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LOGOTHERAPY’S

CONCEPT OF MAN

Classification of Logotherapy

Logotherapy was founded by the Viennese psychiatrist and neurologist Viktor E. Frankl (1905-1997). It can be categorized amongst the many therapeutic approaches existing today by noting to two main points of view:

1. According to W. Soucek, logotherapy is the “Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy”, where Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis is the “First Viennese School of Psychotherapy” and Alfred Adler’s Individual Psychology is the ”Second Viennese School of Psychotherapy”. There is a simple rule of thumb to help us remember the emphases of these three approaches: Sigmund Freud focused on the “will to pleasure”, Alfred Adler on the “will to power”, and Viktor E. Frankl on the “will to meaning”. Naturally these are only simplified descriptions, which cannot claim to do full justice to the corresponding schools of psychotherapy. They merely characterise typical areas of research. Freud’s comprehensive theories focus on human drives – in particular the gratification of the sexual drive – which, if suppressed, become a source of psychic disorder. Adler examined the relationship of the individual to the social environment and derived the theory that deepseated feelings of inferiority lead to compensatory striving for power. Frankl ultimately saw human beings as entities who want to shape life in a meaningful way, and who can become psychically ill when their will to meaning is frustrated.

2. In American textbooks logotherapy is considered a “third force” in psychotherapy, a third approach, though in a somewhat different sense than for Soucek. In the USA, psychoanalysis is regarded (purely historically) as the ‘first force’, behavioural therapy is regarded as the “second force” and so-called existential psychiatry, which became well-known in Europe through Charlotte Bühler’s concept of “humanistic psychology”, is regarded as the ‘third force’. Logotherapy is seen as part of this third force, although Frankl’s concepts differ in one important respect from the ideas of humanistic psychology. In logotherapy, self-actualization is not recognized as the highest goal of human existence, as is the case for all of the many versions of humanistic psychology. In logotherapy, self-actualisation is not recognized as the highest goal of human existence, as is the case for all of the many versions of humanistic psychology. In logotherapy, the self-transcendence of human beings rates higher than self-actualisation. What this means will be explained below. Here it must only be established that in the American context logotherapy is assigned to the third force of psychotherapy, even though its content goes beyond it.

“People who set themselves an objective such as selfactualisation overlook and forget that ultimately human beings can actualise themselves only to the extent to which they fulfil a meaning in the external world, not within themselves. In other words, self-actualization evades being defined as an objective insofar as it occurs as a side-effect of other objectives. This is what I call the ‘self-transcendence’ of human existence.”¹

Again, there is a simple rule of thumb for distinguishing the emphases of these three major groups of psychotherapy according to the American classification. This is what it says: Psychoanalysis sees humans as “abreacting beings”; behavioural therapy sees humans as “reacting beings”; logotherapy sees humans as “acting beings”. These are also simplified descriptions, whose memonics are a play on words: each time a prefix is deleted. Ab-re-acting represents the drive dynamic which is the brainchild of psychoanalysis. Re-acting represents the conditioning and learning processes which are the focus of behavioural therapy. And the capacity for acting in freedom emphasises human freedom of will, which is highly regarded in logotherapy.

Giambattista Torello once asserted that logotherapy is the last complete system in the history of psychotherapy. What he meant by “complete” is that logotherapy as a therapeutic approach is based on a finely honed concept of human beings and of the world. He was not mistaken, for the edifice of logotherapeutic thought is supported by three “pillars”, which Viktor E. Frankl designated as

freedom of will – will to meaning – meaning of life

The two outside pillars are axioms which elude scientific proof, as many thinkers and philosophers before Frankl had already established. The middle pillar, the will to meaning, can and has been proven by experimental psychological studies to be a primary motivating force for human beings. Let us look at the three pillars in detail:

Pillar 1

The question of how “free” or “unfree” humans really are has been asked throughout history. According to logotherapy, every human being has freedom of will, at least potentially. This potential freedom of will can be constrained at times by illness, immaturity, or senility, or can even be overridden, but this does not affect its fundamental existence. Logotherapy is a “non-deterministic” psychology.

“Logotherapy’s concept of man is based on three pillars, the freedom of will, the will to meaning, and the meaning of life. The first of them, the freedom of will, is opposed to a principle that characterises most current approaches to man, namely, determinism. Really, however, it is only opposed to what I am used to calling pan-determinism, because speaking of the freedom of will does not in any way imply any a priori indeterminism. After all, the freedom of will means the freedom of human will, and human will is the will of a finite being. Man’s freedom is no freedom from conditions but rather freedom to take a stand on whatever conditions might confront him.”²

Pillar 2

The motivational concept of will to meaning means that every human is animated by a striving and yearning for meaning. The fulfilment of meaning is the meeting of two complimentary parts: an “internal” part – this striving and yearning for meaning – and an “external” part, the meaning offered by a situation. If the will to meaning in human beings is constrained by illness, immaturity or senility, which does sometimes happen, then this is an impairment in the perception of the external part and not an attrition of the internal part, which remains a proof of humanness even in the case of serious disorders. Logotherapy is meaning-centred psychotherapy.

“Meaning is something objective, and that is not just an expression of my own private and personal worldview, but something which has been verified by psychological research. Max Wertheimer, one of the founders of gestalt psychology, explicitly pointed out that every situation possesses the character of a demand, namely ‘the meaning’ that the person who is facing the situation has to fulfil. ‘The demands of the situation’ are to be responded to as ‘objective qualities’. What I call the will to meaning seems to lead to something like a gestalt concept. James Crumbaugh and Leonard T. Maholick describe the will to meaning as the specifically human ability to discover objective meaning not only in the actual, but also in the possible.”³

Pillar 3

The postulate of meaningfulness of life expresses the logotherapeutic conviction that life has an unconditional meaning which it cannot lose under any circumstances. This meaning can, however, evade human comprehension. Insofar as this meaning is too big to be grasped by humans, it must always be perceived and sensed anew. It follows that logotherapy is a positive worldview.

“There is no situation in life that is really meaningless. This is because the seemingly negative aspects of human existence, especially the tragic triad which consists of suffering, guilt and death, can also be fashioned into something positive, into an achievement, if only they are faced with the right composure and attitude.”⁴

The figure shows that each pillar corresponds to a disciplinary form of logotherapy. Freedom of will is the basis for its concept of the human being and shapes its anthropological foundations. The will to meaning is the starting point and pivotal point of its therapeutic approach and therefore pervades all of its psychotherapeutic methods. The meaning of life, that is, belief in the unconditional meaningfulness of human life under any and all circumstances, belongs to its worldview, to its philosophy.

In this textbook of logotherapy we will principally be thinking about logotherapy as a therapeutic approach. To apply its methods successfully, it is essential to get to know at least the main features of its concept of the human being. It is just as essential to apply the worldview of logotherapy to preventative and follow-up care. For this reason, and to provide a broader view of the philosophy of its teachings, a brief description of the anthropological foundations of logotherapy is given first, followed by an explanation of how logotherapy deals with psychic disturbances.

Before we begin, it is appropriate to answer a frequently asked question: how scientific can a structure of thought be, when it is built on two pillars which cannot be empirically verified, as is the case with the first and third pillars? Well, every form of psychotherapy has its own specific axiomatic basis. The entire field of medicine requires at least one such pillar to justify its existence, namely the belief that human life is of value and is to be preserved. Without this axiom there would be no reason to treat sick people, or to operate on them; one could simply allow them to die. It cannot be scientifically proven that there is any advantage in prolonging life, especially in the context of global overpopulation. We should not, however, allow our belief in the fundamental importance and value of human life to be shaken; it resonates deeply within us, and it is strengthened in logotherapy by the elements of meaningfulness.

The problem of freedom of will is even more controversial. But here as well, all forms of psychotherapy must at least agree on the basic assumption that a patient is capable of changing. Without this assumption, therapeutic efforts would be pointless from the outset, and yet such a capacity for change cannot be proved, or if so, only in retrospect.

“Logotherapy and existential analysis are admittedly based on clinical practice, but one cannot evade the fact that they flow into a meta-clinical theory, as all psychotherapies have as an implicit basis; and this theory implies a vision, that is, the vision of a concept of the human being. In this way we come full circle: clinical practice is always determined and influenced to a large extent by the concept of the human being that the doctor brings to the patient, even if it is unconscious and uncontrolled. In fact, every psychotherapy plays itself out against an a priori horizon. There is always an anthropological concept at its base, whether the psychotherapy is conscious of it or not.” ⁵

The Concept of Dimensional Ontology

Viktor E. Frankl presented his concept of the human being by means of his concept of “dimensional ontology”. He unfolded being human into three dimensions: somatic, psychological, and spiritual. The analogy with the three-dimensionality of space makes it clear that this is not a theory of three “layers”. The human dimensions of being interpenetrate one another as completely as the three dimensions of space: length, height and breadth. For example, it would be ridiculous to say that the spatial dimension “width” begins where the spatial dimension “length” ends. It is the same for human beings: for a human all three dimensions of being meet at every “point”. Frankl spoke of a “unity in spite of diversity”.

The somatic level of a human is easy to define: it corresponds to all physical phenomena. It includes organic cell activity and biological-physiological bodily functions, including all associated chemical and physical processes.

