SOURCE_DOCUMENTS/journal_008_2.txt

Volume 8, Number 2 Fall/Winter 1985 
CONTENTS 
Logotherapy Comes of Age: Birth of a Theory Patricia L. Starck .............................................71 
New Hope for People in Chronic Pain Michael F. Whiddon ..........................................76 
Logotherapcutic Enlightenment in Therapist and Client Wynand du Plessis .............................................82 
New Life through Logotherapy Barb Steidl ...................................................86 
Can Logotherapy Hdp Cancer Patients'! Elisabeth Jahoda ..............................................89 
Reduction of Depression in Relatives of Schizophrenic Clients James F. l.ant7 ...............................................94 
An M l\-1 Pl Existential Vacuum Scale for Logothcrapy Research Robert R. Hut7cll and Thomas J. Peterson .......................97 
Conscience in Logothcrapcutic Coumcling James D. Yoder ............................................. IOI 
Meaning in Life of Cancer Patients Receiving Ad_juvant Therapy Victor Florian ............................................... 109 
Index ........................................................ 122 
The Language of Psychotherapy 
Rudolf Ekstein 

Viktor Frankl and I grew up in the same district ofthe same city, Vienna. This was our common world. The Freudian and Adlerian Institutes were located there. We belonged to the same youth movement and fought for the same social ideals. We had the same teachers at the university and, I believe, similar political convictions, and both saw our world fall apart. 
We faced similar suffering, went similar ways, and found the purpose of our lives as analysts, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, psychologists. We took on the task of helping people and thus found meaning and significance in our lives. 
The question that comes to mind is: Can one search for the meaning of life as if it were a noun, or can one make one's own life meaningful? 
What is the difference between psychoanalysis and logotherapy concerning "to give meaning'' or "to search for meaning?" It is easy to misunderstand the nature of logotherapy and assume that people who have lost the meaning of their lives never had meaning, That they are tortured by depressions or other symptoms, are ill -borderline cases, neurotics, psychotics -looking to us to give them meaning. Physicians are tempted to think in such terms: "We offer these patients pills, give them prescriptions, why not a plan for life, courage and reassurance?" 
To take logotherapy in this sense would mean to totally misunderstand it. Psychoanalysts, too, want to help people change their lives so that there will be meaning again, so they are not overwhelmed by symptoms, to rediscover their options. 
Frankl, in addressing American youth, says that the Statue of Liberty is not enough. They need a Statue of Responsibility-a feeling for responsibility. It is not enough to demand freedom. An older notion of psychoanalysis is "liberation." The unconscious must be free, individuality must be freed, and this cannot be brought about simply through suggestion; one cannot talk people into accepting some kind of imposed meaning for living. In the past this idea was expressed in terms ofthe pleasure principle that would have to be victorious -the instincts liberated. Now add to the Statue of Liberty -as if the goal of life were only joy, pleasure principle, infinite liberty -the Statue of Responsibility. This challenge clearly summarizes the problem of young people everywhere as they move toward adulthood. It is the problem of humankind -the fulfillment of desires, the satisfactions of liberty. It raises the question of what else is necessary to secure liberty. There must be inner freedom! But inner freedom requires that one knows and accepts limits and responsibility -a Statue of Liberty and a Statue of Responsibility. This balance, expressed by Frankl, is also the task of psychoanalysis. I see similarity in our work -we can identify with Frankl. Free association --"to say whatever occurs to one" allows patients to see that they are not really able to associate freely: they experience counter-pressure, something that hinders them from living up to their task. In part the obstacle comes from the superego, from conscience, from the feeling of responsibility. Balancing responsibility and the desire for freedom is an uneven battle, never completed. One can never find the final meaning of one's life. Therefore the logotherapist must, through professional deduction, experience the importance of eternal change. The meaning oflife is never a final position, but a direction, a process throughout professional life. 
The Parable of The Lorelei 
Heinrich Heine wrote in his poem, The Lorelei, "I do not know what it means that I am so sad -atale of times long past will not vanish from my mind. "Why am I sad? I cannot help it when I remember the old talc. In Freudian terms: this sad person is in my consulting room and he tells me about his life. He wants to travel somewhere, a yearning overwhelms him, as if he were a voyager in a little boat, moved by deep longing. He hears a voice singing. He looks up at a high rock. He wants the Lorelei to look at him. and to respond but she is occupied with herself. She is not interested. He longs for her, the return of an old relationship, the girl he has never given up. He, in his little boat, is lost, goes under. drowns. A beautiful metaphor for the depression that engulfs him. 
We may think of him in a different way. Has he lost the meaning oflife or is he still attached to an old fantasy? Freud ---in the second chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams --suggests the word Deutung, interpretation. Alfred Adler speaks of explanation, Frankl of meaning. 
