Existential therapy is aimed at dealing with people and their existence and letting them have the freedom to make choices in shaping their life. This type of therapy tries to help the client improve their self-knowledge and then helps them to make their own decisions about life (Szasz, 2005). The therapist makes the client aware that they are responsible for their own life. Existential therapist are also more focused on the present and the future and do not focus as much on the past. Although they may talk about the past, it is more as a reference to help the client learn from the past so that they can improve their present. There are six main concepts that existential therapy try to address with clients: self-awareness, freedom and responsibility, identity and relationships, anxiety, feeling of meaninglessness, and death (Szasz, 2005).
The memoir “Night” is just one of many memoirs written by Elie Wiesel, who survived the Holocaust. Elie feels compelled to bear witness to the suffering that he experienced and observed in the concentration camps. In Night he narrates the experience of the deaths of his family members, the death of his adolescence, and the death in his naive belief in man’s innate goodness. The power of the genre of the memoir is that it captures experience and insists that forgetting about such crimes against humanity is not an option for Elie or for the reader. Through the radical changes he experiences in the concentration camps, Elie is forced to adapt. He shows his adaptations through various ways in his writing style and author’s craft. Elie Wiesel shows the reader how he personally changes, the true meaning of the word “night”, and Biblical allusions to describe the suffrage, inhumanity, and pain he experiences during the holocaust that affected his life forever.
William Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet involves a rather crazy family. Hamlet’s father is murdered by his own brother Claudius. Claudius becomes king after marrying Hamlet’s mother right after the death of his brother. One night Hamlet sees an apparition of his father which tells him to kill King Claudius in revenge. Laertes is the son of Polonius, the King’s counselor. Polonius is also murdered and Laertes is out to seek vengeance of his murderer. They both learn that that revenge is a dark way to travel and it costs them their lives.
At one point in my career as a student writing had actually been a pleasure for me. I had written a love poem as extra credit in the tenth grade. That may have been the only time I had actually enjoyed writing. Although writing would usually follow a reading assignment, I would much rather read a paper than write one. Eventually the process of writing would be embedded into my memory and I would learn the steps to writing a good piece of literature. This was the period in which I’d actually enjoyed writing. On my journey to college I would soon realize the importance of reading and writing and producing a good paper.
