LOGOTHERAPY (Spirit Wellness or Soul Health) is the existential or life-style approach for developing a life filled with meaning and significance in well functioning families, faith communities, companies and neighborhoods where we find a lasting sense of belonging among the good people with whom we share faith, hope and love.
Logotherapy is a world class psycho-spiritual system for winning a satisfying life for normal persons who apply pragmatic existential psychology and mystical philosophy in the best approach to living, loving, and leading well yet identified by the human race. It helps heal people suffering from mental illness, neuroticism or psychopathy but is more often useful for normal persons making their way through the high expectations and anxieties and joys and sorrows of everyday existence.
The spiritual values, positive attitudes, high expectations, mature beliefs and responsible choices that were to eventually be woven into Logotherapy, first appeared in Jesus’ Sermon On The Mount. These key aspects of Logotherapy offer brilliant solutions to life’s challenges that Mahatma Gandhi called the most meaningful discourse about living with satisfaction and joy ever conceived by any scholar. The very fact that world class scholars are still praising these constructs two thousand years after a wandering rabbi and field preacher first uttered them in a primitive land to simple farmers and shepherds – verifies their world class worth. Logotherapy does indeed strike a resounding cord in contemporary minds and hearts for millions of normal souls. Through the last half century Logotherapy has become the action arm of existential psychology -- although it goes much further in serving thoughtful persons than psychology alone.
Those initial concepts that lead ordinary women and men through increasing knowledge and wisdom with purposefulness and generosity for the health of their souls, were next elaborated on by St. John the Beloved, Paul the Apostle, the Buddha, Lao Tsu, Soren Kierkegaard and more recent life-style scholars that included Otto Rank, Carl Rogers, Ernest Becker and others. However, it remained for Viktor Frankl, the brilliant successor to Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler as leader of the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy, to break with tradition to systematize this very powerful approach to fulfillment, Frankl combined life-style (existential) psychological knowledge with philosophical wisdom into a unified psycho-spiritual whole that keeps lives and souls normal.
He learned that after we meet our clamoring physical needs – after a society becomes affluent and comfortable, men and women absolutely must open sources of meaning or become frustrated with their lives. Unfortunately, we humans who developed in a slow paced society that seemed changeless -- have now invented a tumultuous civilization that makes it difficult to find consistent stability and peace. Our fast changing society often forces us to adapt too swiftly for many souls to remain comfortable. We no sooner find stability than life’s demands shift once more and we are forced to find new and often painful ways to get comfortable again. For -- while we humans usually claim to enjoy changes, we resist new relationships and attitudes unless the rewards are obviously and immediately useful to ourselves.
Multitudes of completely normal persons complain of days, weeks and years of boredom at meaningless jobs that are inter-spaced with times of stark terror as society makes U Turns and frustrates them. Masses of unhappy souls report being lost in the mind-numbing routines of life until they want to scream --
Is this all there is to life, to my precious life -- that is passing like sand through an hour glass.
When do I fulfill the high expectations of my brilliant youth? Then too, a great many secular values and attitudes limit our joy and satisfaction because we humans first, last and always have a broad streak of mysticism at the core of our souls. And our metaphysical needs must be satisfied or life remains incomplete. Every civilization that left its footprints on earth arose around a religion or a philosophy that explained the meaning of their existence and offered a modicum of psycho-spiritual security. They always knew that for life to be consistently meaningful it had to include more than eating and drinking, copulating, defecating and boasting.
And when empires became so secular that they eventually faltered as did Rome, Babylon, Persia, Britain and all the rest –- they fell because their vested secular interests brought then down. Most of the crumbling societies created pseudo religions such as Communism, Fascism, and Capitalism with selfish ideologies and greedy practices that were used unsuccessfully to meet the metaphysical needs of humankind. Precisely as occurred in America during the 2007 to 2010 financial disaster caused by secular greed. We humans cannot find lasting satisfaction through possessions, power, prestige and pleasure alone. We must develop an abiding sense of purpose that sustains our positive attitudes and activities or we burn out and turn to self-defeating choices.
