Logotherapy. Elisabeth Lukas

      Because logotherapy focuses primarily on the noetic dimension, Frankl used the formulation: “Logotherapy is a psychotherapy from the spiritual and towards the spiritual.” In this respect, it stands out from the other schools of psychotherapy, which focus more on the psychic dimension, dedicating themselves to the elucidation of buried drives or of human learning and developmental history. The results, particularly those which have been verified experimentally, are by no means questioned by logotherapy, but they are identified as localised on a two-dimensional plane. Frankl’s contribution was to integrate the uniquely human aspects of being human into conventional psychotherapy, which until then had literally been “spiritless” psychotherapy.

      “In this three-dimensional schema, it is now apparent from the three-dimensionality of the human being that the uniquely human can only appear when we venture into the spiritual dimension. A human is only visible as a human once we take this “third” dimension into consideration: only then do we see the human as such. While the vegetative life of man can be explained within the bodily dimension, and his animalistic life, if necessary, within the psychic dimension, human existence as such, personal spiritual existence does not fit into this two-dimensional “plane” of mere psychosomatics. Homo humanus can at most be projected onto this two-dimensional plane. In fact, the essence of what we call projection is that one dimension is sacrificed – that is, projected onto the nextlower dimension.

      Such a projection has two consequences: It leads to 1. ambiguity and 2. contradictions. In the first case the reason for this consequence is the following: different things are mapped onto the same thing by projection. In the second case, the reason is found in the following fact: one and the same thing maps onto different things in different projections.”⁶

      Psychotherapy with its many different approaches is not exactly lacking in ambiguities and contradictions … with reference to Frankl’s words, it can be assumed that it still suffers from the consequences of improper projections. The most human things in man, like value structures or the inborn desire for meaning, must not be lost in the jungle of psychological interpretations. Logotherapy endeavours to avoid this error by perceiving the spiritual as its own human dimension – the real one, if not the only one – and by investigating whether the influence of the spiritual on the other two dimensions can be used for therapeutic purposes. For this reason, it does not neglect the psychic-social and physical dimensions, but it sets itself the specific research goal of exploring the extent to which the spiritual forces in humans can be mobilised and it can look back on more than 70 years of research, from which some very important results have emerged. Where traditional psychology essentially uncovers ‘psychic dependencies’, logotherapy promotes ‘spiritual independence’, and where traditional psychotherapy analyses ‘neurotic arrangements’, logotherapy registers ‘existential commitment’. This is an extraordinary extension, an additional entry point, otherwise achieved only by pastoral care, which is, however, normally only available to a subset of people: believers with denominational affiliations.

      a) to remove spiritual frustrations,

      b) to correct mental disorders

      c) to alleviate (psycho)somatic suffering,

      It goes without saying that each patient must be helped at the level of existence in which his or her disorder is present. For this reason, at the somatic level, medication (including psychotropic drugs) or, if necessary, electric shock therapy is needed, and at the psychic level cathartic relief, behavioural therapy exercises, cognitive problemsolving strategies, and so on, and in the area of overlap between the physical and the psychic, relaxation techniques (autogenic training, yoga) and suggestive methods. However, to be properly equipped for holistic treatment also requires therapeutic methods that penetrate into the noetic dimension, and logotherapy, ideally combined with therapy operating at a sub-noetic level, fills this gap. This is quite apart from its excellent potential for being combined at its own level with pastoral care or with all forms of art (therapy) or with (promotion of) education.

      From the explanations so far, it is clear that it is important to distinguish the psychic and spiritual dimensions from one another and not to mix them together. (There is less confusion in this regard at the somatic dimension.) To acquire a deep knowledge of logotherapy, one has to incorporate into one’s thoughts the “noo-psychic antagonism”, which according to the theses of logotherapy characterises human existence. This is nothing less than the possibility of fruitful interaction between “psyche” and “spirit” within a person.

      “Man is a point of intersection, a crossroads of three levels of being: the physical, psychic, and spiritual. These level of being cannot be separated cleanly enough from one another. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to say that a human is a ‘sum’ of the physical, the psychic, and the spiritual: man is a unity and totality, but within this unity and totality, the spiritual ‘interacts’ with the physical and the psychic. This creates what I once called the noopsychic antagonism. While psychophysical parallelism is obligatory, noo-psychic antagonism is optional: it is always only a possibility, a mere power, but a power which can always be appealed to, and which has to be appealed to on the medical side: again and again it has to call upon the ‘defiant power of the spirit’, as I have called it, against the seemingly so powerful psychophysical reality.

      The noo-psychic antagonism thus states that the psychic dimension and the spiritual dimension of man are not just somehow juxtaposed, but have a relation with one another, and are sometimes even in opposition to one another. Therefore, in the following chapters the differentiation criteria for both levels should be examined carefully in order to make the enormous potential of their “antagonistic power” transparent for psychotherapy. These are the four distinguishing criteria: fate and freedom, vulnerability and integrity, pleasure orientation and meaning orientation, character and personality. Where they are not heeded, and instead all spiritual phenomena are traced back to psychic ones, which is equivalent to projecting the third dimension into the second dimension, it produces a distorted concept of the human being against which Frankl rightly warned. Specifically, there are four distorted concepts:

      Pan-determinism

      Psychologism

      Reductionism

      Collectivism

      These mistakes are to be excluded in logotherapeutic anthropology, because they are sins against the “spirit”, from which nothing good proceeds.

      The Dialectic of Fate and Freedom

      The scientific discipline of psychotherapy began at the beginning of the 20th century with the idea that childhood

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