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
We have explored the noo-psychic antagonism by looking at three of its aspects: the dialectic of fate and freedom, the dialectic of vulnerability and intactness, and the dialectic of pleasure and meaning orientation. There is a fourth feature inherent in the logotherapeutic concept of the human being, namely the dialectic of character and personality. This is about the personal aspect of the human spirit. Two human beings can have the same character, but they are never the same; they are always unique, irreplaceable individuals. Even in a community, partnership, or peer group, every individual retains his or her individuality, and when this is given up, as is the case with certain infamous crowd phenomena, the individual temporarily shuts down his or her spirituality and humanity. Frankl defined a crowd as a “sum of depersonalised beings”.
A (psychic) character is a “created being”. It corresponds to a psychological type, a race, a mentality, it is inherited and shaped by the environment. In contrast, a (spiritual) person is a “creating being”. It engages with character, with its faculties and its suggestibility. In logotherapy, the beloved phrase: “One does not have to put up with everything about oneself” is actually a core statement about personal points of view.
“It is not only heredity and environment which make a man. A man also makes something of himself: “the man” (the person) “from himself” (from his character). Thus, following Allers’ formulation: man “has” a character, but he “is” a person – and one can add, he “becomes a personality”. Inasmuch as the person who “is” engages with the character that he “has”, taking a position towards it, he transforms it and himself, and “becomes” a personality.”18
People with identical genes can, under very similar environmental conditions, end up with very different ways of life, as we know from research into twins, which always makes clear that a common inheritance and experiential background produces both similarities and differences. I myself have known a gypsy family about which records have been kept for three generations in the files of a charitable organization in Munich. One can see from the files that nine children were born between 1945 and 1955, and they all grew up under the same pressure in the same criminal family milieu, being trained to steal from a young age. If any of the children returned home in the afternoon or in the evening without “loot”, there were beaten.
Of these nine children, one grew up to be a decent man. As an adult, he has never been in trouble with the law, he has learned a proper profession, and he has started a family that lives peacefully and respectably. This one man disproves all the theories of developmental psychology. No one should blame the eight other children of the gypsy family who struggled through life as adults as best they could; they had a really heavy burden to bear. But one feels the greatest respect for the ninth.
In the course of my educational counseling, I have repeatedly met children who have had lovingly caring parents but nevertheless developed badly. There is everything in every person, angel and devil. The human is the being who builds murderous rockets, and at the same time the being who protests against this; the being who hunts seals to extinction, and at the same time the being
