Life Meaning and Resources for Its Realization: Towards Understanding of Personality Crisis Mechanisms

Abstract

The varieties, mechanisms, and patterns of a life- meaning crisis in personality development are discussed in thise article. The crisis is understood as solving by through the personality special life- meaning tasks and the negotiation of subsequent contradictions. The main idea of the paper is that a crisis may be determined from within by the functional properties of individual life meaning. One of these properties is feasibility, understood as the availability of the resources needed for practical realization of a specific life meaning. Specific attention is given to the notion of operational resources, an individual set of specific activities that form the integral life- activity structure and which are used by the person as operational means for life- meaning realization. The main hypothesis of the empirical study is that the feasibility acts as a functionally important property of life meaning, which is determined by the adequacy of its content to the operational and technical possibilities of individual life activity. 357 people took part in the study. The sample was formed with the variabilitvariablesy of gender, age, educational status, professional affiliation, marital and parental status, and level of income. The data was collected with the following scales: the author’s Scale of Life Meaning Crisis, the Satisfaction with Life Scale, purpose the Purpose in Llife scale from the Ryff’s Scales of Psychological Well-Being, as well asand the test Meaning-Metric Analysis of Life Activity test (a modified version of the author’s test Sources of Life Meaning test). The acquired data is presented in frequency tables, correlation analysis, multiple regression and mediation analysis. The results of the empirical study support the hypothesis that unrealistic life meaning, the content of which does not agree with the personality activity repertoire, provokes a life life-meaning crisis.