Personal history and meaning of life: biographical and existential analysis

• Grant number: 12/50193-7
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants - Publications - Books published in Brazil
• Start date: May 01, 2012
• End date: April 30, 2013
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - Epistemology
• Principal Investigator: Dulce Mara Critelli
• Grantee: Dulce Mara Critelli
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Comunicação, Letras e Artes. Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This paper aims at providing the theoretical basis for biographic existential analysis, a therapeutic and educational methodology developed by the author, with resources to existential philosophy, especially the thought of Hannah Arendt, as well as the thoughts of Marlin Heidegger. The fulcrum of this methodology is the understanding of the original need of individuals to sew together the facts of life with a thread of meaning, in this way, developing narratives (reports, tales and stories) through which they know themselves, projecting themselves in their existence and acting. Biographic Existential Analysis aims at analyzing what these narratives are, and how they are constructed, and to outline their function in the formation of the subject agents. It also intends to set out the existential basis of these narratives and the connections between what are not calls "vita active" and "contemplative lite". This text is the result of the implementation, analysis and redirection about the activity (therapeutic-educational) that has been developed by the author for ten years. (AU)