Freud uses Deutzmg as in Biblical writings. Thus one can tell patients that each dream, each fantasy, each free association, can he interpreted to have a deeper meaning --below the surface of consciousness, much deeper, unrecognized. In this interpretation, the voyager is no longer afraid ofthe ocean. He no longer needs a safe harbor, his childhood home, the lure of old fantasies. 
Logotherapy states that there is not only deplh psychology, but also a psychology of goals, aspirations, of reaching less for the depths than for the heights of life, not only the past but the future. Sometimes the past holds us back, so we are unable to find meaning in any future. We cannot give up old suffering: mother did not love us. We experience it that way, whether it is mother or the woman we are in love with, or even our old home or old country. We long to go on in our little boat (or ocean liner), to the new country, migrate, escape, or to survival in prison or concentration camp. I know that, since I, too, experienced some of Viktor Frankl's suffering. 
What can he done now to turn things around, when looking into the past, back on the suffering, and caught by illness? Does illness make us lose the meaning of life? How can we turn once more to a future? 
The German word for meaning is Bedeutung. What does it mean when we speak about meaning? Is it the task of psychotherapists to find the meaning of the patients' communication -in their own strange languages? The languages of psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, logotherapy are not to give meaning to another person. Freud did not give meaning to his patients; he simply tried 
8 
and this is true for every interpretation -to throw light on the communications of patients, to show what patients mean. 
In getting the schools together, I hope the word "to interpret,"zu deuten, does not alienate logotherapists. Patients speak many languages, including a language which pictures their illness. An old proverb (about 1770), Jong forgotten, states: "Speech is the picture ofthe mind." The language chosen is the picture of psychic life. When I grasp at language, when I respond to, and understand, the patient, a process slowly moves the patient to speak my language as well. Many psychotherapists become so taken by their own jargon, ideology and metapsychology, or theory, that they forget Goethe's words: "Gray, dear friend, is all theory: but green is life's golden tree." 
The Tower of Psychological Babel 
We are afraid of losing our own tongue, and in speaking these different languages of psychotherapy we build a Tower of Babel. We no longer understand one another. We believe that only our own language is correct, the other is a mistake, does not work, explains nothing, is without real therapeutic value. This attitude divides the main schools, and smaller groups as well. It is true for the three Viennese schools of psychotherapy and for subgroups within each. The students learn from the father, a teacher, a master, how they speak. This relationship, called transference and countertransference in psychoanalysis, leads us to speak but one language in each school, a language necessarily limited. 
The leaders say that they do not want mere followers. They want to teach, to make themselves understood. But it often happens that students force a leader to lead in an infantile sense. They insist on the formation of schools, new therapeutic groups center around the leader, they go with him and want to be protected, and for that they pay a price. 
Can we really know what certain fundamental concepts mean? Grammatically, logically, or from the deeper sense of linguistics? My two tasks are: to understand patients, and to understand myself and my colleagues. I first went along and spoke the "non-sense" of my colleagues. Before one understands the meaning of a language, one is usually occupied with "'non-meaning," not as stupidity, but as non-sense, not as yet making sense. I start with what the other person real~r means when he speaks about, let us say, "libido," or "goals,"or the meaning of life. 
These questions root from the Tower of Babel. We must overcome the confusion oftongues. In the last few years I have found that part ofthe difficulty of understanding between the therapeutic schools lies in the fact that one gets fixated to a particular language. If one tries to join a group of therapists, the school of language therapy, existential therapy, or one ofthe analytical schools, one may well hear: "You want to join us? Speak like we do. Think like we do." 
Why can't I speak differently? Another language? Must I always speak like they do and they like me? These are power problems, group problems. A group is held together by all speaking the same mother tongue. In America we speak English. Will I be allowed to cross the frontier and learn French? In therapy, do the different languages have different uses? Analytic thinking, as I learned it, cannot say everything. I had to remember that many systems ofcommunication between patients and therapists have little to do with the verbal. There is body language. the language of touch, and others. All must be considered. When I created a bridge to the psychic life of ill children and youths, I realized that I must not give up the old language.just change it a little, add something to it! I believe that Viktor Frankl would also say that he had learned the old languages. He, too, went to school in Vienna and would not deny the importance of his teachers' contributions to his development. 
I often heard that each therapy and each therapeutic school can he seen as a mirror image of the order of society. Enlightened absolutism may lead to hypnosis. democratic elections to free association. adjustment to acceptance of different cultures, to adaptation. The search for identity and meaning goes on in specific orders of society and has changed quickly: those attached to old values hold to them and must experience that some have become meaningless. New orders ofsociety need new meanings. Thus different psychotherapeutic schools reflect our fast-changing society. Psychotherapists never say that they want to change the world. It's the other way around: when the world changes, we too change, and our languages of psychotherapy change correspondingly. 
