eiseEducation

Existential dread is a profound and often overwhelming awareness of life’s fundamental uncertainties and limitations. This sense of dread emerges during periods of profound transition, crisis, or awakening. Though frequently framed through diagnostic categories, existential dread is a profoundly human response to the fundamental conditions of existence. In a world of unpredictable change, such as climate change, war, and the shifting face of democracy, the impact is felt when familiar meanings are lost.

Confronting existential dread, the individual doesn’t just think about these concerns; they experience them in ways that shake their fundamental self-belief and the world around them. Our personal worldview helps to ground us in time and place, offering a sense of certainty about being in and part of the world. Change at any level of being-in-the-world brings uncertainty, and with it, the desire for continuity and certainty.

Drawing on the work of key philosophers and contemporary practitioners, this webinar will examine how dread serves as a doorway to exploring the unique human condition and how existential dread can help ground us in the world while shaping a meaningful narrative in the often, unpredictable world.

Key themes include freedom, aloneness, uncertainty, mortality, anxiety, and the pursuit of meaning (or its absence). We will consider existential dread in the clinical setting and how dread can present in various ways, often misinterpreted as purely pathological anxiety or depression.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this webinar, participants will be able to:

• Demonstrate awareness of the key philosophical foundations of existential dread.

• Recognise the difference between existential crisis and existential dread

• Understand existential anxiety as a motivator for action

• Consider working with existential dread from an existential-phenomenological stance