A growing number of people seek professional help for psychological difficulties which are less the result of the inherent vicissitudes of individual character than the mark of lives led in a world enframed by technology. Calculative, means-end rationality has replaced the common sense of things which once oriented everyday life and in so doing has occasioned the disorientation, dissatisfactions, and meaninglessness to which a rhetorical psychology is designed to respond. Unlike psychotherapy which engages the individual directly, rhetorical psychology addresses the world, the referential context of meanings, in and through which individual psychological life is experienced.;Rhetorical psychology issues from a synthesis of Heidegger's later thought and the classical rhetorical tradition, particularly its sophistic strand. Heidegger's rendering of Sein as the presencing of world in things' gathering of the fourfold (earth, sky, mortals, and divinities) is appropriated as a metapsychology. This metapsychology, which offers a vision of poetic dwelling as an alternative to the technological mode of world disclosure, converges with rhetorical understandings of language, truth, and the human condition. Moreover, Heidegger's articulation of meditative thinking, understood as an appropriate response to the enframing of technology and thus a path to poetic dwelling, is seen to have an essential affinity to the theory and practice of epideictic rhetoric, the discourse of praise and blame which displays qualities.;Meditative thinking as "releasement to things" and "openness to the mystery" is integrated with an understanding of epideictic, based in Aristotle and developed through both ancient and contemporary sources, and then interpreted in light of the fundamental ontology of Being and Time. Rhetorical psychology articulates the epideictic performance of meditative thinking within the context of the alienation of the everydayness of being-in-the-world. By way of epideictic's metaphorical amplification of things, a rhetorical psychology endeavors to provoke insight into the presencing of Sein in the technological world and thereby disclose authentic possibilities of mortal dwelling. Given psychology's authoritative social status, feature stories in the popular press are suggested as a possible vehicle for such discourses.
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