Conceptualization of destiny phenomenon represented by psychology students

Abstract

The context of the modern world is extremely undefined, as the BANI world is not subject to the logic of ordinary perceptions and is accompanied by the collapse of illusions and expectations. The intensity of events in recent years has undoubtedly affected the ability of people to resist anxiety and uncertainty, plan their future and respond to the challenges of life. Further, there has been a severe conflict with the givenness of existence (meaning, death, freedom, loneliness and identity), which mediates the ways in which an individual interacts with the world. Based on their perceptions of the world and the ongoing events, individuals can structure their experiences, connect to others and become more aware of their own place in the world. As a universal and sociocultural phenomenon, destiny, or fate, is presumed to be the best concept for describing one’s picture of the world. The concept of destiny is multidimensional, intuitively defined in language and initially allows for many interpretations. In this connection, the way it is understood in the youth environment attracts the greatest interest. The study was aimed at clarifying the perceptions of destiny among undergraduate (2 nd and 3 rd year) and master’s (1 st year) students of the Faculty of Psychology at St. Petersburg State University. The paper reports the results of descriptive and interpretive phenomenological analysis of 30 texts obtained in the course of a creative assignment on a given topic in the discipline Existential Psychology. The characteristics of the phenomenon contained in the representations include: resistance to predetermination, hip of life, prediction, authenticity and selfactualization, outcome, experience, meaning, and life path. The explicated qualitative data on the phenomenon of destiny allow us to summarize and systematize the students’ manifest and implicit attitudes which determine their ways of transcending beingness.