What do I really want, when I speak about the need for an encounter, a dialogue, not only of languages, but also of different people, their leaders? 
1 want a tentative, preliminary conclusion when I think about Frankl's and my own experience. We have had many teachers, who influenced our lives, and none is forgotten. We each must say. "Now I myself became a teacher, hut never the only teacher of my students." 
From Goethe: "What thou has inherited from your fathers -from all ofyour fathers -acquire it to make it thine." As a psychoanalyst. I add, following Freud: "The voice of the intellect is soft, but is persistent until it gains itself a hearing." 
RUDOLF EKSTEIN. Ph.D. is clinical professor of Medical Psychology, University ofCal(fornia, Los Angeles, training analyst, and in private practice. 
This article was adapted from the address at the Third World Congress of Logotherapy in Regensburg, Germany, in 1983. 
In the article "Meaning in Life of Cancer Patients Receiving Adjuvant Therapy" (Forum, Volume 8, Number 2, Fall/ Winter 1985) identification of the author was left out. Victor Florian, Ph.D., is senior lecturer at the School of Social Work, University of Haifa, Israel. 
Understanding Human Nature: Freud, Adler, Frankl 
Steven S. Kalmar 

At the Third World Congress ofLogotherapy in Regensburg, Rudolf Ekstein suggested that the three Viennese schools of psychotherapy -Freudian psychoanalysis, Adlerian individual psychology, and Frankl's logotherapy, in fact all schools of psychotherapy -agree on basic issues but speak different languages. (Editor's note: See Ekstein3.) 
It is true that language erects barriers to communication among the schools of psychotherapy, complicated by translation difficulties. Bettelheim has pointed this out in the use of Anglicized Freudian terms.2 
It is also true that there are fundamental differences among the three Viennese schools, based on their approaches to human nature. They are less distinct to contemporary therapists but do exist. 
This article aims to clarify the fundamental distinctions between Freud's, Adler's, and Frankl's views of human nature, and to show how the differences originated. 
Sigmund Freud 
Freud was born in 1856, and graduated in medicine from the University of Vienna in 1880. After post-graduate work he went to Paris in 1885 and worked with the world-famous neurologist, Jean Martin Charcot. Charcot was opposed to traditional explanations of mental disorders and hysteria, the term for what we now call neurosis, and Freud became interested in the causes of hysteria. This extended to the possible use of hypnosis and drugs, such as cocaine, in treating these conditions. In 1886 he returned to Vienna and opened a practice in which he treated clients suffering from various forms ofhysteria. In 1895, in conjunction with his friend Josef Breuer, he wrote a book, Studies on Hysteria. 
By that time Freud had abandoned his belief in mechanical causes and mechanical treatments of hysteria. By 1896 he believed he had developed a new scientific explanation, based on eighteen identical cases. He asked the highly respected Medical Association in Vienna for the opportunity to present his views at one of their monthly meetings. Freud expected to create a sensation and to obtain acceptance of theories for which he thought he had indisputable scientific proof. 
On that evening Freud presented what became known as Freud's Sexual Seduction Theory. The physicians, however, were not impressed by Freud's presentation and rejected his theories and conclusions as unproven, nonscientific speculations. Freud was heartbroken but held to his belief that his cases were sound scientific foundation for his theory. 
The Sexual Seduction Theory claims that all hysteria are caused by early sexual abuse~ seduction of the child by the father, a close relative, or a family friend. The stress is on all. In his presentation Freud said, "I therefore put forward the thesis that at the bottom of every case of hysteria there are one or more occurrences of premature sexual experience, occurrences which belong to the earliest years ofchildhood ... whatever case and whatever symptom we take as our point of departure, in the end we infallibly come to the field of sexual experience." He then continued, "Ifyou submit my assertion that the etiology of hysteria lies in sexual life to the strictest examination, you will find it is supported by the fact that in some eighteen cases of hysteria I have been able to discover this connection in every single symptom. "11 
Then Freud made a statement he later deeply regretted. "The behaviour of patients while reproducing these infantile experiences is in every respect incompatible with the assumption that the scenes are anything else than a reality." There are, he continued, a number "of things that vouch for the reality of infantile sexual scenes."I I 
Freud was certain he had scientific proof of the causes of hysteria: in every case actual rape or seduction by an adult. Yet, his teachers, Charcot and Breuer, did not agree. Breuer especially warned Freud that his praxis and career would suffer, he would become isolated and fathers would he reluctant to send their daughters to him if there was risk of being accused of having seduced them in their childhood. Freud stubbornly refused to listen. He suffered financially and found it difficult during the following years to support his wife and six children. Only ten years later, in 1905, did he publicly admit that his seduction theory was wrong. 
