of the late nineteenth century, a period in which people (especially in the European cultural environment) had a feeling of being at the mercy of fate. Many discoveries were being made, which increased this sense of dependency and “smallness”. Advances in astronomy had revealed the vastness of the cosmos, which made the earth seem like an irrelevant grain of sand. Insights into the relations between societal structures and socioeconomic conditions had made the individual seem like a tiny cog in an unstoppable machine. The rapid development of technology further exacerbated this feeling of fatality; there emerged robotic models of thought, with which people identified themselves. They saw themselves as “programmed”, controlled by automatically stored influences.
Existential philosophy developed as a counter-movement, but it split into two camps: one more life-affirming and one more sceptical. It saw humans as beings “thrown into life”, who must find their own essence for themselves, but who can, so to speak, recapture the principle of action. Logotherapy has its theoretical roots here, especially in the life-affirming form of existential philosophy.
Amongst the pioneers of psychotherapy, Frankl was the first to reaffirm the element of human spiritual freedom, which, of course, is not freedom “from” something, from outside influences, but a freedom “for” something, namely a freedom to put outside influences in their place: to affirm them, to deny them, to follow them, or to resist them.
“We in no way deny the life and world of human drives. We deny neither the external world, nor the inner world; … What we emphasise, however, is the fact that a human as a spiritual being is not only confronted with the world – the external world as well as the inner world – but also takes a position with respect to it, can always respond to the world with some “attitude” or “behaviour”, and this position is a free one. A human being takes a position at every moment of existence, both to the natural and social environment, to the external milieu, as well as to the vital psychophysical inner world, to the inner milieu.”8
Let us consider the logotherapeutic concept of freedom by looking at three examples.
1. Example: anxiety
Anxiety – with the exception of loving care for someone or something valuable in the world – is an unpleasant mental feeling of being threatened. It “sits” in the second dimension and is closely linked to physical symptoms such as heart palpitations, pallor, or tremors in the first, somatic, dimension. Because it sits or appears there, there is no choice about it at the time of its appearance, and this means that it is “fate”. The causes of anxiety may or may not have been possible to avoid, but the feeling of anxiety cannot easily be ignored when it has crept up in a human being.
On the other hand, the decision about how to react to this anxiety lies in the third, spiritual, dimension: whether one takes it seriously or whether one ignores it, whether one runs away because of it or persists in a situation in spite of it. Here there is something about which a choice can be made, here there is some freedom. So we see that we are not free from fear, but free despite fear …
2. Example: a bad childhood
People who have suffered an unhappy childhood are not free from its effects, but they are free to adopt different positions towards it. Some parents say: “I was beaten when I was growing up, so beating is in me. If I get angry, I’ll beat my children too!” Other parents say, “Because I was beaten as a child, I want to make things better for my children. That’s why I do not beat them!”
Upbringing undoubtedly has a powerful influence, but not an allpowerful one. With a certain degree of maturity, every human being is free to educate him or herself. The act of self-education is then less and less dependent on “the will of the parents”, rather than on an “ought that should be experienced by the individual as his or her own” (Frankl).
3. Example: instinctive actions
An animal cannot act against its instincts. If it is hungry and sees food, it “must” pounce on it and devour it. A person, on the other hand, can be hungry (– fate), and still give the last piece of bread which he or she still possesses to a comrade who might need it more urgently (– freedom). In the first, somatic, dimension, the stomach will growl and the sinking blood glucose level will cause discomfort. In the second, psychic, dimension, the desire for bread and fantasies about food will cause torments. This is the “psychophysical parallelism” mentioned by Frankl, in which the first two levels are interwoven. But in the third, noetic dimension, a person separates him or herself from the fact of hunger, and decides – if this is what he or she wants for any meaningful reason – to overrule the inner psychophysical pressure.
Humans thereby prove themselves able to respond to the conditions of fate in freedom, and, in doing so, they are responsible for their response. The non-deterministic outlook of logotherapy implies the re-admission of responsibility and possible guilt in the psychotherapeutic concept of the human being.
Where there are no choices at a given time, there can be no guilt. Since we have no ability, for example, to change our past, we cannot be guilty towards it. (This says nothing about whether we were guilty in the past, at the time when we could still make choices about it.) On the other hand, when we have choices, we are responsible for the choice made. And it may happen that a bad, a wrong choice is made. The terms “good or bad” or “right or wrong” are difficult to define, which is why they are replaced in logotherapy by the words “more or less meaningful”. In other words they are measured according to the concrete meaning of the corresponding life situation. Guilt is then: choosing against meaning.
“Humanity has developed a maximum of consciousness – of knowledge, of science – and a maximum of responsibility; but at the same time it has developed a minimal sense of responsibility. The man of today knows much more than ever, and is also responsible for many things - for more than ever; but what he knows less about than ever, is his responsibility.”9
According to a logotherapeutic outlook, fate never fully explains a person’s behaviour, for a human is not a victim, but a co-creator of his or her destiny. Logotherapy abhors the widespread “victim ideology” in psychology, and the tendency to provide psychological excuses by asserting human dependencies. To assert, for example, that a murderer had to murder because of terrible childhood circumstances or long-suppressed feelings of hatred, is too facile. This criticism on the part of logotherapy does not, of course, apply to cases in which there is limited responsibility as a result of psychosis. It applies to authentic cases such as the following: A 41-year-old Swede was released because of a supposedly severe mother complex after he strangled his wife and stabbed his two children. The court sent him to a psychiatric institution, where he was discharged as cured after a few months. He took the money from his wife’s life insurance and started a nice new life with his girlfriend, in which his wife and children would have been in the way.
Logotherapy asserts that a person can always take a position with respect to his or her childhood circumstances, feelings of hatred, mother complexes, etc., and decide what he or she makes of them; and that it is actually the worst “condemnation” to be denied this last room of manoeuvre and seen as a spiritually incapable marionette, a “homo-automaton”, a product of heredity and environment who is unalterably subservient to external conditions. It is precisely this statement that characterises pan-determinism, which commits the error of sparing nothing from deterministic interpretation. However, in fact, there are always still personal choices that are not defined, there always remains a small amount of unpredictability in human life.
Logotherapy has reversed the old deterministic question, which asks what determines a person’s feelings and actions, and asks where this ineliminable residue