The psychic plane of the human being is to be understood as the sphere of condition: mood, instincts, desires, affects. To these psychic phenomena we add intellectual talent, acquired patterns of behaviour, and social formation. In short, cognition and emotion are “at home” in the psychic dimension.

What is left over for the spiritual plane? An endless amount! The “primal human” aspect, namely the freedom to determine one’s attitudes to body and condition. Independent decision-making (“intentionality”), technical and artistic interests, creative activity, religiosity and ethical sensibility (“conscience”), an understanding of values and love are all located in the spiritual dimension of the human being.

If we were to divide the living beings on earth according to their participation in the different dimensions of being, we would arrive at the following, with a minimal number of transitional forms:

We see that the spiritual plane (which has nothing to do with intelligence or understanding) is the real human one, the “uniquely human” dimension; in logotherapy it is also called the “noetic dimension”, from the Greek word nous (spirit or mind). The other two levels, which humans share with animals, i.e. the somatic and the psychosocial dimensions (animals also have emotions and cognition to a certain extent!), are characterised in logotherapy as the “psychophysical” or the “subnoetic dimensions”.

Because logotherapy focuses primarily on the noetic dimension, Frankl used the formulation: “Logotherapy is a psychotherapy from the spiritual and towards the spiritual.” In this respect, it stands out from the other schools of psychotherapy, which focus more on the psychic dimension, dedicating themselves to the elucidation of buried drives or of human learning and developmental history. The results, particularly those which have been verified experimentally, are by no means questioned by logotherapy, but they are identified as localised on a two-dimensional plane. Frankl’s contribution was to integrate the uniquely human aspects of being human into conventional psychotherapy, which until then had literally been “spiritless” psychotherapy.

“In this three-dimensional schema, it is now apparent from the three-dimensionality of the human being that the uniquely human can only appear when we venture into the spiritual dimension. A human is only visible as a human once we take this “third” dimension into consideration: only then do we see the human as such. While the vegetative life of man can be explained within the bodily dimension, and his animalistic life, if necessary, within the psychic dimension, human existence as such, personal spiritual existence does not fit into this two-dimensional “plane” of mere psychosomatics. Homo humanus can at most be projected onto this two-dimensional plane. In fact, the essence of what we call projection is that one dimension is sacrificed – that is, projected onto the nextlower dimension.

Such a projection has two consequences: It leads to 1. ambiguity and 2. contradictions. In the first case the reason for this consequence is the following: different things are mapped onto the same thing by projection. In the second case, the reason is found in the following fact: one and the same thing maps onto different things in different projections.”⁶

Psychotherapy with its many different approaches is not exactly lacking in ambiguities and contradictions … with reference to Frankl’s words, it can be assumed that it still suffers from the consequences of improper projections. The most human things in man, like value structures or the inborn desire for meaning, must not be lost in the jungle of psychological interpretations. Logotherapy endeavours to avoid this error by perceiving the spiritual as its own human dimension – the real one, if not the only one – and by investigating whether the influence of the spiritual on the other two dimensions can be used for therapeutic purposes. For this reason, it does not neglect the psychic-social and physical dimensions, but it sets itself the specific research goal of exploring the extent to which the spiritual forces in humans can be mobilised and it can look back on more than 70 years of research, from which some very important results have emerged. Where traditional psychology essentially uncovers ‘psychic dependencies’, logotherapy promotes ‘spiritual independence’, and where traditional psychotherapy analyses ‘neurotic arrangements’, logotherapy registers ‘existential commitment’. This is an extraordinary extension, an additional entry point, otherwise achieved only by pastoral care, which is, however, normally only available to a subset of people: believers with denominational affiliations.

a) to remove spiritual frustrations,

b) to correct mental disorders

c) to alleviate (psycho)somatic suffering,

It goes without saying that each patient must be helped at the level of existence in which his or her disorder is present. For this reason, at the somatic level, medication (including psychotropic drugs) or, if necessary, electric shock therapy is needed, and at the psychic level cathartic relief, behavioural therapy exercises, cognitive problemsolving strategies, and so on, and in the area of overlap between the physical and the psychic, relaxation techniques (autogenic training, yoga) and suggestive methods. However, to be properly equipped for holistic treatment also requires therapeutic methods that penetrate into the noetic dimension, and logotherapy, ideally combined with therapy operating at a sub-noetic level, fills this gap. This is quite apart from its excellent potential for being combined at its own level with pastoral care or with all forms of art (therapy) or with (promotion of) education.

From the explanations so far, it is clear that it is important to distinguish the psychic and spiritual dimensions from one another and not to mix them together. (There is less confusion in this regard at the somatic dimension.) To acquire a deep knowledge of logotherapy, one has to incorporate into one’s thoughts the “noo-psychic antagonism”, which according to the theses of logotherapy characterises human existence. This is nothing less than the possibility of fruitful interaction between “psyche” and “spirit” within a person.

“Man is a point of intersection, a crossroads of three levels of being: the physical, psychic, and spiritual. These level of being cannot be separated cleanly enough from one another. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to say that a human is a ‘sum’ of the physical, the psychic, and the spiritual: man is a unity and totality, but within this unity and totality, the spiritual ‘interacts’ with the physical and the psychic. This creates what I once called the noopsychic antagonism. While psychophysical parallelism is obligatory, noo-psychic antagonism is optional: it is always only a possibility, a mere power, but a power which can always be appealed to, and which has to be appealed to on the medical side: again and again it has to call upon the ‘defiant power of the spirit’, as I have called it, against the seemingly so powerful psychophysical reality.

The noo-psychic antagonism thus states that the psychic dimension and the spiritual dimension of man are not just somehow juxtaposed, but have a relation with one another, and are sometimes even in opposition to one another. Therefore, in the following chapters the differentiation criteria for both levels should be examined carefully in order to make the enormous potential of their “antagonistic power” transparent for psychotherapy. These are the four distinguishing criteria: fate and freedom, vulnerability and integrity, pleasure orientation and meaning orientation, character and personality. Where they are not heeded, and instead all spiritual phenomena are traced back to psychic ones, which is equivalent to projecting the third dimension into the second dimension, it produces a distorted concept of the human being against which Frankl rightly warned. Specifically, there are four distorted concepts:

Pan-determinism Whoever denies human spiritual freedom must logically define humans as being subject to fate.

Psychologism Whoever loses sight of the integrity of spiritual existence, soon sees a human only as a vulnerable psychic apparatus.

Reductionism Whoever ignores the meaning orientation of the human being is tempted to interpret every motive as an expression of a (secret) instinctual need.

Collectivism Whoever ignores the personality of the individual is quickly ready to judge him or her solely by character type.

These mistakes are to be excluded in logotherapeutic anthropology, because they are sins against the “spirit”, from which nothing good proceeds.

	2nd human dimension:“psyche ”	3rd human dimension:“spirit”	False reduction of the 3rd dimension to the 2nd one leads to:
A	fate	freedom	pan-determinism
B	vulnerability	intactness	psychologism
C	pleasureorientation	meaningorientation	reductionism
D	character	personality	collectivism

The Dialectic of Fate and Freedom

The scientific discipline of psychotherapy began at the beginning of the 20th century with the idea that childhood fatefully predetermines a person’s whole life. The reason for this deterministic conception is to be sought in the naturalism of the late nineteenth century, a period in which people (especially in the European cultural environment) had a feeling of being at the mercy of fate. Many discoveries were being made, which increased this sense of dependency and “smallness”. Advances in astronomy had revealed the vastness of the cosmos, which made the earth seem like an irrelevant grain of sand. Insights into the relations between societal structures and socioeconomic conditions had made the individual seem like a tiny cog in an unstoppable machine. The rapid development of technology further exacerbated this feeling of fatality; there emerged robotic models of thought, with which people identified themselves. They saw themselves as “programmed”, controlled by automatically stored influences.

Existential philosophy developed as a counter-movement, but it split into two camps: one more life-affirming and one more sceptical. It saw humans as beings “thrown into life”, who must find their own essence for themselves, but who can, so to speak, recapture the principle of action. Logotherapy has its theoretical roots here, especially in the life-affirming form of existential philosophy.

Amongst the pioneers of psychotherapy, Frankl was the first to reaffirm the element of human spiritual freedom, which, of course, is not freedom “from” something, from outside influences, but a freedom “for” something, namely a freedom to put outside influences in their place: to affirm them, to deny them, to follow them, or to resist them.

“We in no way deny the life and world of human drives. We deny neither the external world, nor the inner world; … What we emphasise, however, is the fact that a human as a spiritual being is not only confronted with the world – the external world as well as the inner world – but also takes a position with respect to it, can always respond to the world with some “attitude” or “behaviour”, and this position is a free one. A human being takes a position at every moment of existence, both to the natural and social environment, to the external milieu, as well as to the vital psychophysical inner world, to the inner milieu.”⁸

Let us consider the logotherapeutic concept of freedom by looking at three examples.

