dimension. Thanks to it, human beings can defy their fate, dissociate themselves from their inner states, resist their external circumstances or accept their limitations heroically. On the psychological level, such freedom does not really exist: nobody can choose his or her condition. Anxiety, feelings of anger and instinctual drives are not selectable, conditioning cannot be annulled, social formation cannot be shaken off, limitations of ability cannot be lifted. Reducing the spiritual to the psychic, as pan-determinism does, deprives human beings (at least theoretically) of individual responsibility and delivers them to fate.
What does all this mean for practical psychotherapy? Simply: if we admit that even a psychically disturbed human being has spiritual freedom, we must also respect that human being. A patient shares responsibility for his or her own healing – to the extent that the spiritual dimension is still “open” – and also has the freedom to destroy his or her life. Ultimately, healing is not “do-able”; it can only be promoted, and relies on the self-healing powers of the body and the psyche, and the willingness of the spirit to be healed. Therefore, one of the basic rules of logotherapy is:
One should offer help,but not take away responsibility!
Unfortunately, psychotherapy often works the other way around, because a therapist strictly avoids giving instructions or disappears behind an impenetrable wall of non-comment. On the other hand, too much responsibility is taken away from the patient, in that all internal and external difficulties are traced back to conflicts initiated by others, and this makes the patient a helpless victim. In logotherapy, concrete help is offered, but responsibility remains with the patient.
Conscience, the “Organ of Meaning”
We have illustrated the noo-psychic antagonism by means of the dialectic between fate and freedom. Here the psychic “determinateness” of the human, everything which is fated, stands against the spiritual “indeterminateness”, everything which is free. We contrasted what is psychically imposed with what can be chosen by the spirit. From the resulting freedom (not from, but for something), we deduced the basic responsibility of the human and the possibility of guilt. But this does not end the chain of logical consequences. For, as freedom presupposes choice, a more or less meaningful choice presupposes the recognition of meaningful and not meaningful, and to ensure this recognition a special “organ” is needed in the human organism: the conscience.
“Meaning not only must but can be found, and human conscience is the guide in the search for it. In a word, the conscience is a meaning organ. It could be defined as the ability to perceive the unique and one-off meaning hidden in every situation.”10
What conscience reveals to humans is a trans-subjective meaning, which applies to values in the world, their preservation and multiplication, and not subjective meaning in the service of individual need satisfaction. It would be very dangerous to restrict the decisions of conscience to the perception of what seems “subjectively meaningful ”. This would mean that a terrorist could claim that it seemed meaningful to him to plant bombs. But this sort of “meaning for him” is not what is meant. Rather, it is a matter of “meaning in itself”, the meaningfulness which arises from the thing and the situation. It is fits into someone’s plans. Of course, many questions arise when assessing a situation and mistakes cannot be excluded. Anything human can be mistaken. Nevertheless, an orientation towards objective meaningfulness is the best measure we have for the decisions of conscience.
For a closer understanding of how something as subjective as conscience can sense something as objective as the “meaning of a situation”, consider the analogy of a compass: North is the objectively most meaningful thing that corresponds to the life situation of a person. The compass is the spiritual organ belonging to this human being that receives the “call to the individual”. And the compass needle is the “indicator” of conscience, which points to the individual’s concrete task. This means that the consciences of two people who are in exactly the same position would have to indicate the same thing if neither of them were mistaken. This is, of course, only a fictitious consideration, because two life situations are never identical, neither in the course of a single life, nor when comparing several people. This is why Frankl described the meaning which is to be found as “unique and one-off”.
Now the conscience can be mistaken, which can be symbolised by a fluctuating compass needle that does not point north. But human beings remain free to act against their conscience, metaphorically, to march south with a working compass in hand. Inner freedom on the noetic level is also freedom to act against conscience (although it is no freedom with respect to the indications of conscience). Probably this sort of “marching south” is much more common than a faulty indication of conscience itself, and it has bitter consequences: “north” gets ever further away! From psychotherapeutic practice, we know how many spiritual disorders can be traced back to not being in harmony with one’s own conscience, to a life led against one’s better self.
For a long time, the conscience was identified by psychology with the “superego”, and according to Frankl this is not permissible. As defined by Freud, the superego is the set of handed-down norms and customs, that is, the moral consciousness of tradition, which has been inculcated in us by parents, teachers, church and state authorities. The conscience, on the other hand, is an understanding of values that precedes all morals, which each of us intuitively carries within ourselves. It is the ethical feeling, unconscious of its origins, which belongs to our existential “basic equipment”. If a criminal claimed to have a poorly developed conscience, one would have to contend that his or her superego might be poorly developed, but that his or her conscience “speaks” just like that of other people.
In a human being the superego normally coincides with the voice of conscience. A theft, for example, is contrary to the morals of society and is also rejected by the conscience as an “unsocial act”. However, one can conceive of situations in which someone’s personal conscience could advocate theft as “meaningful”, for example to save children from starvation. To use a metaphor again, one could say that the superego is like the traffic rule we learn to stop at a red traffic light and go through a green one. If the road to be crossed is empty, personal conscience certainly has no objection to driving through the traffic light even if it is red. If, however, an old, visually impaired man starts to cross the road, conscience will forbid one to go through the light even when it is green. We see that the conscience is oriented to the meaning of the particular situation, the superego to established and handed down laws.
Frankl put forward an interesting thesis that breaks with tradition in the history of mankind are often due to an increasing gap between the superego and the consciences of a large number of people. One of the examples cited is slavery, which was “blessed” by popular opinion for centuries. Nevertheless, there was an ever-growing discomfort with it on conscientious grounds, until one day this discomfort became manifest and found its final expression in the abolition of slavery. We might currently be at the point of a similar break with tradition with respect to another longstanding norm of the superego: the defence of the fatherland. The importance of protecting native territory is deeply rooted in human beings, both biologically and sociologically. Nevertheless, at the end of the twentieth century modern weapons, which respect no borders, evoked a new worldwide uneasiness that conflicts with this traditional super egotistical norm. Many began – and continue – to question, whether it wouldn’t be more meaningful in the age of nuclear weapons to make the fatherland defenceless than to continue to accumulate weapons …?
In the context of psychotherapy the problem of the superego is clearly recognisable and can be distinguished from the real considerations of conscience. A patient who is tormented by what “people” think is listening to his or her superego. One who struggles in the decision-making process about the meaningfulness of a thing is communicating with his or her conscience.
The Dialectic of Vulnerability
