Toward a comprehensive understanding of existential threat: Insights from paul tillich
Experimental existential psychology (XXP) empirically investigates how people's motives for meaning and personal value influence their lives, and how symbolic self-awareness undergirds these motives and experienced threats to their fulfillment. The authors attempt to synthesize the insights that have already accumulated from XXP, and simultaneously point to a new direction for this field. Researchers have debated whether there is a "core threat" in human experience, but the authors propose that a more fruitful direction for research is to examine the simultaneous independence and interdependence of different existential threats. Paul Tillich's (1952) theory of existential threat is put forward as one model for understanding how a core threat to non-being (mortality) can nevertheless be experienced in proximally different forms, in terms of anxieties about meaninglessness or condemnation of the self. In addition to presenting Tillich's theory, the authors make several concrete suggestions for how future research in XXP should proceed. © 2012 Guilford Publications, Inc.
Duke Scholars
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Related Subject Headings
- Social Psychology
- Political Science & Public Administration
- 5205 Social and personality psychology
- 5204 Cognitive and computational psychology
- 4408 Political science
- 2202 History and Philosophy of Specific Fields
- 1702 Cognitive Sciences
- 1701 Psychology
- 1606 Political Science
Citation
Published In
DOI
ISSN
Publication Date
Volume
Issue
Start / End Page
Related Subject Headings
- Social Psychology
- Political Science & Public Administration
- 5205 Social and personality psychology
- 5204 Cognitive and computational psychology
- 4408 Political science
- 2202 History and Philosophy of Specific Fields
- 1702 Cognitive Sciences
- 1701 Psychology
- 1606 Political Science