1. Example: anxiety

Anxiety – with the exception of loving care for someone or something valuable in the world – is an unpleasant mental feeling of being threatened. It “sits” in the second dimension and is closely linked to physical symptoms such as heart palpitations, pallor, or tremors in the first, somatic, dimension. Because it sits or appears there, there is no choice about it at the time of its appearance, and this means that it is “fate”. The causes of anxiety may or may not have been possible to avoid, but the feeling of anxiety cannot easily be ignored when it has crept up in a human being.

On the other hand, the decision about how to react to this anxiety lies in the third, spiritual, dimension: whether one takes it seriously or whether one ignores it, whether one runs away because of it or persists in a situation in spite of it. Here there is something about which a choice can be made, here there is some freedom. So we see that we are not free from fear, but free despite fear …

2. Example: a bad childhood

People who have suffered an unhappy childhood are not free from its effects, but they are free to adopt different positions towards it. Some parents say: “I was beaten when I was growing up, so beating is in me. If I get angry, I’ll beat my children too!” Other parents say, “Because I was beaten as a child, I want to make things better for my children. That’s why I do not beat them!”

Upbringing undoubtedly has a powerful influence, but not an allpowerful one. With a certain degree of maturity, every human being is free to educate him or herself. The act of self-education is then less and less dependent on “the will of the parents”, rather than on an “ought that should be experienced by the individual as his or her own” (Frankl).

3. Example: instinctive actions

An animal cannot act against its instincts. If it is hungry and sees food, it “must” pounce on it and devour it. A person, on the other hand, can be hungry (– fate), and still give the last piece of bread which he or she still possesses to a comrade who might need it more urgently (– freedom). In the first, somatic, dimension, the stomach will growl and the sinking blood glucose level will cause discomfort. In the second, psychic, dimension, the desire for bread and fantasies about food will cause torments. This is the “psychophysical parallelism” mentioned by Frankl, in which the first two levels are interwoven. But in the third, noetic dimension, a person separates him or herself from the fact of hunger, and decides – if this is what he or she wants for any meaningful reason – to overrule the inner psychophysical pressure.

Humans thereby prove themselves able to respond to the conditions of fate in freedom, and, in doing so, they are responsible for their response. The non-deterministic outlook of logotherapy implies the re-admission of responsibility and possible guilt in the psychotherapeutic concept of the human being.

Where there are no choices at a given time, there can be no guilt. Since we have no ability, for example, to change our past, we cannot be guilty towards it. (This says nothing about whether we were guilty in the past, at the time when we could still make choices about it.) On the other hand, when we have choices, we are responsible for the choice made. And it may happen that a bad, a wrong choice is made. The terms “good or bad” or “right or wrong” are difficult to define, which is why they are replaced in logotherapy by the words “more or less meaningful”. In other words they are measured according to the concrete meaning of the corresponding life situation. Guilt is then: choosing against meaning.

“Humanity has developed a maximum of consciousness – of knowledge, of science – and a maximum of responsibility; but at the same time it has developed a minimal sense of responsibility. The man of today knows much more than ever, and is also responsible for many things - for more than ever; but what he knows less about than ever, is his responsibility.”⁹

According to a logotherapeutic outlook, fate never fully explains a person’s behaviour, for a human is not a victim, but a co-creator of his or her destiny. Logotherapy abhors the widespread “victim ideology” in psychology, and the tendency to provide psychological excuses by asserting human dependencies. To assert, for example, that a murderer had to murder because of terrible childhood circumstances or long-suppressed feelings of hatred, is too facile. This criticism on the part of logotherapy does not, of course, apply to cases in which there is limited responsibility as a result of psychosis. It applies to authentic cases such as the following: A 41-year-old Swede was released because of a supposedly severe mother complex after he strangled his wife and stabbed his two children. The court sent him to a psychiatric institution, where he was discharged as cured after a few months. He took the money from his wife’s life insurance and started a nice new life with his girlfriend, in which his wife and children would have been in the way.

Logotherapy asserts that a person can always take a position with respect to his or her childhood circumstances, feelings of hatred, mother complexes, etc., and decide what he or she makes of them; and that it is actually the worst “condemnation” to be denied this last room of manoeuvre and seen as a spiritually incapable marionette, a “homo-automaton”, a product of heredity and environment who is unalterably subservient to external conditions. It is precisely this statement that characterises pan-determinism, which commits the error of sparing nothing from deterministic interpretation. However, in fact, there are always still personal choices that are not defined, there always remains a small amount of unpredictability in human life.

Logotherapy has reversed the old deterministic question, which asks what determines a person’s feelings and actions, and asks where this ineliminable residue of indeterminateness, which is still present in distress and illness, comes from. Its answer: it comes from the noetic dimension. Thanks to it, human beings can defy their fate, dissociate themselves from their inner states, resist their external circumstances or accept their limitations heroically. On the psychological level, such freedom does not really exist: nobody can choose his or her condition. Anxiety, feelings of anger and instinctual drives are not selectable, conditioning cannot be annulled, social formation cannot be shaken off, limitations of ability cannot be lifted. Reducing the spiritual to the psychic, as pan-determinism does, deprives human beings (at least theoretically) of individual responsibility and delivers them to fate.

What does all this mean for practical psychotherapy? Simply: if we admit that even a psychically disturbed human being has spiritual freedom, we must also respect that human being. A patient shares responsibility for his or her own healing – to the extent that the spiritual dimension is still “open” – and also has the freedom to destroy his or her life. Ultimately, healing is not “do-able”; it can only be promoted, and relies on the self-healing powers of the body and the psyche, and the willingness of the spirit to be healed. Therefore, one of the basic rules of logotherapy is:

One should offer help,but not take away responsibility!

Unfortunately, psychotherapy often works the other way around, because a therapist strictly avoids giving instructions or disappears behind an impenetrable wall of non-comment. On the other hand, too much responsibility is taken away from the patient, in that all internal and external difficulties are traced back to conflicts initiated by others, and this makes the patient a helpless victim. In logotherapy, concrete help is offered, but responsibility remains with the patient.

Conscience, the “Organ of Meaning”

We have illustrated the noo-psychic antagonism by means of the dialectic between fate and freedom. Here the psychic “determinateness” of the human, everything which is fated, stands against the spiritual “indeterminateness”, everything which is free. We contrasted what is psychically imposed with what can be chosen by the spirit. From the resulting freedom (not from, but for something), we deduced the basic responsibility of the human and the possibility of guilt. But this does not end the chain of logical consequences. For, as freedom presupposes choice, a more or less meaningful choice presupposes the recognition of meaningful and not meaningful, and to ensure this recognition a special “organ” is needed in the human organism: the conscience.

“Meaning not only must but can be found, and human conscience is the guide in the search for it. In a word, the conscience is a meaning organ. It could be defined as the ability to perceive the unique and one-off meaning hidden in every situation.”¹⁰

What conscience reveals to humans is a trans-subjective meaning, which applies to values in the world, their preservation and multiplication, and not subjective meaning in the service of individual need satisfaction. It would be very dangerous to restrict the decisions of conscience to the perception of what seems “subjectively meaningful ”. This would mean that a terrorist could claim that it seemed meaningful to him to plant bombs. But this sort of “meaning for him” is not what is meant. Rather, it is a matter of “meaning in itself”, the meaningfulness which arises from the thing and the situation. It is fits into someone’s plans. Of course, many questions arise when assessing a situation and mistakes cannot be excluded. Anything human can be mistaken. Nevertheless, an orientation towards objective meaningfulness is the best measure we have for the decisions of conscience.

For a closer understanding of how something as subjective as conscience can sense something as objective as the “meaning of a situation”, consider the analogy of a compass: North is the objectively most meaningful thing that corresponds to the life situation of a person. The compass is the spiritual organ belonging to this human being that receives the “call to the individual”. And the compass needle is the “indicator” of conscience, which points to the individual’s concrete task. This means that the consciences of two people who are in exactly the same position would have to indicate the same thing if neither of them were mistaken. This is, of course, only a fictitious consideration, because two life situations are never identical, neither in the course of a single life, nor when comparing several people. This is why Frankl described the meaning which is to be found as “unique and one-off”.

Now the conscience can be mistaken, which can be symbolised by a fluctuating compass needle that does not point north. But human beings remain free to act against their conscience, metaphorically, to march south with a working compass in hand. Inner freedom on the noetic level is also freedom to act against conscience (although it is no freedom with respect to the indications of conscience). Probably this sort of “marching south” is much more common than a faulty indication of conscience itself, and it has bitter consequences: “north” gets ever further away! From psychotherapeutic practice, we know how many spiritual disorders can be traced back to not being in harmony with one’s own conscience, to a life led against one’s better self.

For a long time, the conscience was identified by psychology with the “superego”, and according to Frankl this is not permissible. As defined by Freud, the superego is the set of handed-down norms and customs, that is, the moral consciousness of tradition, which has been inculcated in us by parents, teachers, church and state authorities. The conscience, on the other hand, is an understanding of values that precedes all morals, which each of us intuitively carries within ourselves. It is the ethical feeling, unconscious of its origins, which belongs to our existential “basic equipment”. If a criminal claimed to have a poorly developed conscience, one would have to contend that his or her superego might be poorly developed, but that his or her conscience “speaks” just like that of other people.

