Logotherapy. Elisabeth Lukas

      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.