Existential Theories of Gender Development

Existentialism focuses on the ultimate question of the meaning of life and was exemplified in the 11th century in Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat. [Page 526]Existentialism emerged as a major force in Europe in the 20th century due to the chaos created by the World Wars, the disarray in the social and political systems, the emergence of the mass society, and the alienation among people, all created by cultural upheaval and the movement away from an agrarian to an industrial society. Phenomenology and existential thinking in 20th-century psychiatry did not emerge from a single school of thought; there are many different and sometimes opposing views on existential thought. The commonality in these two lines of thinking is the rejection of reductionist thinking, which resulted in 19th-century materialism, ...