In a human being the superego normally coincides with the voice of conscience. A theft, for example, is contrary to the morals of society and is also rejected by the conscience as an “unsocial act”. However, one can conceive of situations in which someone’s personal conscience could advocate theft as “meaningful”, for example to save children from starvation. To use a metaphor again, one could say that the superego is like the traffic rule we learn to stop at a red traffic light and go through a green one. If the road to be crossed is empty, personal conscience certainly has no objection to driving through the traffic light even if it is red. If, however, an old, visually impaired man starts to cross the road, conscience will forbid one to go through the light even when it is green. We see that the conscience is oriented to the meaning of the particular situation, the superego to established and handed down laws.

Frankl put forward an interesting thesis that breaks with tradition in the history of mankind are often due to an increasing gap between the superego and the consciences of a large number of people. One of the examples cited is slavery, which was “blessed” by popular opinion for centuries. Nevertheless, there was an ever-growing discomfort with it on conscientious grounds, until one day this discomfort became manifest and found its final expression in the abolition of slavery. We might currently be at the point of a similar break with tradition with respect to another longstanding norm of the superego: the defence of the fatherland. The importance of protecting native territory is deeply rooted in human beings, both biologically and sociologically. Nevertheless, at the end of the twentieth century modern weapons, which respect no borders, evoked a new worldwide uneasiness that conflicts with this traditional super egotistical norm. Many began – and continue – to question, whether it wouldn’t be more meaningful in the age of nuclear weapons to make the fatherland defenceless than to continue to accumulate weapons …?

In the context of psychotherapy the problem of the superego is clearly recognisable and can be distinguished from the real considerations of conscience. A patient who is tormented by what “people” think is listening to his or her superego. One who struggles in the decision-making process about the meaningfulness of a thing is communicating with his or her conscience.

The Dialectic of Vulnerability and Intactness

Viktor E. Frankl assumed that a person can be ill at the somatic and psychological levels, but never in the noetic dimension. “Mental illnesses”, as psychotic disorders are called in popular science, are normally not even psychic illnesses, but disturbances in the nerve cells, in other words they are somatogenic. And, of course, people with psychosis, confusion, dementia, Alzheimer’s patients, etc., have an intact spiritual dimension, even if it is sometimes inaccessible, blocked by the processes of a psychophysical illness.

“Anyone who knows about the dignity, the unconditional dignity of every single person, also has unconditional reverence for a human person, even for a sick person, even for the incurably ill, and even for the incurably mentally ill. There are no “spiritual” illnesses. For the “spirit,” the spiritual person, cannot get sick, and remains present even behind psychosis, even when “invisible” to the psychiatrist.”¹¹

The human spiritual dimension cannot be lost. It is latent in the child – not yet unfolded – just as language is latent in the newborn child and has simply not yet been developed. It resides in people ravaged by age and people with cerebral damage, although hidden by disruptive biological factors, and in schizophrenics, although restricted by neurochemical impairments. It flourishes in the drug addict, although crippled by artificial influences. The fact that human spirituality is always potentially present is what guarantees the inviolable dignity of the human being.

From the outside, the progressive blocking of the spiritual dimension largely hides what is uniquely human. Thus, a small child, a drunk or an imbecile can hardly be distinguished from an intelligent animal, because in them spiritual freedom and power of judgement – and thus human decision-making capability and responsibility – are drastically reduced. Nevertheless, there remains a difference in potentiality that cannot be lost – a dimension that is beyond health and illness (or intelligence and lack of intelligence), even though – temporarily or permanently – it can no longer come to expression in the other dimensions of being.

This has implications for establishing indications and contraindications for logotherapeutic treatment. Where a person’s noetic dimension is “asleep”, meaning that the patient is completely benighted by unconsciousness, immaturity or illness on the other levels of being, no logotherapeutic help is possible. Logotherapy can be used in all other contexts, even with older children and adolescents, and even with senile, mentally disabled or psychotic people to a limited extent, depending on the extent of their spiritual freedom – which is, according to experience, often greater than one initially thinks.

The overview makes it clear that there are qualitative gradations within the psychic dimension (and analogously within the somatic one). There are many gradations between “sick” and “healthy”, “abnormal” and “normal”, or – as one prefers to say today – between having or not having a “disorder”. Each of us at any time is somewhere on this continuum between the two poles, as regards both spiritual and physical condition.

On the spiritual level, it is more a question of quantitative accessibility between the extremes of “completely open” and “completely blocked”. While a severe illness, abnormality or disorder is not a contraindication for logotherapy in the psychic (or even somatic) areas, a loss of accessibility of the noetic dimension represents the only important contraindication for applied logotherapy. With small children, and in cases of significant impairment of consciousness, serious physiological brain defects, complete loss of sense of reality, chronic personality breakdown, and so on, we no longer reach the spiritual person to whom all logotherapeutic arguments and appeals are addressed.

Let us now specify the areas in which the logotherapeutic seed can grow and bear fruit. They include physical and mental disorders which have an effect on the spiritual level, and spiritual frustrations which have an effect on the psychic and the psychosomatic level. Wherever logotherapy is applied, it always deals with the interaction between the psychophysical and the spiritual. However, this is characterised by the rhythms of human life as a whole: the alternation and interplay between the material and the ideal, the vulnerable and the intact, the transitory and the permanent.

And when it is denied that there is something “intact”, unbroken and unbreakable in the human being? That something can be intact even though it falls outside the norm, yes, that there exists truth in spite of illness and suffering in spite of health? Well, then we arrive at a view of a human as a machine in need of repair. In this view, deviations from the norm only reveal functional weaknesses, and anyone who does not function in the expected way is sick. If, for example, a patient is not immediately enthusiastic about a therapist, this is “resistance”; if a searcher asks about the meaning of life, this is “autoaggression”; if an artist struggles to produce a creative design, this is an “inferiority complex”. We quickly end up with a general discrimination against spiritual concerns and achievements, with a “hyper-diagnosis” of all human statements that no longer recognises that there is something in human beings that is beyond health and illness. Something which is capable of engaging with content, something which cannot be interpreted merely as a product of psychological and psychopathological development, as psychologism and the related approach of pathologism try to do.

“[Psychologism] sees nothing but masks everywhere; behind them, it wants to admit the existence of nothing but neurotic motives. It sees everything as artificial, improper. It wants us to believe that art is ultimately nothing more than a flight from life or love; religion is nothing but the primitive human’s fear of cosmic forces. The great intellectual creators are dismissed as neurotics or psychopaths. With this kind of “unmasking” through psychologism one can finally claim with a breath of relief that, for example, Goethe was “actually only” a neurotic. This way of thinking does not see anything real, which means that it does not really see anything.”¹²

Psychologism commits the error of persistently projecting phenomena from the spiritual space onto the psycho-sociological plane. It rejects human individuality, in the light of which deviations from the norm need not be a sign of illness, but can be individual ways of life, an expression of human intactness. Only in the psychophysical plane is any deviation from the norm a symptom of illness; in the spiritual dimension, in contrast, the “special” nature of each human being, which cannot be calibrated, finds its form.

Thus, as pan-determinism denies human freedom and responsibility, psychologism closes its eyes to the genuinely human, to genuine human creativity and spirituality.

The Dialectic of Pleasure Orientation and Meaning Orientation

Logotherapy differs from other psychotherapies mostly in its concept of motivation. It calls into question the prevalent philosophy of happiness in psychology. According to this philosophy, happiness is the fulfilment of needs. If we take the noetic dimension of human beings into account, however, happiness means the inner fulfilment of meaning. It has been demonstrated in logotherapeutic studies that people are ready to give things up for the sake of a meaningful task and, if necessary, to let needs go unsatisfied. Physical and psychic well-being plays a secondary role in the search for meaning. On the other hand, as can be easily observed in psychological practice, failure in the search for meaning cannot be compensated for by any kind of psychophysical well-being.

How can this discrepancy be explained by the concept of what happiness means? Undoubtedly it emerges from the origins of European psychology and psychotherapy as a science. After all, the first half of the twentieth century, which is when psychology was developed, was a time of extreme hardship. World wars, economic crises, and mass unemployment followed one after another. It is easy to understand why the people of that time wanted only one thing: liberation from their daily distress. They thought they would be happy if only the constant pressure of the struggle to survive were removed, with the associated need to swallow humiliation, bitterness and deprivation.

Also, psychology could not help to alleviate external distress, so it concentrated on liberation from internal distress. Following the general trend, it attacked the thesis of “happiness through liberation” and set itself the goal of freeing people from their internal inhibitions, the burden of their fear of authority, their subjugation to others, and possibly even their bad conscience. “You must ultimately think of yourself,” was emblazoned on its banner, and it taught those seeking its advice to fight for their own requirements, to categorically reject excessive demands, and to live out their right to have their needs satisfied.

No objection could be made to all this, and one would still be sure of being on the right path to happiness, if the economic situation in Western industrialised countries had not changed dramatically for the better in the second half of the twentieth century. Prosperity spread, and at the same time the population was freed from almost every need. People were no longer hungry, sexual restrictions disappeared, there was an abundance of jobs (until the nineties), strict authority died out, and leisure time, with numerous affordable amusements for everyone, rose sharply. What earlier psychotherapy had been able to eradicate by way of inner distress was overshadowed by the economic miracle with its eradication of external distress. But hoped-for happiness did not appear. Instead, statistics dispayed skyrocketing numbers of suicides, drug overdoses, crimes, divorces, and the like, and overall, an indescribable increase of neurotic, broken, badtempered and deeply dissatisfied people. The thesis that happiness lies in deliverance from distress had to be revised.

