Logotherapy. Elisabeth Lukas
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