Authored by: Doaa Ragab
While facing major societal shocks such as wars, revolution failures and their consequences, a man could lose a lot of rights and freedoms and suffer from physical damages. On the psychological side, particularly, he could be exposed to something more serious such as the loss of meaning and value of life due to his suffering. This is what psychologists call “Existential Frustration”. Although this loss of meaning case is uncertain in societal shocks, yet it is most likely if the shock is too hard that makes a person lose his psychological equilibrium.
This study attempts to deal with the idea of Existential Frustration and its aspects and how it arises because of an ordeal or a societal shock. It handles its different manifestations, particularly in Existential Depression as a result of losing what is called ‘meaning’ when man becomes the enemy of himself. It also attempts to concentrate on psychological phenomena widespread after the failure of Arab Spring revolutions and the manifestations of the loss of meaning in the Arab youths’ expatriation from and in themselves, which is manifest in their feeling of not belonging and the contradiction between their concepts and behaviors in addition to the phenomena of weak societal integration. Some tried to dodge all this and end his pains through atheism, suicide and other social abnormalities.
In order to do this, the study is attempting to present those concepts (expatriation, suicide, atheism) and their contexts in the Arab World from a psychological point of view and how those phenomena are related to the state of existential frustration or depression resulting from the societal shock caused by the failure of Arab Spring revolutions.
Leave A Comment