PSYC 3460 Lecture Notes - Peak Experience, Neurosis, Existentialism

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 3460
• Professor: Stephen Kosempel

Document Summary

Peak experiences are activating the same areas in the brain that drugs activate. Certain drugs promote that feeling, others promote the opposite. Remeber: phenomenology: what is stressed is not the object of perception but the perceiver, what the perceiver brings to the situation. Rogers descried a phenomenal field: which was the sum total of the experiences that a person has and is currently having. It is everything that could be observable to consciousness. So phenomenal field would be everything in the conscious and preconscious mind, everything that can be drawn into consciousness. And the organism or person as a whole is influenced by this phenomenal field. So there"s a focus on the individual"s unique perception. Perception of reality that counts not the reality itself. Rogers argued that the need to actualize is built into everyone, it"s not cultivated by everyone but it"s built into everyone. And it can be foiled or assisted by the environment we are in.