Public admission of using a wrong theory as basis for treating patients could have been the end of Freud's reputation and medical career. We know this did not happen. Freud saved himself by proposing a new theory more acceptable in the medical circles of Vienna. He called it the Infantile Sexuality Theory. By 1908 respected physicians had joined him: Paul Federn, Isidor Sadger, Sandor Ferenczi, Max Ettington, Carl Gustav Jung, Ludwig Binswanger, Karl Abraham, and Ernst Jones. The psychoanalytical movement was born. 
Freud's revised infantile sexuality theory contains the main concepts of psychoanalysis. Again, as in the first and now revised theory, Freud claimed to be on strictly scientific grounds. The main difference between the two theories is that Freud first believed that sexual seduction by the father really occurred, while in the second it takes place only in the fantasy of female patients. But the fantasies are to be analyzed as if they really had happened. He himself explains: 
"You will recall an interesting episode in the history of analytic research which caused me many distressing hours. In the period in which the main interest was directed to discovering infantile sexual traumas, almost all my women patients told me that they had been seduced by their father. I was driven to recognize in the end that these reports were untrue and so came to understand that hysterical symptoms arc derived from fantasies and not from real occurrences. It was only later that I was able to recognize in this fantasy of being seduced by the father the expression of the typical Oedipus complex in women." (13, p. 106) 
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Thus he arrived at the main Freudian concept, the Oedipus complex. the center piece of his psychology (and, I would add, his philosophy, though he denies applying philosophy). The term is now common usage and widely understood to mean that every boy wants to sleep with his mother. In Freud's theoretical system it means that civilization suppresses a person's natural desire to gratify instinctual sexual needs. The mechanism of this suppression is explained by Freud's concepts of id, ego, and superego: 
"The id of course knows no judgments of value: no good and evil, no morality ... the pleasure principle dominates all its processes. Instinctual cathexes (relief) seeking discharge -that, in our view, is all there is to the id." (13, p. 66) 
"The ego must on the whole carry out the id's intentions." (13, p. 68) 
About the superego: "The ego is observed at every step it takes by the strict superego which lays down definite standards for its conduct, without taking any account of its difficulties from the direction of the id and the external world. and if those standards are not obeyed, punishes it with tense feelings of inferiority and guilt ... often we cannot suppress a cry: 'Life is not easy!' If the ego is obliged to admit its weakness, it breaks out into anxiety -realistic anxiety regarding the external world, moral anxiety regarding the superego, and neurotic anxiety regarding the strength of the passions." ( 13, p. 69) 
Many conclusions derived by Freud from these concepts of id, ego, and superego have been questioned by critics, including Adler and Frankl, the founders of the other two Viennese schools of psychotherapy. The questioning extends to Freud's theories of neurosis: 
"The symptoms of neurosis, as we have learned. are essentially substitute gratifications for unfulfilled sexual wishes." (13, p. 96) 
"Neurosis appeared as the outcome ofa struggle between the interests of self-preservation and the claims of libido, a struggle in which the ego was victorious but at the price of great suffering and renunciations." ( 12, p. 69) 
When Freud first presented these views, more than eighty years ago, they impressed many respected physicians and psychologists as scientific and true. Even today a large number of psychotherapists believe that Freud's theories are the only scientific theories to explain the workings of the human mind. To followers of Adler and Frankl, Freud's theories are unproven hypotheses, based on Freud's biases and controversial concept of human nature. This view is also shared by philosophers, such as Sir Karl Popper who stated, "As for Freud's epic of the ego, superego, and id, no substantially stronger claim to scientific status can be made for it than for Homer's collected stories from Olympus. These theories describe some facts, but in the manner of myths; they contain most interesting psychological suggestions but not in a testable form. "15 
To gain recognition by the academic community Freud had to use the concepts of his time. Any theory not using the principle of cause and effect would not have been taken seriously. Freud's great contribution to science was to break from the strictly physiological explanation of the mind which considered any neurosis to be the outcome of a mental defect. His medical training convinced Freud that what went on in a patient's psyche was more than could be explained by a defect in the brain. Therefore, to Freud's thinking at the time, hysterical symptoms had to have other causes, and he believed the real cause of hysteria was not in the brain but in much deeper layers of the patient's psyche. He firmly believed that the true causes of hysteria lay in animalistic instincts which were not allowed gratification. To him, humans were nothing but animals, and animals must behave like animals. In his view, this was not a hypothetical philosophical speculation but a fact beyond dispute. Whenever someone opposed this philosophical foundation of psychoanalysis, Freud would reply: not he, but his critic, was using philosophy, unproven faith and religious nonsense, while Freud himself dealt with observable facts, free of philosophy. As late as 1930 he wrote: 
"In circumstances that favour it ... [it] reveals men as savage beasts ... (12, p. 61) [The] ideal command to love one's neighbour as oneself ... is so completely at vanance with original human nature." (12, p. 62) 
"The bit of truth behind all this ... is that men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked, but that a powerful measure of desire for aggression has to be reckoned with as part of their instinctual endowment." (12, p. 60) 
"The question, 'what is the purpose of human life?' has been asked times without number: it has never received a satisfactory answer. Perhaps it does not permit such an answer ... Nobody asks what is the purpose of the lives of animals." (I 2, p. 15) 
"As we [Freud and his followers] see it, it is simply the pleasure principle which draws up the programme of life's purpose." (12, p. 16) 
These quotations show Freud's philosophy, even though he considers them not philosophical statement but scientific fact. Today, they are seen as unproved assumptions based on the erroneous idea that human attitudes, motivations, and ideals can be explained by reductionist determinism and scientifically proved by weighing and measuring. Psychologists with such beliefs do not serve humanity but block a better understanding of what makes us human. Psychology is understanding, not science. 