Specifically, the conventional psychological understanding of the human being needed to move in the direction of logotherapy. For Frankl had already realised in the thirties that people not only need to know by what they live, they also want to know for what they live; they need not only means to live, but also a purpose for their lives. The anxious question from earlier times, which had preoccupied people in times of distress: “What do I do to live?”, was turned around in times of prosperity and was suddenly asked no less anxiously: “What do I live to do?” A secure and luxurious life had come to be taken for granted, but the why for living was gone and this resulted in a frightening lack of answers.

One striking example of this is a report from Finland, which found that the consumption of alcohol has multiplied sixfold since the introduction of modern central heating systems in the country. The connection seems strange, and it is yet logical. Before this technical advance, weekends were often used by families to collect wood in the forest, in order to lay in supplies for the long winter. The excursions were opportunities for recreation and conversation, fitness training and meaningful work in one. Afterwards, one only had to turn a dial on the thermostat, and the room would become warm. But what was one to do on Sunday? Many were seduced into sitting in front of the TV and consuming one beer after another out of sheer boredom …

What is clearly illustrated by this problem is precisely the field of tension created by the noo-psychic antagonism, expressed theoretically as the antithesis of the “homeostatic principle” and “noodynamics” (Frankl). The homoeostatic principle of the two-dimensional plane of being in humans and animals says that urgent needs (hunger, thirst, freezing, sexual desire, need for safety, etc.) call for abreaction and satisfaction, so that a living organism can regain its internal equilibrium. The living creature is then in balance within itself until the pressure of a new drive sets it back into motion. The preservation of the inner balance – homeostasis – is thus the basic motivational force by which undertakings are initiated. No action takes place without a prick of internal or external discomfort.

This self-regulating principle is valid in the animal kingdom, but it cannot be so easily transferred to a “spiritual being” like a human, as has repeatedly been shown in times of general need-satisfaction. For us humans, a balance of inner drives means anything but inner peace and contentment. It soon produces a feeling of emptiness and superfluity, an aimlessness (what is to be striven for when most needs have already been satisfied?) and a reduced affirmation of existence. In an extreme case this leads to “dying in the golden cage”: a spiritual death resulting from a missing “reason for vigour”.

“It is all the more important because psychic hygiene has been more or less dominated by a mistaken principle up to the present day: the conviction that what man needs first and foremost is inner peace and balance, relaxation at all costs. However, individual reflections and experiences have shown that a human needs tension much more than relaxation – a certain healthy dose of tension! The tension, for example, which is experienced through the demands of a life-meaning, a task which must be fulfilled, especially when the demands are concerned with the meaning of an existence, the fulfilment of which is reserved for, required of and applied to exclusively this one human being. Far from being psychically harmful, such tension promotes psychic well-being, to the extent that the “noo-dynamics”, as I would call them, characterize everything that is human; for being human means, unavoidably and without exception, being in tension between what is and what should be.”¹³

In contrast to the homoeostatic principle, the principle of noodynamics sees healthy people as being in tension between what is and what should be, where “is” is the current (world) situation, and “should be” is a change (however small) in the constructively changed situation. This change does not stem from an externally imposed prescription, but from one’s own recognition of a meaningful and attainable goal. In the consciousness it takes the form of an image of a concrete task, which is, so to speak, exclusively waiting for oneself because no one else can fulfil it at the same time, to the same extent or as well. One could say that “what is” is reality as perceived and “what should be” is an intuitive ideal which provides a noodynamic tension between reality and ideal.

Of course, this relationship of tension is different in different stages of life, indeed from day to day, and is is rare for “what should be” to be fully attainable, but it provides a direction for human action. Let’s look at an example. A young man is a student of medicine. The “what is” pole consists, amongst other things, of his financial support from his parents, his lack of a professional field of activity, and, in the world “outside”, a lot of sick people. The “what should be” pole is his goal of becoming a capable physician, who continually fights against the illnesses and premature deaths of his fellow human beings, and thereby not least expresses gratitude to his parents for what they have done for him. As long as the student remains in such a relationship of tension, he will devote himself to his studies with a maximum of intensity.

If, in this example, homeostatic rather than noodynamic aspects were to play a role, we would have to assume that the young man was studying to compensate for an imbalance in his psyche – perhaps the result of a weakly developed self-awareness. Perhaps he hopes that one day, as a qualified doctor in an elevated social position, he will be able to impress beautiful women and enjoy a high level of prestige, which would restore his inner balance. Whether he is going to complete his studies successfully on the basis of this unhealthy – because not fittingly human – kind of motivation is highly questionable, because who is going to struggle through thick books and undergo nerve-racking examinations just to revitalise his or her own self-confidence?

According to the noodynamic principle, there is always a value from the external world which is pointed to by “what should be”, such as the production of a work, the starting of a family, the construction of a home, the filling of a role in the workplace, or the improvement of political circumstances. The homeostatic principle, on the other hand, is exclusively concerned with the ego. Interestingly, both are found in the human being: on the psychic level, longing for pleasure and satisfaction of drives, and on the spiritual level striving for the fulfilment of meaning and values. From a logotherapeutic point of view, however, the latter is the crucial factor: the “will to the meaning” is the human’s original primary motivation – and if it is not, the person is on the road to illness. Since, noodynamic tension involves transcending the ego, a human being must also be able to transcend him or herself; Frankl called this the “capacity for selftranscendence”.

In logotherapy, self-transcendence is regarded as the highest level of development of human existence. It is the uniquely human ability to think and act in a way that gets one beyond oneself, in an “existence for something or for someone” (Frankl), by giving oneself to a task or by orienting oneself towards other people. Self-transcendence is concerned with a thing in itself or with people for their own sake and never as an object that can satisfy one’s own needs.

It is astonishing that no school of psychotherapy before Frankl had arrived at the idea that what is essential for a human being could be something outside of his or her own self. All other motivational concepts in psychology ultimately revolve around the self. Depth psychology aims at maximum pleasure through satisfaction of drives, behavioural therapy at reward and “strokes” (receiving social boosts), and humanistic psychology at self-realisation. From the point of view of logotherapy, these schools provide a completely egocentric concept of the human being – and this in a narcissistic age such as our own! – that has no positive effect, and that in its onesidedness does not do justice to a creature that is essentially spiritual.

Particularly dangerous, however, is the current of reductionism, which, generalising the homeostatic principle, tries to interpret every meaning-oriented human action according to the pleasure principle. This is truly nihilism in psychological garb.

“The basic possibility of denying meaning encounters us in the actual reality of what is called nihilism. For the essence of nihilism does not exist, as one might suppose, in denying being; it does not really deny being – or rather, the being of being, but the meaning of being. Nihilism by no means asserts that there is nothing in reality; on the contrary, it asserts that reality is nothing but something or other that some concrete form of nihilism traces it back to, or derives it from.”¹⁴

According to the reductionist pattern, the love of parents for their children is “nothing but” self-love: the parents satisfy their parental drives though their children. The friendship between two people of the same gender is “nothing but” a successful sublimation of homosexual inclinations. Aid workers in the third world use their work to satisfy their desire to travel, the acts of environmentalists satisfy a secret urge for recognition, and so on. It is inevitable that such models of interpretation, which – denying meaning – only recognise motives involving pleasure gain or displeasure avoidance, massively devalue all spiritual ideals. In the end, there are only moments of pleasure and agonising moments of displeasure, which, given unbelievably exaggerated importance, are supposed to control the whole of human life.

If we ask how the concept of the human being can be subjected to this sort of diminution, or reduction – which is a long way from being overcome in current psychology – we must repeat our statement: by the projection of noetic phenomena onto the subnoetic plane, or in other words, by the projection of human phenomena onto the subhuman plane. Reductionism is “projectionism”, and even subhumanism.

The human being is spiritually involved in the world (and even in a transcendent world) and oriented towards logos. When incorrectly reduced to the next lower level, the human being is seen at the psychological-sociological level as a self-contained system of psychological functions and reactions; the self-transcendence of the human being is no longer visible. At a purely psychic level, pleasure and displeasure, drives and drive satisfaction are the motors which drive a living being, even within such a complex hierarchy of needs as Maslow’s hierarchy, which has self-realisation at the summit. But even the idea of self-realisation does not get beyond the concept of the ego, and remains trapped in homeostatic ideas – which is why, as already indicated, logotherapy distinguishes itself from humanistic psychology and rather advocates humane psychotherapy.

Only from a reductionist perspective can the satisfaction of one’s own needs be raised to the highest good; but at the same time the human being is lowered – quite deliberately – to the level of a “naked ape”. The denial of the human being’s existential orientation toward meaning amounts to a degradation, because it is a dehumanisation.

An Intermediary Case Study

The following case study should demonstrate that in practice it is sometimes a question of preventing the development of psychic disorders, and that the concept of the human being applied to those who are under threat is extremely important. To begin with, a few words about this category of psychic disorders, which were formerly referred to as “neuroses”.

