Viktor Frankl: existentialist and father of logotherapy
Background and development
Being a former student of Freud, Viktor Frankl has a psychoanalytic orientationhowever, he was influenced by the writing of existential philosophers like Heidegger, Scheler and Jaspers. Frankl begins to develop his own existential philosophy and therapeutic technique. To avoid confusion with Bingswanger’s existential analysis, Frankl coined the term Logotherapy. According to Frankl, logotherapy proceeds of the spiritual, while existential analysis proceeds toward the spiritual
Frankl’s first book was published in 1946 in German and translated into English in 1959, under the title From the field of death to existentialism. This book was later revised to include the basic concepts of Logotherapy, and redistributed in 1962, under the title The search for the meaning of man.
Philosophy and Concepts
Frankl believes that even under the extreme physical and psychological stress of the concentration camp, man can preserve his spiritual freedom of mental independence. You can decide what will become of him mentally and spiritually. It is this spiritual freedom that cannot be taken away. Furthermore, according to Frankl, if life has meaning, so does suffering, since suffering, like death, is an inescapable part of life.
The nature of the person
The individual is a unit consisting of three aspects: body, mind and spare. The first two are closely related and together they form the psychophysical Through the teachings of Freud, Adler, and Jung we have a functional understanding of mind and body, but we have neglected the spiritual side of the human dimension. Logotherapy focuses on this third dimension, the spiritual man. Spirituality is the main attribute of the individual, and from it derives consciousness, love and aesthetic awareness. The second characteristic of human existence is freedom. Being human is being able to decide. Man is free to decide what will be in the next instant. Freedom means freedom on three levels: the moment, the inherited disposition and the environment. True, the human being is influenced by all these factors, but they are free accept or reject and take a position against these conditions.
Man does not simply exist, he decides what his existence will be. Since man can rise above biological, psychological and sociological conditions, on which the predictions are based, are individually unpredictable. The third factor of individual existence is responsibility. The freedom of the individual is not only freedom of freedom of goal to something, and this according to Frankl, are the responsibilities of the individual. Logotherapy tries to make the client fully aware of his own responsibilities; they must decide for what, to what or to whom they understand to be responsible.
Motivation
The primary motivation of the individual is not the will to pleasure or the will to power, but the will to meaning. is this what most deeply inspired man, that is the most human phenomenon of all, since an animal certainly never cares about the meaning of its existence. The meaning is not invented by the human being, but discovered by the human being. Man gives meaning to his life by carrying out creative values, carrying out tasks. The human being realizes values by his attitudes toward desperate or inescapable suffering.
These are attitudinal values and the possibility of their realization exists until the last moment of life, so suffering has meaning. The will to signify is not a driving force in the psychodynamic sense. The values themselves do not drive a man, they do not push him, but they pull him. involve choices or decisions man is not led to moral behavior; in each case he decides to behave morally. He does it for a cause he is committed to, or for a person he loves, or for his God.
The existential void and existential frustration
This existential emptiness manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom. For example, him sunday neurosis the kind of depression that afflicts people who realize the emptiness in their lives once the hustle and bustle of the busy week ends and the emptiness inside kicks in. Existential frustrations is the frustration of the will to meaning. This frustration is sometimes vicariously compensated by a will to power or by the will to pleasure. Often, existential frustration results in sexual compensation. We can observe that the sexual libido becomes rampant in the existential vacuum.
Existential frustration is not pathological or pathogenic, not all conflict is necessarily neurotic, suffering is not always a pathological phenomenon. The search for meaning can lead to tension rather than balance, but every tension is not pathological, it is rather an indispensable prerequisite for mental health.
The nature of neuroses and psychoses
Although existential conflicts can exist without neuroses, all neuroses have an existential aspect. The neuroses are based on the four basically different dimensions of man’s being: the physical, the psychological, the social, and the existential or spiritual. For example, noegenic neuroses do not arise from conflicts between drives and instincts, but from conflicts between various values, in other words, from moral conflicts and spiritual problems.
Frankl believes that collective neurosis is characteristic of four symptoms: (1) modern man’s everyday attitude towards life, (2) man’s fatalistic attitude towards life, (3) man’s collective thinking, and the final symptom it is fanaticism. Ultimately, the four symptoms can be traced back to man’s fear of responsibility and his escape from freedom.