The Structure of Personal Thesaurus: Existential Psychological Approach

The author presents a model of the content and structure of personal semantic thesaurus, constructed in the framework of the existential psychological approach. The concept of personal thesaurus as a specific option (part) of individual mental dictionary containing systemi-cally represented key units of existential experience is introduced and substantiated. These characteristics describe his personality and life path reflected in his biography to the subject and allow one to integrate the meanings accumulated in them into a current dynamic self-presentation and the course of his life. The hypothesis of personal thesaurus as an instrument of semantic coding of existential experience is argued. We also explain the specificity of the existential psychological approach to the analysis of personal thesaurus, which distinguishes it from the cultural and linguistic. Theoretical assumptions about the hierarchical psychosemantic structure of personal thesaurus, including meta-, macro-, mini- and micro-levels, are put forward and substantiated. The upper level (meta level) forms a subjective ontology that defines the general principle of organizing the experience of human existence and the world together. This is followed by the second level (macro level), which defines the field of human existence in the world by the macro-concepts "Me" and "Life". The content of both concepts within the framework of two dimensions (time and space) is stratified into "Me / Life in the past / present / future" and "Me / Life in the real / mental / virtual spaces". At the third level (mini level) there are various and numerous existential concepts selected by given person for self-understanding, self-interpretation and self-presentation (happiness, love, duty, responsibility, etc.). They perform the functions of organizing the experience of self-knowledge and reflection of life events meaningful to the person. The third and fourth (lower) levels are interconnected by some individual semantic axes ("Stabilization-entropy", "Integrality-assertiveness", "Rationality-irrationality", etc.), organized as binary oppositions for answers to possible questions that a person can ask about himself and his existence. The fourth level (micro level) is formed by the no longer quantifiable semantic concepts-quanta as purely individual results of coding meaningful episodes of the subject's experience. The construction of the personal thesaurus levels is based on the mechanism of individual semantic coding, where the personal descriptive-semantic code acts as the "language of sense" of a particular person. The semantic thesaurus used by the individual is the intermediary code between external and internal realities, connecting the motivational-need orientation of a person with objects and events of the external world.

Keywords

Authors

References