Structural features of individual event space in cancer patients

Abstract

The article analyzes the structural features of the individual event spaces in cancer patients. Person’s event space includes the main events in individual’s life and individual experience of the cause and effect relations between major events of the past, present and future. Cancer disease changes the event space of a person that has predictively significant impact on the general attitude toward the disease, thereby activating the productive mechanisms of overcoming the disease. Event space of a personality in the situation of cancer is characterized by disintegration and narrowing of past, present, and future sizes; predominance of negative emotional evaluation of future events. The techniques of event-driven reconstruction of person’s time perspective in cancer patients are used as psychotherapeutic resource to extend the scope of future event space, as well as to transform semantic values of event space of person’s time perspective.