Freud himself came to doubt whether he had established scientific proof for his discoveries. Shortly before his death he is quoted as saying: "It is a false assumption that the validity of psychoanalytical findings and theories are definitely established, while actually they are still in their beginnings and need a great deal ofdevelopment and repeated verification and confirmation. "16 But he still believed that future disciples would eventually find the scientific confirmation that had escaped him. 
Alfred Adler 
Adler was born in 1870 in Vienna, where he studied medicine. From 1902 to 1911 he was closely associated with Freud and much appreciated by him. Yet, Adler developed doubts about certain views by Freud, especially the stress on sexual drives forcing patients to oppose a society that prevented them from gratifying the pleasures they sought. In 1911 Adler left Freud and formed his own school, Individual Psychology. 
Contrary to Freud, Adler's theories have an optimistic outlook. He sees the individual less imprisoned by his past and urges, allowing a much wider field to grow up in harmony with society. 
I became acquainted with Adler's ideas in 1926 by reading his books. and later by attending the famous Tuesday evening meetings of the Individual Psychological Association in the medical faculty of the University of Vienna. The lectures were often given by Adler himself, but mostly by close disciples -Erwin Wexberg. Otto Kaus. Alexander Neuer, Danica Deutsch, Lydia Sicher, Oskar Spiel, Ferdinand Birnbaum. and others. The lectures, case histories, and discussions gave a clear picture of Adler's views and he refined them throughout his life. 
Like Freud, Adler was a "depth psychologist," looking deep into the psyche for explanations. He called his work Seelenforsrhung (study of the psyche), translated -wrongly, as Bettelheim2 shows for Freud who used the same term -as "science of the mind." Adler, too, wanted academic acceptance, and wished to place his system firmly on logical grounds, but his logic was different from Freud's. To Freud, humans are "driven" by urges; to Adler they are drawn to chosen goals, acting teleologically. To Freud. the logical explanation of human fears, failures, or wishes was rooted in causes (traumas) in the past which remained in the unconscious and could be cured by making them conscious. Adler. too, believed in the importance of making patients aware of their unconscious fears and wishes, but showed how the patients' '"private logic" wa~ in conflict with common logic or common sense. Adler recognized Freud's great achievement in opening the door to the new field of depth psychology but differed about what one could see through that door. 
What Adler saw was that no two human beings are alike. The whole of one person differs from the whole of every other person. Adler's perception of the person is holistic. This uniqueness makes an individual, "in-dividable," different from all others. This is why he called his system "individual psychology." 
Because people are different there cannot be one single "cause" for neuroses, such as sexual suppression. It is often mistakenly believed that Adler also explained his patients' problems by a single cause-· the "inferiority complex." Equally, Adler is said to have explained the human psyche with the "power principle," again a single cause. like Freud's "pleasure principle." This description ( often also used by logotherapists in describing Adler's views) are wrong in the sense that Adler docs not speak of "causes" at all in the analysis of human personality. He speaks ofinfluences, factors present in early childhood and used when individuals form attitudes to life, their personalities, their "lifestyle," (a word coined by Adler and now in common use but without being credited to him). In Adler's view, every person develops a unique lifestyle, a personality chosen from early childhood influences and factors. These are chosen, they are not causes forcing people to become what they are going to be as adults. Every person is a free agent in this process of selecting, in the formulation of future goals and attitudes. This ability to choose freely, to have free will and creative power from birth is a deep philosophical difference from Freud's "natural" philosophy, the reductionism which considers human beings as animals controlled by biological urges. 
