Publication 5458

From an ecological perspective, humans are built to detect important meanings in their life spaces. These meanings are not so much imposed on reality as already there in reality. However, humans still construct their realities in the sense that what patterns of meaning they respond to are differentially determined by what they attend to. Thus they configure their realities. Humans experience their realities primarily in terms of nonverbal, nonconceptual detection of meaning patterns. Perception needs to be distinguished from cognition, and it is argued that the “human as aesthetic experiencer” is a better model of how humans function than the “human as naive scientist”. Implications for psychotherapy, such as for the concepts of resistance and transference, are discussed.