The Dramatic Nature of Human Being

Human living is a flow of emerging, escalating, exploding affective dramas that then quiet down only to emerge in a new form. The quieting down of this turbulent way of living happens by creating everyday routines that counter the affective turbulence. Very ordinary life events that pass without attention suddenly give us surprises—positive or negative—thus becoming objects of meaning construction. I clumsily drop my coffee on my clothes (an event that will—if treated objectively—lead to cleaning the clothes) with an immediate self-reflexive internal exclamation (the event is subjectively interpreted—“I am so clumsy, so stupid!”) with an immediate generalizing escalation (“It is me! Always so clumsy!”) leading to further self-dialogue about my dextral inferiority complex. Had this mishap not happened, such internal escalation of self-accusative train of feelings would not have happened. In this chapter we look how everyday living entails dramas—from very small to very large—and how the person is simultaneously a theater in ful- actod, director, and audience all in one.