Adler also perceived as a factor in the unconscious that human infants are born unable to exist on their own and need to be cared for during a much longer period than animals. Lacking the strength and instincts of animals, human infants depend for a long time on the help of parents, relatives, servants, and others. Very early, infants experience the "social interest" of persons helping them. Adler even says that humans are born with this social interest. It helps the child, it helps everybody, it helps society, it is a life-sustaining force. Adler's original word, Gemeinschajisgejuhl, expresses much better what he wanted to say than "social interest." Gemeinschaft describes persons who have something in common, something like "community." Nor does the word "interest" correctly express Adler's word Gefuhl. Gefuhl is a feeling in the psyche, while "interest" is an activity of the brain. 
Other Adlerian Concepts: 
Inferiority complex. We arc born with inferiorities and must master the tasks we live to fulfill. As babies we cannot stand up like the people around us. nor move, or communicate what we want. When we try to copy grownups we do it clumsily, resulting in feelings of inferiority. Gradually we learn to do things better. If we are encouraged to do things on our own, are surrounded by loving and understanding people, have good health and are biologically strong, we may develop an attitude of trust. courage, cooperation, responsibility, and learn to live without inferiorities or to the degree we have them; they will not retard our growth. If we are discouraged by the environment, family, or upbringing, our feeling of inferiority is reinforced and may become an inferiority complex, resulting in a passive, cowardly, unsocial lifestyle. 
Tendentious apperception. Impressions, memories are selected and retained in the mind in a distorted form that fits the individual's bias, lifestyle, and attitude. 
The urge for power or superiority. Again the English term is misleading, seemingly saying that each person wants to be a "superman," in the sense Nietzsche used the term. What Adler meant was quite different. In his earliest research -when associated with Freud -Adler observed patients in the hospital with biological inferiorities. In 1907 he published The Theory of Inferiorities of Organs. 1 He found that inferiority of an organ leading to sickness can be overcome or reduced by the workings of the whole body, especially if the patient manifests a strong will to overcome the inferiority. Other cells and body parts compensate for the inferior organ. Adler observed that persons with a handicap -a shorter leg or arm -not only overcome the handicap but overcompensate and some become outstanding in sports. Overcoming -moving from a minus to a plus position -is what Adler meant by seeking superiority. a desire for achievement rather than power. In striving for greater self-respect, recognition, and admiration by others, individuals may develop a lifestyle that tends to dominate others. Adler's goal was to reduce such tendencies, to help people find lifestyles that made for consideration of others and their rights. This is the goal he seeks for parents and teachers. 
Male-Female. Adler disagrees with Freud that males are superior to females, he saw their ahilities and rights as equal. Freud's followers were mostly men, many of Adler's, women. 
In assessing patients' personalities, Adler paid attention not only to what they said ahout themselves, but how they behaved, walked, sat on their chairs, held heads high or low. Adlerians also look for clues and meanings in dreams and not merely for sexual fantasies and repressed sexual desires. Adler believed that in dreams a person continues to worry about the same things as in waking, and that all problem-solving attempts must use fantasy, awake or asleep. Dreams do not use brain and reason but look for solutions hy other methods, illustrating problems in fairy-tale fantasies with meaning that can be clarified in sessions with a trained therapist. 
The goal of Adlerian therapy is to help patients discover that their problems come from a private logic which leads to unrealistic expectations. Therapy makes them see reality ohjectively, using common sense, and encourages them to use their creative power and free will to choose new goals and new lifestyle. 
Viktor Frankl 
Frankl, founder of the third Viennese school of psychotherapy, allowed many original Adlerian views to survive and added others of his own. Because Frankl's views are well known to readers of the Forum they need no detailed description. On various occasions Frankl said that. had he not been expelled from the Association of Individual Psychology as a young man (the "Benjamin" of the Association), he might still be an individual psychologist. To this he added in a private conversation, ''On the other hand, I believe if Adler were alive today he would not expel me but share many of my views." There arc good reasons to believe this. In later writings Adler spoke ofcosmic values. In 1931 he published a book, What Life Should Mean To You. and in 1933 another book, Der Sinn des Lebens (Meaning in Life). Jacoby14 recently wrote that toward the end of his life Adler spoke less of environmental factors in a person"s lifestyle and more of the metaphysical goals in one's life. 
Frankl was born in 1905 and was first a follower of Freud but as early as 17, still a student in high school, he gave a lecture in Vienna on "The Meaning of Life." On that occasion Frankl made two points which later became the foundation of his theories: that life leaves it to us to find what is meaningful; and that the ultimate meaning oflife is beyond the grasp of intellect but is something we can only live without ever being able to define cognitively. 
