Logotherapy. Elisabeth Lukas
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
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