The Will to Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

Author:Viktor E. Frankl [Frankl, Viktor E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101664025
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2014-06-23T16:00:00+00:00

Logotherapeutic Techniques

In cases of noogenic neurosis, logotherapy is a specific therapy. In other words, what a patient caught in the existential despair over the apparent meaninglessness of his life needs is logotherapy rather than psychotherapy. This, however, is not true of the psychogenic neuroses. Here logotherapy cannot be opposed to psychotherapy but itself represents one among the schools of psychotherapy.

Let us now discuss how logotherapy may be applied in psychogenic cases, although an adequate introduction to its clinical applications must be based on case material and should presuppose a hospital setting. As compared with training through case presentations and discussions, even training analyses are relatively unimportant.

The clinical applications of logotherapy really follow from its anthropological implications. The logotherapeutic techniques called dereflection and paradoxical intention both rest on two essential qualities of human existence, namely, man’s capacities of self-transcendence and self-detachment.1

When discussing the motivational theory of logotherapy I pointed out that the direct intention of pleasure defeats itself. The more an individual aims at pleasure the more he misses the aim. In logotherapy we speak in this context of hyperintention. Along with this pathogenic phenomenon we may observe another one, which in logotherapy is called hyperreflection. Hyperreflection means excessive attention.

There is also a phenomenon that may justifiably be called mass hyperreflection. It is particularly observable within the culture of the United States where many people are intent always to watch themselves, to analyze themselves as to the alleged hidden motivations of their behavior, to interpret this behavior in terms of the unconscious psychodynamics underlying it. Professor Edith Weisskopf-Joelson of the University of Georgia has found that among American students self-interpretation and, next to it, self-actualization are regarded as the highest values—statistically significantly higher than any others. Growing up in such a climate, people are often haunted by a fatalistic expectation of the crippling effects of their pasts so they actually become crippled. A reader of one of my books once wrote a letter to me and made the following confession: “I have suffered more from the thought that I should have complexes than from actually having them. Actually, I wouldn’t trade my experiences for anything and believe a lot of good came out of them.”

Spontaneity and activity are impeded if made a target of too much attention. Consider the centipede who, as a story has it, was asked by his enemy in what sequence he moved his legs. When the centipede paid attention to the problem, he was unable to move his legs at all. He is said to have died from starvation. Should we say that he died from fatal hyperreflection?

In logotherapy hyperreflection is counteracted by dereflection. One of those domains in which this technique is applied is that of sexual neuroses, whether frigidity or impotence. Sexual performance or experience is strangled to the extent to which it is made either an object of attention or an objective of intention.2 In cases of impotence, the patient frequently approaches sexual intercourse as something which is demanded of him. I have elaborated on this aspect of the etiology of impotence elsewhere.

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