Conference Agenda

Politics supporting the economic model relying on the increasing exploitation of the Earth's human and (recently, of space's, too) natural resources became part of the everyday reality of many in the forms of permanent crises tendencies. The negative consequences of such politics have been affecting humans living not just in the so-called Global South, Global East, but more recently, in the Global North. The weight of different social tensions is experienced unequally by the people not just along the east-west or the north-south divisions but in a local intersection of gender, class, and race structures as well. The cycles of permanent and multiple crises (economic, ecological, political, humanitarian, health, etc. crises) constantly reshape the fundamental structures of societies and increase the volume of unequal resource exchange between social groups, and by doing that, deepen the problems of social inequality.

This has a remarkable impact on individuals' mental health and the unequal distribution of mental health risk factors across different social groups. Just as the individual's physical health, the person's mental health depends on the social factors affecting the person's life chances and choices.

Classical and modern existentialism faced individual situations of uncenrtainty: anxiety, despair, absurdity, depersonalisation, derealisation, etc. Nevertheless existentialism considered human existential problems as untimely the same: according to Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Sartre we are supposed to experience anxiety in the same way as the ancient greeks did. I would like to show the illusiory character of this presupposition. Human existential problems evolve with historical changes and with social transformations. From the holistic perspective of a bio-psycho-sociological approach I would like to concentrate on the psycho-sociological relations. Not only psychological problems (f. ex. mental illnesses) are unseparable from social background, but existential problems as well. We experience our problems in a different way as our parents and gandparents, because our problems are different. Its obvious that there are apprently eternal human problems (death, love, survival, etc.), but we face death in differentsocial and institutional context, we experience love according to different cultural codes, we struggle for survival in different oceonomical situations. That is the way we can speak about a certain „social unconscious”. The imperatives of the superego and the ideal ego have been changed constantly, and what is more: they have been changing more and more quickly in the last decades. I would like to show that this transformation has a serious impact on our feeling of increasing uncertainty and it influences our concept of authentic life and our concept of happiness.