Neuroses are caused by multiple factors. Genetic predispositions combine with significant educational or environmental influences, small mistakes have decisive consequences, and unfortunate coincidences also play a role. Above all, the person concerned surrenders without a fight to inner obstacles. Two characteristics may generally be observed: a strong susceptibility to feelings of insecurity and a “hanging on” to certain thoughts.

1) On susceptibility to feelings of insecurity

The spiritual dimension of the “neurotic” (today called an “anxiety sufferer”) is unblocked and unrestricted, and the intellect is also unaffected. But the patient does not, so to speak, trust his or her own spirit. What is missing is not so much health as the security of being healthy. There is doubt about everything, especially about the self, and insecurity penetrating into the deepest existential layers of being. As a result, there is no trust in the capacities of the self (“I can’t do that”) but at the same time trust in a tendency to do everything badly (“I only do stupid things”). Although the irrationality of these feelings, which are unnecessarily negative, is fully recognised, there is always a temptation to take them seriously. The patient is always running away from something that is always catching up. This annoys the patient – to the point of self-hatred, which has an additionally weakening effect. An inescapable vicious circle of lack of trust and resulting misfortune is created. Insecurity, anxiety, low selfesteem and increased irritability become spiritual traps.

The neurotic, having become insecure for some psychophysical reason, has a particular need for the support of the spiritual.¹⁵)

2) On “hanging on” to thoughts

The “neurotic” (today called an “anxiety sufferer”) cannot get rid of doubting and complaining thoughts. It is immeasurably difficult for the sufferer to draw a line under things. His or her thoughts dwell endlessly on small inconveniences which have been or could be experienced, and make an “elephant out of every mosquito”. In logotherapy we speak of “hyperreflexion”, which exaggerates and aggravates every minor life crisis.

This “hanging on” to thoughts is highly likely to have a neurophysiological factor. Sensitive measurements of electrical impulses in the cerebral cortex when isolated groups of cells are stimulated show different progressions in different people. In some people the activation response to stimuli is slower than in others. If groups of cells are activated in rapid succession, they easily get into a state of permanent activation. This could be a clue as to why anxiety sufferers are more sensitive, tense and excitable than their fellow human beings: their vegetative system often reacts more excitably than in others. Thus, whenever a person has a strong predisposition to hyperreflection, the way is prepared for a neurotic disorder. Nevertheless, powerful psychotherapeutic weapons should not immediately be brought into play. As soon as an insecure person sees him or herself as needing therapy, he or she slips a level deeper into a presupposed inability to master life. What needs to be made clear to a person in danger of neurosis is not his or her illness, but his or her remaining health! Any overdose of psychotherapy both intensifies the insecurity (“I need help, I cannot do it alone”) and reinforces the circling around problems in thought – thus problem-oriented discussions play completely into the hands of the illness! At this stage it is better to encourage the endangered person to trust in themselves and the world, and to let go of fruitless thoughts.

Now to the promised case study:

A young pregnant woman was referred to me by her GP to me to learn relaxation exercises. During the period when she was coming to me regularly for training, her husband once asked for a private conversation with me. The conversation is sketched out in sections with a specialist commentary.

Section 1

At first the man seemed embarrassed and did not come to the point. He confined himself to superficial conversation.

Commentary: The man’s insecurity was noticeable. To relieve him of the idea that he had to “confess” unwanted things, I said to him, “Just tell me what you’d like to tell”. This instruction often has a paradoxical effect, as the forbearance opens floodgates and the inhibited person begins to pour out his or her heart. But I honestly meant it; the responsibility for the conversation should remain with the person seeking help.

Section 2

The man reported that he had a damaged disc and various resulting problems with his back.

Commentary: One could presume that his back pain had to do with the problems he wanted to discuss. This “conversation opener” was not, however, completely appropriate for a meeting with a psychologist, who is not an expert on damaged discs. Clearly his thoughts were circling around something that was not currently the focus of our attention. I listened in silence, to give the man the opportunity to come back from his detours to the essentials.

Section 3

The man continued his remarks about his back. He had been provided with detailed medical information, and knew all about the connections, for example, between long drives and curvature of the spine.

Commentary: A further indication of the man’s insecurity emerged, namely an attempt to get rid of his internal insecurity by obtaining information. Intelligent, but spiritually handicapped persons often read a lot of life counselling and technical literature, without being able to obtain decisive impetus from them. I do not, however, want to assert “psychologistically” that any interest in autodidactic training is an expression of insecurity. In any case, an interruption of the man’s long-winded deliberations was indicated, and so with the question: “Can you do something to relieve your pain?” I led him back into the constructive realm.

Section 4

The man said he could. He was receiving special massages and physiotherapy. There was a pause in the conversation.

Commentary: Apparently, the keyword had been spoken. Now I just had to wait. In the silence that followed, the man decided to reveal his problem.

Section 5

The man embarrassedly explained that he would become sexually excited during the massages. Then he would be embarrassed in front of the women who treated him, he would tense up and become cramped. His concerns went beyond this, however. He expressed it in these words: “That’s not what I want, I’m not like that! I don’t understand myself anymore. I love my wife and I’m not interested in anyone else. Is it possible that I am unconsciously trying to cheat on her? It weighs me down and it is extremely embarrassing.” He also mentioned that he had thought about running away: “I’d like to cancel the treatment, but I don’t know how to explain it to my doctor and my wife.”

Two- and Three-dimensional Interpretations

Let us consider this case according to dimensional ontology. What is visible to the spectator?

On the somatic level

Physically, a low sexual arousal threshold, possibly associated with vegetative and hormonal factors. However, the erections at unsuitable moments that he described are not unusual. After all, they took place in a context conducive to sexual arousal: he was undressed and being touched by women … diagnostically this suggests nothing abnormal!

On the psychic level

The psychic symptoms were more drastic, though also not alarming. He was astonishingly unsure of himself, worked himself up into unnecessary worries and attributed excessive importance to the matter. A hypersensitivity in the area of shame triggered a desire for avoidance.

On the noetic level

There was a clear spiritual statement: he loved his wife and he wanted to remain faithful to her. There was no extramarital sexual activity, and his erections during the massages did not correspond with his intentions.

Let us further differentiate fate from freedom in the man’s situation at this point. His psychophysical over-excitation was fateful, leading psychically to insecurity and physically to sexual arousal. In contrast, he was free in his attitude towards himself, his wife, his love, and his problem. What was he responsible for as a result? Not for his psychic anxiety, nor for his physical reaction, but for his spiritual answer to these things.

Nothing else had to be explained to him. What was going on in his body, I explained to him, was not under his control; the emotions he experienced as a result had not been chosen by him. On the other hand, whether he used this as an opportunity to flirt with other women, to indulge in them, or whether he kept an inner distance from what was happening in his body, conscious that he loved his wife and had no intention to betray her, this was his alone to determine. This was his spiritual freedom and his personal decision. If he acted in harmony with his conscience, with what he thought meaningful, he acted optimally, and there was no cause for concern. On the contrary, he could be contented with himself.

What kind of therapy was this? None at all, it was neurosis prevention. The person seeking help was addressed as a healthy person. A footing in the spiritual was offered to him by drawing attention to the free space in which he had and made choices. Instead of being afraid of whether he was a secret sex pervert, which confused and tormented him, he should be proud that he preserved his love for his wife, regardless of psychophysical pressure and opportunities for seduction.

This argument gave the man immediate relief (“So I am not abnormal?”) and increased his security (“I am quite certain of my intentions”). In addition, there was a transformation of a false feeling of guilt – arising from the superego? – into a sense of responsibility – belonging to the conscience – which, together with his turning towards the realm of freedom, counteracted his tendency to hyperreflexion. The man thanked me for our conversation and left soothed and refreshed. His departure conformed to a logotherapeutic rule which states that a patient should never be dismissed without

a) an answer to his or her questions,

b) hope for some opportunity for improvement, and

c) a small challenge to his or her spiritual powers.

After the birth of the child, the couple sent me a birth announcement. Shortly thereafter the new father called to thank me for my congratulations. I did not bring up the subject of his particular problem so as not to upset him again, but before he hung up, he told me, as though it were a side-issue: “By the way, the matter that I confided to you earlier has resolved itself. My body now responds completely normally.”

A cure by “non-therapy”? Well, the exacerbation mechanism is countered by the spiritual attitude: “I cannot do anything about what my body does.” The insecurity is resolved by the spiritual attitude: “I know what I want, and what I do not want: I am faithful to my wife.” This removed the risk of neurosis and made complete normalization possible. From this, one can learn the lesson that spiritual forces can have a healing influence on the psychophysical.

I have achieved many similar cures by non-therapy, that is, by preventing the escalation of a psychic disorder (with or without physical effects) that has already begun. I remember, for example, a student who asked me for advice six years ago because the contents of her stomach would come back up after almost every meal and she had to swallow them back down laboriously. This had caused a chronic gum disease. Medically neither a cause nor a remedy had been found. I was very doubtful that I could help her. In any case, we talked about her spiritual freedom, about meaningful attitudes to the facts, and about her responsibility not to be discouraged by this handicap. After the semester break, she told me with pleasure that she had gradually “forgotten” about her problem, until she suddenly realized that her food had not come back up for a long time. In six months she was symptom-free.

