“So what is a human being? A being who always decides what he or she is. The being who invented gas chambers; but at the same time the being who has entered the gas chambers, upright, with a prayer on the lips.”19
The relationship between freedom and personality can be expressed as Frankl’s equation:
Freedom from character = freedom for personality
The spiritual freedom of a human being includes an ability to step back from one’s own inclinations, conditioning and character traits. This is the basis for the human capacity for self-distancing, which, like the capacity for self-transcendence, is harnessed by logotherapy for healing purposes. Since this capacity for self-distancing is a fundamental anthropological phenomenon existing at the noetic level of the human being, which cannot itself become sick, the following separation scheme naturally presents itself for psychotherapy: a separation between the sick part of a patient’s psyche and the healthy part of the patient’s psyche, including his or her (not sick) spirituality – the “intact” part.
Patient
“intact” part sick part
| Definition: “intact” part = the healthy part of the psyche together with the part of the spirit that cannot become sick. | Sick part = the sick of the psyche |
The central concern of logotherapy is to strengthen the patient’s “intact” part, and to use the powers concentrated there to deal properly with the sick part.
In the diagram the therapeutic extension of the “intact” area is represented by the curved line extending into the sick area. One might argue that it makes no difference whether one occupies oneself primarily with the sick part of a person and tries to reduce it, as psychotherapy has generally attempted to do, or whether one attempts to extend the “intact” area of a human being as logotherapy does. In fact, it is not the same at all. In the one case, the therapist “looks” for the patient in the sick area, in the other case in the healthy area.
Anyone who is familiar with the therapeutic profession knows how much the charisma of a therapist is able to set in motion in a patient. What the therapist thinks and feels flows into patient’s thoughts and feelings in the interaction process and changes them. Thus when therapists and life coaches keep their sights on the essential freedom, the fundamental intactness of the human spirit, the meaning orientation and the unique personality of every individual, in addition to the part of a sick person, that is still healthy, in spite of all psychic disorders and confusions, then sooner or later we will have patients who are no longer completely at the mercy of their disorders and confusions, because they sense (through the charisma of their therapists) that human beings can be self-determining like no other creature, every day newly decide what they will be the next day, and that even the most severe illnesses, which admittedly have a fateful aspect, can only cripple one part of them, but can never destroy their dignity. If patients are able to recognise this, they have already taken a huge step towards health.
There is one last danger to mention: collectivism. Its dangers hardly need to be explained, when one thinks about some of the crudest collectivist judgments such as: “All redheads have tempers” or “All blondes are dumb”. In statements like this, assessments and forecasts about people are made solely on the basis of their race or character. The collectivist thinker is too comfortable to examine the personality of the person concerned. Such a person forgets that genetic heritage constitutionally and dispositionally pre-forms the psychophysical element of the human being, but ultimately everything depends on what the person concerned does or does not make out of these resources. Since this is a personal act of self-determination that cannot be derived from belonging to any type or race, but rather derives from the nous, the collectivist assessment is invalid: human beings are not predictable, calculable, or even evaluable on the basis of character.
Collectivism is also dangerous with regard to self-assessment. It is a prominent error, indeed, perhaps the error of the neurotic, to believe that he or she has a predetermined character, and cannot behave in opposition to this character. It is only this error that makes psychic disorders possible, not any neurotic disposition of character!
“Whenever a neurotic speaks of his or her self or personal way of being, he or she tends to imply that this way of being could not be otherwise. The identification of a character trait automatically becomes a stipulation. The neurotic thinks that having this character trait is just the way it is, and there is no possibility of being any other way …
Yet the neurotic person is not only concerned with his or her own individual character, with the id, but also with something beyond individuality, something collective within the self – the “person” that is active in and through the self … In this context it must appear to us as extremely questionable when we perceive that these days people are generally inclined to refer in all sorts of ways to the characteristics of any group (class or race) to which they belong. This apparent self-justification is facilitated by constant reminders of how much they are dependent on any collective and influenced by it in a spiritual sense.”20
Collectivism, in its various forms, is a perfect example of the ways of thinking that arise when spiritual matters are derived from, or traced back to, psychic ones.
To end this sad chapter, I want to finish the enumeration of psychological “dead ends” with an example that illustrates all of the previously mentioned dangers of impermissible projections. The starting point of our considerations is a mother who bears an unwanted child.
Pan-determinism would claim that rejection of the child by the mother inevitably leads to a mother-child relationship that is destroyed for life (“programming”).
Psychologism would claim that the unwanted pregnancy was a result of the neurotic impulses and complexes of the mother (“unmasking”).
Reductionism would claim that the entire future upbringing of the child by the mother will be an expression of her unconscious hatred towards the child (“devaluation”).
Collectivism would claim that in later life the child will exhibit the characteristics and behavior of all “typical unloved children” (“classification”).
What would logotherapy say about this case? It would argue that everything is still possible for mother and child. That both can grow into love for one another, and that the mother, with her intact spiritual dimension, has the freedom to change her attitude to the child and accept its existence as a meaningful task. As a task that she is responsible for fulfiling, and in the fulfilment of which her personality will mature into something new.
Self-knowledge and Dealing with Oneself
The expression “dealing with oneself” has been used in connection with deriving the human capacity for self-distancing from the noopsychic antagonism. This expression refers to an important pedagogical-therapeutic goal of logotherapy. This goal is more highly valued than the goal of self-knowledge. For adequate self-knowledge can never remain an end in itself, but is a transitional stage on a path which leads beyond the self. By calling for setting goals beyond the self, logotherapy becomes a school for living which breaks out of the narrower space of psychotherapy and merges with an education in responsibility.
Self-knowledge reveals the process of self-becoming, unconscious drives, formation in fixed ways and, of course, also the deliberate input of the person from past epochs. Dealing with oneself unlocks the self’s
