Sunday, May 29, 2005

Fear of Freedom

A discussion of my previous posting on How liberals and conservatives make decisions — at least according to Dennis Prager led to a discussion of Irvin D. Yalom's text on Existential Psychotherapy. Yalom's book credits Soren Kierkegaard with having identified the four "ultimate concerns of life" — death, freedom, existential isolation, and meaninglessness.

The relevance here is the idea that liberals have been more successful than conservatives in confronting the existential meaning of freedom and the need to accept responsibility for having to make one's own decisions.

As a side note it looks like Yalom has a professionally designed web site. It's very nicely done. But since he's listed as an emeritus professor at Stanford, I would guess that his picture on the site (linked to on the right above) is not current.

1 comment:

Tom Raworth said...

Hey Russ.... blog is good and interesting.... hope all's well... love to D and to you. If you're there in the fall it looks like I'll be doing something at USC September/October. Before that, a week in China and then coronary artery surgery on July 5th. And so we go on.... regards, Tom