실존적 ‘만남’과 ‘치유’의 장(場)으로서 ‘돌봄’의 철학상담

초록

Contemporary society is characterized by an intensification of superficial connections, while genuine existential encounters and authentic communication are largely absent. As a result, many people experience isolation and anxiety amid the superficiality of everyday life and face existential crises in their “limit situations.” This study analyzes such conditions from the perspective of philosophical counseling and aims to explore how philosophy can open a path toward existential recovery and healing. To this end, it draws on Karl Jaspers’ existential philosophy and Otto Friedrich Bollnow’s philosophy of education as its theoretical foundation, seeking to demonstrate that group philosophical counseling accompanied by philosophical education can function both as a field of existential encounter and as a practice of healing and care. Bollnow’s concept of the “educational encounter” is understood as an awakening event that guides the counselee to confront the limit situation; within that situation, the existential encounter expands into the realm of existential communication and transcendence described by Jaspers. In this way, philosophical counseling grounded in education operates as a structure in which awakening and communication are integrated into ontological healing and care. An analysis of a university course in group philosophical counseling accompanied by philosophical education, along with a philosophical dialogue program for children and adolescents, provides empirical evidence that participants, through philosophical questioning and reflection, came to examine their own problematic situations and experienced inner recovery and relational care through dialogue with others. Therefore, this paper argues that philosophical counseling accompanied by philosophical education serves as a “pedagogy of awakening and transformation” and a “field of existential healing and care” amid the existential crises of modern individuals, presenting the possibility of philosophy’s return to life as a path of existential restoration.

키워드