Obligations Beyond Competency: Metabletics as a Conscientious Psychology1

A Heideggerian reading of J.H. van den Berg’s writings contributes to an appreciation of phenom-enological psychology as a cultural therapeutics. Both van den Berg’s structural phenomenology of human existence and his Metablectic theory of historical changes lead to a notion of culture as a disclosive construction of the world. Our technological culture, in its reduction of all forms of relatedness to functionality (what van den Berg refers to as secularization), has repressed the spiritual dimension of contemporary life. The resultant derangement of social existence gives rise to the individual distress brought in to psychotherapy. Attention to the spiritual unconscious is the ethical obligation of phenomenological psychology that transcends, and in so doing, contextualizes considerations of professional competency. In his elegy Bread and Wine, Hölderlin asks “what are poets for in a destitute time? ” I believe that the work of Jan Hendrick van den Berg raises that same question for phenomenological psychology: “what are psycholo-gists for in a destitute time? ” Van den Berg’s answer is found in his definition of phenomenology: “[W]ould you like to hear the definition which I myself hold dearest? ” van den Berg asked an audience at Duquesne University i