Frankl became a student of Adler but in the early thirties he saw that Freud's and Adler's teaching lacked important components and their theories were inadequate for the new problems of our century. There are large areas of common ground between Adler's views and logotherapy but also differences. Frankl maintained that the purpose ofliving is not just overcoming inferiorities; not all neuroses arc the result of lifestyle; nor are all goals set in early childhood. The greatest difference lies in the philosophical foundation, with significant conseq ucnces for the therapeutic aims of the two schools. Adler was concerned with faults in a person's character and how they impair relationships with others. He saw meaning only in what could help a person overcome inferiorities, improve attitudes toward work and other people, cope with life's tasks. He did not approach the existential question "what does life mean?" The closest Adler came was to maintain that there is no meaning in life -you have to create it. Frankl starts with the existential position that life has meaning at all times and under all circumstances, and that human beings are born with an inherent will to meaning. Meaning exists, the task of the individual is to find it. Humans are born with a pre-logical concept of moral values. The essence of being human is the capacity of spirituality, the freedom to choose, and the ability to respond responsibility -to the demands of life. 
Frankl's stress on the spiritual component of human beings is the main departure from the second Viennese school of psychotherapy; it is the existential heart of the third Viennese school. For Frankl, the problems of our times are existential. The meaninglessness oflife leads to the neurosis of our times, to the empty life of drug addicts, criminals, school dropouts, even "life dropouts,"the growing number of suicides. Frankl's term for this emptiness is "existential vacuum." His cure is through the spirit, it lies in the "defiant power of the human spirit." Therefore, Frankl is less interested in delving into the psyche of the patient to find past causes and influences that contributed to present frustrations. His therapy goal is to guide patients to the resources of the spirit, the power to move from past and present to what is meaningful in the future, to cure existential frustrations. Animals do not have these frustrations, humans have them and can overcome them through the power ofthe spirit. This elevates them above the mere animal stage. 
Selected Quotes 
In conclusion, here are samples from Frankl's writings about his position relative to Freud and Adler: 
From Man's Search/or Meaning.4 
"Logotherapy, in comparison with psychoanalysis, is a method less retrospective and less introspective. Logotherapy focuses rather on the future, that is to say, on the assignments and meanings to be fulfilled by the patient in his future" (pp. 152-153). 
"The truly neurotic individual does try to escape the full awareness of his life's task" (p. 153). 
"The striving to find a meaning in one's life is the primary motivational force in man" (p. 154). 
From Will to Meaning:5 
"Freud believed that man could be explained by a mechanistic theory and that his psyche could be cured by means of techniques. But what he achieved was something different, something still tenable, provided that we reevaluate it in the light of existential facts" (p. 11). 
"Freudian psychoanalysis, and Adlerian psychology ... are not nullified by logotherapy but rather overarched by it. They are seen in the light of a higher dimension ... and rehumanized by it" (p. 26). 
From Psychotherapy and Existentialism:6 "Adler made us conversant with the important part played by what he called the sense of inferiority in the formation of neuroses. Well, it appears to me that today [it is] not the feeling of being less valuable than others, but the feeling that life has no longer any meaning" (p. 122). 
From Unheard Cryfor Meaning:7 
"Adlerian psychology views man as a being directed to goals rather than driven by drives, but the goals, upon closer scrutiny, do not actually transcend man's self or his psyche ... [they are] seen as mere devices to come to terms with his feelings of inferiority and insecurity" (pp. 61-61). 
From The Doctor and the Soul:~ 
"Psychoanalysis is ... concerned with undoing the consequences of repression -reversing, that is, the processes of making psychic material unconscious. The concept of repression is of central importance within the psychoanalytic scheme" (p. 4). 
"Individual psychology sees the matter somewhat differently. The key concept of the scheme is that of 'arrangement' --which plays a part analogous to that assigned by Freud to repression. Arrangement is the process by which the neurotic seeks to clear himself of guilt. Instead of relegating something to the unconscious, he seeks to relieve himself of responsibility. The symptom, as it were, assumes the responsibility which the patient therefore need no longer bear" (p. 4). 
"When [Freudian] pan-sexualism arbitrarily restricts psychic reality to sexuality. it deliberately limits its insight into the nature of psychic striving. Individual psychology commits its own kind of error in that its psychopathological scheme ts narrower. For it does not admit the genuineness of psychic strivings, but instead insists on viewing them (when they take the form of neurotic symptoms) as mere means to an end --either as 'arrangement' or as excuse. Individual psychology, unlike pan-sexualism, recognizes psychic factors other than sexuality, such as the will to power, status drive, or 'social interest"' (pp. 6-7). 
