Logotherapy. Elisabeth Lukas
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
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