By way of contrast, let us interpret the case study of the abovementioned husband in the context of a two-dimensional concept of the human being. There is no noetic dimension in such a concept, and everything spiritual is shifted to the psychic level, which is governed by the principle of homeostasis. As a consequence, one would have to speculate that the man’s sexual libido had somehow been suppressed and awoke in the presence of pretty women. Against this, his superego asserted his unbroken fidelity. To resolve the conflict, the man talked himself into loving his wife, which in a reductionist interpretation, was “nothing but” a defence mechanism that was supposed to appease the superego, but at the same time he had his inappropriate erections in which the repressed libido manifested itself as a neurotic symptom.

As to the question of why his libido had been suppressed, so that the man could not “satisfy himself” with his own wife, there are several possible explanations in the two-dimensional concept of the human being. One is simple: pregnancy complicates sex. Another is provided by depth psychology: the man suffered from an Oedipus complex, he had developed a love-hate relationship with his mother, and unconsciously transferred this love-hate relationship to his wife, which is why he could not have satisfying sexual relations with her. This completes the circle: Because his libido wants to discharge itself, he turns to other women, with whom he has no emotionally prejudiced relationship, however, his superego objects to this. .

With the aid of purely scientific evidence, one cannot determine which of the two concepts of the human being, the three-dimensional one (logotherapy), or the two-dimensional one, is true. One thing, however, is certain: the therapeutic consequences are different. A therapist who sympathises with the two-dimensional interpretation will probably put the patient on the couch and “analyse” them until he or she knows that he actually hates his wife more than he loves her, that he unconsciously desires other women, and that his mother is to blame for everything. Then the man will be sent home with this “knowledge”. Will the therapist, however, also take responsibility, if the man begins to argue with his wife, has unpleasant exchanges with his mother, or if the coming child has to grow up without a father one day? I fear not.

It has been statistically demonstrated that three quarters of marriages in which a partner is involved in psychoanalytic treatment break down. This was not worked out by logotherapists, but by psychoanalysts themselves, who presented their statistics in a professional journal with the proud announcement that their patients would be freed from being oppressed by their partners. Nothing was written about the children who lost their parents. I personally do not want to have that on my conscience, but then there is no conscience in a twodimensional concept of the human being …

In the interest of fairness, I do not want to deny that psychoanalysts are also critical of logotherapy. Albert Görres, a famous old master of psychoanalysis, expressed it like this in the following passage:

“The significance of the spirit is not entirely unknown in psychotherapy. There is the experience that the breaking of neurotic fetters often gives a person an opportunity to rediscover buried experiences of meaning. The person begins to sense things that could be worthy of the use of his or her whole being. There are also psychotherapeutic theories and methods, like those of Viktor E. Frankl, which hold that such fundamental experiences of meaning are what is actually healing. Unfortunately, the attention given to the meaning, purpose and goals of existence often leads to a certain neglect of the bio-psychic foundations of drives and drive destinies. Furthermore, the art of the positive provocation of spiritual powers in psychotherapy has not yet been well elucidated. Psychology does not have its bearings here.”¹⁶

In our discussion of logotherapeutic methods, we will see that logotherapy always has an eye on the interactions between the three dimensions of the human being, and for this reason the claim that it neglects the bio-psychic foundations of being human is ill-founded. But it is true that its primary focus is on the spiritual, and that this spiritual dimension is completely new territory for traditional psychology. Yes, perhaps it is precisely the imponderable and the incalculable in the human being – ultimately a mystery – which resists experimental and psychological testing.

If, however, any school of psychology knows about the “positive provocation of spiritual powers”, then it is logotherapy.

The Dialectic of Character and Personality¹⁷

We have explored the noo-psychic antagonism by looking at three of its aspects: the dialectic of fate and freedom, the dialectic of vulnerability and intactness, and the dialectic of pleasure and meaning orientation. There is a fourth feature inherent in the logotherapeutic concept of the human being, namely the dialectic of character and personality. This is about the personal aspect of the human spirit. Two human beings can have the same character, but they are never the same; they are always unique, irreplaceable individuals. Even in a community, partnership, or peer group, every individual retains his or her individuality, and when this is given up, as is the case with certain infamous crowd phenomena, the individual temporarily shuts down his or her spirituality and humanity. Frankl defined a crowd as a “sum of depersonalised beings”.

A (psychic) character is a “created being”. It corresponds to a psychological type, a race, a mentality, it is inherited and shaped by the environment. In contrast, a (spiritual) person is a “creating being”. It engages with character, with its faculties and its suggestibility. In logotherapy, the beloved phrase: “One does not have to put up with everything about oneself” is actually a core statement about personal points of view.

“It is not only heredity and environment which make a man. A man also makes something of himself: “the man” (the person) “from himself” (from his character). Thus, following Allers’ formulation: man “has” a character, but he “is” a person – and one can add, he “becomes a personality”. Inasmuch as the person who “is” engages with the character that he “has”, taking a position towards it, he transforms it and himself, and “becomes” a personality.”¹⁸

People with identical genes can, under very similar environmental conditions, end up with very different ways of life, as we know from research into twins, which always makes clear that a common inheritance and experiential background produces both similarities and differences. I myself have known a gypsy family about which records have been kept for three generations in the files of a charitable organization in Munich. One can see from the files that nine children were born between 1945 and 1955, and they all grew up under the same pressure in the same criminal family milieu, being trained to steal from a young age. If any of the children returned home in the afternoon or in the evening without “loot”, there were beaten.

Of these nine children, one grew up to be a decent man. As an adult, he has never been in trouble with the law, he has learned a proper profession, and he has started a family that lives peacefully and respectably. This one man disproves all the theories of developmental psychology. No one should blame the eight other children of the gypsy family who struggled through life as adults as best they could; they had a really heavy burden to bear. But one feels the greatest respect for the ninth.

In the course of my educational counseling, I have repeatedly met children who have had lovingly caring parents but nevertheless developed badly. There is everything in every person, angel and devil. The human is the being who builds murderous rockets, and at the same time the being who protests against this; the being who hunts seals to extinction, and at the same time the being who desperately tries to save this species. Everything is always there in every one of us.

“So what is a human being? A being who always decides what he or she is. The being who invented gas chambers; but at the same time the being who has entered the gas chambers, upright, with a prayer on the lips.”¹⁹

The relationship between freedom and personality can be expressed as Frankl’s equation:

Freedom from character = freedom for personality

The spiritual freedom of a human being includes an ability to step back from one’s own inclinations, conditioning and character traits. This is the basis for the human capacity for self-distancing, which, like the capacity for self-transcendence, is harnessed by logotherapy for healing purposes. Since this capacity for self-distancing is a fundamental anthropological phenomenon existing at the noetic level of the human being, which cannot itself become sick, the following separation scheme naturally presents itself for psychotherapy: a separation between the sick part of a patient’s psyche and the healthy part of the patient’s psyche, including his or her (not sick) spirituality – the “intact” part.

Patient

“intact” part sick part

Definition: “intact” part = the healthy part of the psyche together with the part of the spirit that cannot become sick.

Sick part = the sick of the psyche

The central concern of logotherapy is to strengthen the patient’s “intact” part, and to use the powers concentrated there to deal properly with the sick part.

In the diagram the therapeutic extension of the “intact” area is represented by the curved line extending into the sick area. One might argue that it makes no difference whether one occupies oneself primarily with the sick part of a person and tries to reduce it, as psychotherapy has generally attempted to do, or whether one attempts to extend the “intact” area of a human being as logotherapy does. In fact, it is not the same at all. In the one case, the therapist “looks” for the patient in the sick area, in the other case in the healthy area.

Anyone who is familiar with the therapeutic profession knows how much the charisma of a therapist is able to set in motion in a patient. What the therapist thinks and feels flows into patient’s thoughts and feelings in the interaction process and changes them. Thus when therapists and life coaches keep their sights on the essential freedom, the fundamental intactness of the human spirit, the meaning orientation and the unique personality of every individual, in addition to the part of a sick person, that is still healthy, in spite of all psychic disorders and confusions, then sooner or later we will have patients who are no longer completely at the mercy of their disorders and confusions, because they sense (through the charisma of their therapists) that human beings can be self-determining like no other creature, every day newly decide what they will be the next day, and that even the most severe illnesses, which admittedly have a fateful aspect, can only cripple one part of them, but can never destroy their dignity. If patients are able to recognise this, they have already taken a huge step towards health.

There is one last danger to mention: collectivism. Its dangers hardly need to be explained, when one thinks about some of the crudest collectivist judgments such as: “All redheads have tempers” or “All blondes are dumb”. In statements like this, assessments and forecasts about people are made solely on the basis of their race or character. The collectivist thinker is too comfortable to examine the personality of the person concerned. Such a person forgets that genetic heritage constitutionally and dispositionally pre-forms the psychophysical element of the human being, but ultimately everything depends on what the person concerned does or does not make out of these resources. Since this is a personal act of self-determination that cannot be derived from belonging to any type or race, but rather derives from the nous, the collectivist assessment is invalid: human beings are not predictable, calculable, or even evaluable on the basis of character.

