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Irrationality as a resource for coping with uncertainty // Pedagogical Review. 2024. Issue 3 (55). P. 90-99

Transformations connected with modern processes of informatization and digitalization make a person’s habitual living environment fundamentally different and change himself, requiring new forms of behavior and choices of a model of action. In the paradigm of existential psychology, the article substantiates the thesis about irrationality as a potential resource for coping with the experience of discomfort of uncertainty. The author reviews irrationality as a manner of thinking, as a way of behavior in a diverse social reality, as a mode of existence of an individual in conditions of uncertainty and as an integral part of the modern self. The novelty of the author’s approach lies in the fact that irrationality is seen as a specific extra way of compensating for the accelerating obsolescence of individual experience, the non-adulting of contemporary people and the becoming of a fragmentary identity. Using irrationality contributes to the transformation of modern man into an “open system” and actualizes the ability to behave, shifting the frames between the already accepted, “own” senses and values of the subject and those potentially possible and realizable for him. A comparative analysis of the possibilities of rational and irrational behavior in situations where existing experience is insufficient but a person cannot avoid the need to make decisions and act is carried out. The author formulates provisions about the possibilities of an irrational attitude in interaction with reality as the basis of transgressive behavior and the use of new possible “logics” (axiologic, Bayesian logic, imaginative logic) in a person’s exploration of reality and himself.

Keywords: uncertainty, personality, experience, rationality, irrationality, identity

The potential of personal story analysis in existentially oriented counselling // Pedagogical Review. 2026. Issue 1 (65). P. 115-125

Based on the author’s model of existentially oriented counseling, represented by three levels (the level of life strategies, the level of “self-care” and the level of “construction of being”), the idea of using the psychosemantic potential of the client’s personal stories is argued and developed in order to detect points of misalignment with oneself on the path of life (“points of self-confusion”, “bifurcatios”, episodes of “self-repression of authenticity”) and clarify (untangle) the subsequent chains of experienced and semantically amplified life events that lead the subject away from his authenticity. Existential counseling is considered as a form of mutual philosophical and hermeneutic practice designed to transform the person himself and the intentions of his life path, as well as to construct some new relationships with reality (“adduction to lucidity” his being, allowing him to answer the question “why am I doing what I do?”). The article presents a number of consultative and therapeutic techniques (“Autobiography”, “The Butterfly Effect”, “My Current Self →My Different Self”, “Fly, fly, petal”) proposed for use in the investigation of personal stories. A variant of the consistent construction of the topics of sessions for the analysis of personal stories in the paradigm of the author’s model of existentially oriented counseling is proposed.

Keywords: existentially oriented counseling, personal stories, life path, sense, authenticity, inauthenticity, self-care