The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy

Many laypersons' eyes glaze over when confronted with terms such as Logotherapy, existentialism and the like. I urge them to dig into this text and they will find it rich with practical ideas and marvelous insights. The many excellent reviews about this book adequately summarize much of its contents. However, one must realize that Dr. Frankl's writings were largely philosophical. In fact, when a scientist writes about science, he or she is doing philosophy, not science. Frankl's perspective of man is vastly different from a materialistic scientists perspective. He sees man as responsible for the quality of his inner life, not totally malleable in the Freudian or Behaviorist point of view. This is critically important. And Frankl tells us why: "We can only be responsible to an entity higher than ourselves ... If we present man with a concept of man that is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, a mind-machine, a bundle of instincts, a pawn of drives and reactions, a mere product of heredity, and environment, we feed the nihilism to which, in any case, man is prone. "I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but a product of heredity and environment--or, as the Nazi liked to say, "Blood and Soil." I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers." A geyser of wisdom from a great mind that transcended the logic-tight barriers between disciplines, much in the spirit of his American contemporary, Abraham Maslow.

This is a wonderful book that describes the existentialist process and thoughts of a brilliant man. It is a very different school of thought than more recent schools of thought such as cognitive-behavioral psychology. Dr. Frankl discusses meaning of life, suffering, and how one choose one's attitude toward suffering to alleviate it. Of course, who could be a more experienced speaker of this message than Dr. Frankl who endured being in a concentration camp during World War II and was able to survive it through his choices of attitude towards his suffering. Dr. Frankl is clearly an existentialist who sees choice and personal responsibility as the center of the soul.

Some of the most important principles in my life can be found in Dr. Viktor Frankl's The Doctor and the Soul. Without them, I along with my efforts to do good in the world would be lost in cynicism and depression. The book is an answer to Ecclesiastes' refrain, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." The book is an answer of hope. I have pitied certain people to the point of questioning how they could endure life. I think of the boy whose alcoholic father had poured gasoline over him while he was sleeping. His face and over 90% of his body had been burned and melted. He no longer has ears, lips, or a nose. This nine year old boy has 50 or 60 more years to live among us. In this depressing context, Dr. Frankl's mission in life was to help others realize meaning in their lives no matter their condition. The fundamental premise behind Frankl's life work is that "whoever has a reason for living endures almost any mode of life - Nietzche" (p.54). One scene from Frankl's autobiography, Man's Search for Meaning, encapsulates this thought well. One night when his fellow prisoners of a concentration camp had received word that they would all be gassed the next day, the people looked to the Viennese psychiatrist for solace. He in turn was able to help each person discover personal reasons to endure which carried them through that dark night with hope and dignity. For example, Frankl helped one person overcome despair by reaffirming the man's fleeting hope that his suffering and death would somehow mean that his wife and family would be saved from such a fate. Instead of perceiving his situation as mere waste and tragedy, this man was enabled to convert his inescapable plight into a noble, heroic deed. To be human, says Frankl, is to be conscious of one's responsibility no matter the situation. What makes human existence always meaningful, even in a concentration camp or in a severely wrecked body from an accident, is at every moment in a person's life he or she is being asked to fulfill a task. "It is life itself that asks questions of man. It is not up to man to question; rather, he should recognize that he is questioned, questioned by life." (p. 62) Frankl emphasizes two primary and related guides for hearing the questions that life puts to us: conscience and regret. Frankl offers the leading maxim, "Live as you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now" (p.64). Frankl goes on, "Once an individual really puts himself into this imagined situation, he will instantaneously become conscious of the full gravity of the responsibility that every man bears throughout every moment of his life: the responsibility for what he will make of the next hour, for how he will shape the next day." (p.64-5) But isn't there some who simply cannot respond favorably to life's questions due to great catastrophe or suffering like the boy who was burned? This is where the implications of Frankl's thought reach their p

Frankl's logotherapy enables people to once again discover the quality of life. Frankl believes that the first two schools of Viennese psychotherapy (Freud and Adler), which he calls the depth psychology, must be complimented the logotherapy - the height psychology. His therapy explores man's future instead of his past. Summarizing the Freudian concept as the will to pleasure and the Adlerian concept as the will to power, Frankl points out that man's basic motivation in life is neither pleasure nor power. Each person lives to discover the meaning of life and thereby to fulfill it - the will to meaning. Life is too meaningful for man to comprehend: it is essentially incomprehensible because it lies on a higher realm than that of man's. During the World War 2, Frankl survived four concentration camps including Auschwitz. In the camps, most of the inmates despaired that if they did not survive the camp, there was no meaning in suffering. Frankl, on the other hand, believed that if there was no meaning in suffering, there was no point in surviving the camp. In other words, the meaning of life was either unconditional regardless of the situation one was facing, or it was none at all. In the camps, Frankl would console his inmates telling them, "Someone looks down on each of us in difficult hours ?a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead ?and he would not expect us to disappoint him. He would hope to find us suffering proudly ?not miserably ?knowing how to die.? He would explain to them that it was not them asking the meaning of life. It was life asking them the meaning, and they had to answer to it. What Frankl witnessed in the camps contradicted Freud's theory that if people were left without food for few days, their wants would be reduced to the common desire for food. While some inmates behaved according to their instincts, as Freud predicted, there were also others who lived up to this challenge. Frankl witnessed people who gave away their last piece of bread and others who organized religious activities, which resulted in execution if they were caught. One of logotherapy's techniques to help people discover values is to have them imagine their lives from their deathbeds and look back on them. During such exercises people often find that their current definition of success differs significantly from that on their deathbeds. They realize that they do not wish they had made more money, had more sex. It is interesting to note that virtually everyone points to relationship as their most cherished value. They wish that they had spent more time with people they care about. Logotherapy bases its therapy on the fact that man is a self-transcendent being. Psychotherapy which views man as a self-contained being is bound to fail. Frankl's favourite analogy regarding this matter is the eye. The function of the eye is to transcend itself: healthy eye does not see itself. The more it self-transcends, the more it actualizes itself. Onl

Adler thought all human motivation was based on the will to power, manifesting itself in men's desires to get rich and to exercise dominion and women's desire to marry such men. Freud thought all human motivation was based on the will to sex, that is to say the will to procreate the manifestations of which we see in our sex obsessed society. Frankl shows that the misplacement of these desires in the center of human life causes all of the psychological turmoil under which our society suffers. He shows that by putting (dare I say) God, and the purpose for which He created each individual at the center of human existence (the will to meaning), love (misunderstood as the will to sex) and creativity (misunderstood as the will to power)are put into a proper perspective. Frankl's treatise makes the insights of Adler and Freud useful to the religious individual who consider either of these great psychologists secular humanist riff-raff. More over it renders the endless the tangled web weaved by psychoanalysis unnecessary as it shows how understanding oneself as a purposeful being one can alleviate all the binding ties of compulsion, addiction, and irrational fear. INCREDIBLE.