IJSP Number 4, 2022

58 superficial approach, or because they are paid just for listening at the continuous and uninterrupted stream of complains their clients have to utter, which would be the lowest level – a level of prostitution actually – this so noble profession could, and in some cases, can degrade itself).And, as V. Frankl hinted at, existential issues are usually covered by trivial psychological stuff that are blocking and hiding the more serious and profound problems of life itself. Psychology has, as a gift and a curse, the amazing ability and capability to focus on concrete, superficial behavioural traces from which it is tr ying to infer what is going on inside the person’s mind. As such, psychology does not bother about what life is, what directions it can take, why are we here, do we have a mission or a purpose on this planet, do we have a soul and/or a spirit, is there a greater spirit we are just parts of, and so on. Those are all existential questions and issues, which although very specific and stringent to everyone (at least in adolescence or in some cases later in life, too), do not seem to find neither the place or the circumstances, nor the right time to be asked or bothered with. Usually life goes-on, time passes-by, problems come and go, stress builds up and is discharged again, but no one seems to find the right moment to stop, there in the middle of one’s life int ersection or some red warning traffic light and ask those questions. Paradoxically, although those existential questions come forward with the most important aspects of life, they see themselves neglected, put aside as secondary, unimportant for the moment, expandable or right down avoidable; it seems that they can be postponed forever as if they would be perfectly contingent. What is amazing is the fact that, looking at the great majority of people, this sad conclusion seems to be true, those acute issues and astute questions concerning life do not belong to life itself, one can live without them, without bothering with existential interrogations or deep ethical problems. Life, as it is offered on the consumerist plate, is way too complicated to leave a moment of pause or respire for asking complex questions or inquiring profound anthropological issues. As a matter of fact, the complications of life, so trivial and ubiquitous, so intrusive and destabilizing, have contaminated every corner of our mind (and soul) and, as a result, there is no more space or hardware capability left to accommodate existential complexities (although the two words – complication and complexity – similar in the broad sense, but dissimilar at a closer look, the former always complicating things, doing it on the most superficial level, while the latter, complexity, comes with an inherent three-dimensional view, one that goes beyond normal and habitual complications, which it is able to transmute into a simplicity that can then be complexities and even initiate, in further developments, a circular systemic relation and enhancement between simplicity and complexity). Ultimately, we have to come back to the question of why; why do we do psychotherapy? What is our motivation to follow such a sensible, maybe the most sensible path there is out there? It is a matter of fact that in an existential discussion, one cannot come up, as an excuse or a justification, with the so ubiquitous financial issue. Even more psychological or humanistic answers, although pertinent up to a certain point, can be just excuses, false motivational slogans, or just clichés to justify, protect, hide, or compensate some unknown existential anguish, felt as a psychic black hole of unsolved and unsolvable problem. And, as we know, projection can be a very powerful mechanism, one that sees every problem outside,