Logotherapy became so valuable that some fifteen million copies of Frankl’s paperback book MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING were devoured intellectually by men and women in a few years as it was translated into thirty-four languages. Viktor then wrote thirty more, powerful books about life, love, labor and leadership that taught many more millions of women and men the spirit wellness methods that can keep life meaningful and satisfactory. Finally, Professor Jard DeVille, who cheerfully admits to being the dwarf seated on his mentor’s giant shoulders, can occasionally see further along the path of knowledge than Viktor could. Therefore, in his twenty graduate volumes and courses about Logotherapy, DeVille integrates Frankl’s crucial need for meaning with the humanly essential need to belong that leads to the following equation.
LOGOTHERAPY = f (Personal Meaning x Communal Belonging)
Even psycho-spiritually maturing men and women must find ways to live, love, labor and lead others - by building on the crucial choices that make life meaningful and significant in places blessed by human hearts where we share faith, hope and love.
And any thoughtless approach that draws from time expired assumptions, worn out traditions and self-defeating ideologies leads to the complaint -- Too soon we get old and too late we get smart.
Katherine Hendricks, who became a successful mining company executive, lamented after a FRONTIERS OF FULFILLMENT seminar at the University of Arizona.
We paraphrase --
I seem to be working sixty hour weeks only to pay for the house and the Mercedes while my family falls apart. I sometime feel I’m going mad because I’ve won everything I’ve ever wanted and it isn’t enough to keep me happy. And I cannot even tell my therapist what has gone wrong.
Multitudes of persons feel much as Catherine did but we are pleased to report that she and her husband brought some key Logotherapy constructs into their marriage and family and that effort saved their relationship. Most people admit that they suffer through three or four disappointments for every one period of joy. A great many graduates from Harvard, Southern Methodist and other great schools reported that life and careers have become painfully boring and much less satisfying than they had expected when they graduated twenty years earlier. A great many women and men dread the final twenty years before retirement after life has no new challenges. And multitudes of career workers wither away soon after retiring because they lost the purposes of life that sustained them. About half of all new marriages fail because of sexual or financial dis-satisfactions and many careers are sacrificed in self-defeating searches for success. With eighty percent of American women and men now saying that they feel frustrated because the nation has lost its way and fear they cannot recoup their former significance. Some existential scholars call this widespread existential frustration the mass neurosis of the twenty-first century – while Frankl called it the existential vacuum of modern industrial life. We also call it psycho-spiritual bankruptcy. We all must find avenues of fulfillment as did one elderly nanny who sorrowfully counseled with Frankl because she felt that her life had been wasted.
Anna -- I’m so discouraged because my life is over. I reared another family’s children and grandchildren and had none of my own. And now they are all grown and although the family takes good care of me, no one needs me any longer. I get so discouraged that I could cry.
Frankl – You feel that your life was wasted? That you caused the children to turn out badly?
Anna -- Oh no! They’ve done well. One boy is a professor and another is a sea captain with his own ship. And the girls have dress shops all over France and Italy. They’ve all succeeded.
Frankl -- But they’ve forgotten you? Is that it?
Anna -- Not that either. When they come home at Christmas or on holiday, they always visit with me. We talk about the old days and they give me presents and some money and we go on rides with their children and dine out together. They are always generous and kind to me.
Frankl -- Anna! Anna! You have it all wrong. You should take pride from having cared for those children. You life wasn’t wasted. It was invested! Your love is still being reflected by the new generation for their own children. You taught two generations generosity and love. And as far as being useless… go to your rabbi and ask to help with the babies in the nursery during Sabbath and volunteer to help neighborhood mothers. You are needed in an avocation.
Anna -- (After a long pause) Why, Doctor Frankl, I see that you are right. My life isn’t over rafter all. Children will still care for me. (She thanked him, found places in which to use her skills as a volunteer and never returned with another lament.)
Logotherapy is neither psychotherapy nor the use of psychotropic medication because it opens consistent avenues of fulfillment for normal men and women in a complex and often painful society through spirit wellness or soul health. Logotherapy offers consistent satisfaction and times of great joy to men and women of all ages and conditions in virtually every aspect of life. Logotherapy can teach you how to –
LIVE - CONSISTENTLY ACCORDING TO SOUND PSYCHO-SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLES,
LOVE - DEEPLY ENOUGH TO MANAGE INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS WELL,
LABOR - BY SHARING THE REWARDS OF ACHIEVEMENT WITH YOUR HELPERS,
LEAD - WISELY ENOUGH TO CREATE A GREAT COMMUNITY OF ACHIEVERS.
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