Logotherapy. Elisabeth Lukas
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
Psychologism
Reductionism
Collectivism
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