Collectivism is also dangerous with regard to self-assessment. It is a prominent error, indeed, perhaps the error of the neurotic, to believe that he or she has a predetermined character, and cannot behave in opposition to this character. It is only this error that makes psychic disorders possible, not any neurotic disposition of character!

“Whenever a neurotic speaks of his or her self or personal way of being, he or she tends to imply that this way of being could not be otherwise. The identification of a character trait automatically becomes a stipulation. The neurotic thinks that having this character trait is just the way it is, and there is no possibility of being any other way …

Yet the neurotic person is not only concerned with his or her own individual character, with the id, but also with something beyond individuality, something collective within the self – the “person” that is active in and through the self … In this context it must appear to us as extremely questionable when we perceive that these days people are generally inclined to refer in all sorts of ways to the characteristics of any group (class or race) to which they belong. This apparent self-justification is facilitated by constant reminders of how much they are dependent on any collective and influenced by it in a spiritual sense.”²⁰

Collectivism, in its various forms, is a perfect example of the ways of thinking that arise when spiritual matters are derived from, or traced back to, psychic ones.

To end this sad chapter, I want to finish the enumeration of psychological “dead ends” with an example that illustrates all of the previously mentioned dangers of impermissible projections. The starting point of our considerations is a mother who bears an unwanted child.

Pan-determinism would claim that rejection of the child by the mother inevitably leads to a mother-child relationship that is destroyed for life (“programming”).

Psychologism would claim that the unwanted pregnancy was a result of the neurotic impulses and complexes of the mother (“unmasking”).

Reductionism would claim that the entire future upbringing of the child by the mother will be an expression of her unconscious hatred towards the child (“devaluation”).

Collectivism would claim that in later life the child will exhibit the characteristics and behavior of all “typical unloved children” (“classification”).

What would logotherapy say about this case? It would argue that everything is still possible for mother and child. That both can grow into love for one another, and that the mother, with her intact spiritual dimension, has the freedom to change her attitude to the child and accept its existence as a meaningful task. As a task that she is responsible for fulfiling, and in the fulfilment of which her personality will mature into something new.

Self-knowledge and Dealing with Oneself

The expression “dealing with oneself” has been used in connection with deriving the human capacity for self-distancing from the noopsychic antagonism. This expression refers to an important pedagogical-therapeutic goal of logotherapy. This goal is more highly valued than the goal of self-knowledge. For adequate self-knowledge can never remain an end in itself, but is a transitional stage on a path which leads beyond the self. By calling for setting goals beyond the self, logotherapy becomes a school for living which breaks out of the narrower space of psychotherapy and merges with an education in responsibility.

Self-knowledge reveals the process of self-becoming, unconscious drives, formation in fixed ways and, of course, also the deliberate input of the person from past epochs. Dealing with oneself unlocks the self’s potential, which builds upon it, and actualises the spiritual consciousness and the spiritual unconscious. (What Frankl meant by the spiritual unconscious is the unpondered and imponderable origin of the ethical, erotic and autonomic in human life: faith, love in the widest sense, and artistic inspiration.) Dealing with oneself is equivalent to giving oneself a belated self-education for achieving inner control and inner growth.

A minimum level of inner control is a prerequisite for alleviating numerous psychic disorders such as addiction and delinquency, and this can only be achieved by a movement of the spirit which gains distance from the self and works on the self from this distance in a healing and corrective fashion. Similarly, a minimum level of inner growth is a prerequisite for maintaining good health in all situations of life that require a capacity for achievement, love, and suffering, and can only be achieved by a movement of the spirit that transcends the self by listening to a call of meaning.

As illustrated in the figure, self-knowledge simply reveals the inner movements of the unity “human”, while dealing with oneself begins external movements that lead across the threshold of the self. What does this mean in practice for psychotherapy? Well, it stakes out the poles between which the idea of logotherapy catches fire.

“A humane, a humanised, a rehumanised psychotherapy presupposes that we have self-transcendence in our sights and master the art of self-distancing.”²¹

On the “self-distancing” pole

In logotherapy, the therapist senses self-healing powers, such as courage, defiance, humour or gratitude, possessed by the patient and focuses on strengthening them. The therapist works in alliance with the patient’s intact spiritual abilities and uses them to combat the patient’s psychic weaknesses. It is interesting to note that after millennia of research, modern medicine has arrived at similar conclusions and is increasingly trying to activate the immune systems of sick people against disease. Perhaps logotherapy can cut short the analogous research process in psychotherapy, since from the beginning it has methodically worked out the little stimuli that are indispensable for the mobilisation of spiritual self-healing powers.

On the “self-transcendence” pole

In logotherapy, the therapist helps the patient to stand above things – and, if necessary, above him or herself. This is only possible if the patient turns away from things – and necessarily away from him or herself – towards a meaning to be fulfilled in the world. It is amazing what – normally hidden – reserves of power exist in a human being and suddenly open their floodgates when such a meaning comes to light. And it is no less amazing how many unimportant problems are solved when they are not sustained by receiving attention.

Thus, in a patient-therapist relationship in logotherapy, the external world is always included as a third frame of reference. This means that after establishing an atmosphere of personal trust (a) the patient’s attention is drawn to values in the sphere of his or her life (b). As soon as the condition of the patient allows, the therapist follows his or her thoughts (c), which pre-empts any transfer problem from the outset and substantially facilitates the patient’s subsequent withdrawal from therapy.

Dealing with oneself – which therefore consists not only in healing oneself, but also in forgetting oneself in a positive way – often produces a kind of self-discovery as a by-product; as paradoxical as it sounds, self-discovery never springs from self-knowledge. Selfdiscovery can only be achieved indirectly through a discovery of meaning. If one looks for oneself, tries to catch a glimpse of one’s image in all the artful mirrors of psychology, one loses oneself. But if one goes out and devotes oneself to a meaningful task, one finds oneself.

¹ Viktor E. Frankl, Der Wille zum Sinn, Hogrefe Verlag, Bern, 7th ed., 2016, 17.

² Viktor E. Frankl, The Will to Meaning, Foundations and Applications of Logotherapy, Meridian/Penguin Group, New York, 1988, 16.

³ Viktor E. Frankl, Der Wille zum Sinn, Hogrefe Verlag, Bern, 7th ed., 2016, 23f.

⁴ Das Leiden am sinnlosen Leben, Psychotherapie für heute, Kreuz Verlag, Freiburg im Breisgau, 2013, 33f.

⁵ Viktor E. Frankl, Logotherapie und Existenzanalyse, Beltz Verlag, Weinheim und Basel, 2010, 3rd ed., 59f.

⁶ Viktor E. Frankl, Logotherapie und Existenzanalyse, Beltz Verlag, Weinheim und Basel, 2010, 3rd ed., 65f.

⁷ Viktor E. Frankl, Der Wille zum Sinn, Hogrefe Verlag, Bern, 7th ed., 2016, 92f.

⁸ Viktor E. Frankl, Der leidende Mensch, Verlag Hans Huber, Bern, 2005, 3rd ed., 141.

⁹ Viktor E. Frankl, Der leidende Mensch, Verlag Hans Huber, Bern, 2005, 3rd ed., 197.

¹⁰ Das Leiden am sinnlosen Leben, Kreuz Verlag, Freiburg im Breisgau, 2013, 30.

¹¹ Viktor E. Frankl, Der Wille zum Sinn, Hogrefe Verlag, Bern, 7th ed., 2016, 88.

¹² Viktor E. Frankl, Ärztliche Seelsorge, dtv, München, 2007, 7th ed., 58.

¹³ Viktor E. Frankl, Gesammelte Werke Band 3, Die Psychotherapie in der Praxis, Böhlau Verlag, Wien, Köln, Weimar, 2008, 34f.

¹⁴ Viktor E. Frankl, Der leidende Mensch, Verlag Hans Huber, Bern, 2005, 3rd ed., 163.

¹⁵ See Viktor E. Frankl, Gesammelte Werke Band 3, Die Psychotherapie in der Praxis, Böhlau Verlag, Wien, Köln, Weimar, 2008, 30.

¹⁶ Albert Goerres, Kennt die Psychologie den Menschen? Piper, München 1978, 33.

¹⁷ The words "character" [German: “Charakter”] and “personality” [German: Persönlichkeit] are used by Frankl in a special way that almost reverses their normal meanings. “Character” refers to the aspects of personality which can be attributed to genes, to upbringing, to natural disposition. “Personality”, on the other hand, is what a person has made of these elements, it is the completely unique quality of personhood that has been shaped by that person’s own choices.

¹⁸ Viktor E. Frankl, Der leidende Mensch, Verlag Hans Huber, Bern, 2005, 3rd ed., 204.

¹⁹ Viktor E. Frankl, … trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen, Kösel Verlag, München, 2018, 130f.

²⁰ Viktor E. Frankl, Der leidende Mensch,Verlag Hans Huber, Bern, 2005, 3rd ed., 144.

²¹ Viktor E. Frankl, Gesammelte Werke Band 3, Die Psychotherapie in der Praxis, Böhlau Verlag, Wien, Köln, Weimar, 2008, 54.