From Am Anfang warder Sinn9 (my translation): 
"In psychoanalysis, the isolation ofthe genital zones, the emphasis of sexuality as an end in itself, as a mere means to sexual pleasure, prevents the forming of any partnership. It is sexuality that prevents us from seeing the partner as a human being. It belongs to the severest degradations to make a human being into a mere tool to an end" (p. 61). 
From Psychotherapie fur den Laiento (my translation): 
"Freud's goal was to find an explanation of what at his time was called hysteria. Freud's explanation was that events that created hysteria were linked to the sex drive of the patient, the memory of the events was repressed and pushed into the unconscious. Yet, in changed forms it reappears in dreams masked as symbols. The psychoanalytic treatment aims at lifting the repression of such memories, bringing them back to consciousness, and thereby freeing the person from neurosis" (p. 35). 
"Adler split with Freud by showing that many factors besides the sex drive contributed to the development of a person's psyche: environment, the home situation, early inferiorities, and the child's need to find security through help by others and society" (p. 35). 
"Each era has its neurosis and its psychotherapy. Freud was a child of his time. His originality and genius demand our respect but should not cloud our judgment. We admire Hyppocrates and Paracelsus but this does not make us practice medicine in accordance with their theories ... The needs of our times are different from Freud's. Today, not sexual repression creates neuroses but lack of existential fulfillment: the main problem of our time is the search for meaning, a goal, concrete tasks, and personal meaningful challenges" (p. 35). 
STEVENS. KALMAR, Ph.D. isamemberofthe BoardofDirectors, Institute of Logotherapy, author of "A Brief History of Logotherapy" in Analecta Frankliana. 
REFERENCES: 
I. Adler, Alfred. Studie uher Minderwertigkeit von Organen. Urban & Schwarzenberg, BerlinWicn, 1907. 
2. 
Bettelheim, Bruno. Freud and Mans Soul. New York, Vintage Books, 1984. 

3. 
Ekstein, Rudolf. "The Language of Psychotherapy." International Forum for Logothcrapy, 9(1). 1986. 

4. 
Frankl. Viktor. Man's Search/or Meaning. New York, Washington Square Press. 1963. 

5. 
___ The Will to Meaning. New York. The World Publishing Co., 1969. 

6. 
___ Archotherapy and Existentialism. New York, Simon & Schuster, Touchstone, ]967. 

7. 
---The Unheard Crrj<,r Meaning. New York. Simon & Schuster. 1978. 

8. 
___ lhe Do<"tor and the Soul. New York. Vintage Books. 1973. 


9. ---Am Anfang warder Sinn. Vienna, Franz Deuticke, 1982. 10 ___ Aychotherapiefiirden Laien, Freiburg Herderverlag. 1981. 
11. Freud. Sigmund. "The Etiology of Hysteria," tr. by James Strachcy. Paper presented at the Association of Physicians in Vienna, l 896. 
12. 
---Civili::ation and its Discontents. Garden City. NY, Doubleday, 1980. 

13. 
___ Ne»· Introductory l.Rctures. New York. W.W. Norton, 1933. 

14. 
Jacoby. Henry. Alfred Adler's Jndividualpsychologie und dialektische Charakterkunde. Frankfurt. Fischer Taschenbuch. 1983. 


15. Jahoda. Marie. Freud and the Dilemma in Psychology. Lincoln. University of Nebraska Press. 1977. 
16. Peck. Martin W. "A Brief Visit with Freud." Psr<"hoanahtic Quarterlr. IX. 1940. 

IN MEMORIAM 
Michael F. Whiddon, Ph.D. 1949-1985 
Michael Whiddon died on December 19, 1985, a few days after a heart attack brought on by the effects of leukemia. During his intensive treatment and subsequent period of remission, he served as a model par excellence for leading a meaningful and productive life despite the extremely disabling effects of his disease. His dedication to psychology as a field of human concerns was expressed by his recognition of psychology as both a science and a profession and by his genuine respect for all people with whom he related. More than practicing psychology he lived it. He possessed an unusually keen awareness of human sensibilities and sensitivity to human needs. His talent as a teacher, his skill as a supervisor of psychology interns, and his excellence as a psychotherapist were charac-terized by a combination of warmth, gentleness, and firm conviction. 
In 1971, Michael received a B.S. from Mississippi College, and earned his M.A. in 1975 and the Ph.D. m 1977 at the University of Southern Mississippi. One of the outstanding highlights of his career was being granted the status of Diplomate in Logotherapy in 1984. 
At the time of his death, he had served as a clinical psychologist and director of the Behavioral Health Clinic at the VA Medical Center, Knoxville, for 5½ years. Prior to coming to the Knoxville facility, he worked as associate warden and hospital administrator for the Mississippi State Penitentiary and director of Clinical Services, Mississippi Department of Corrections. 
Joe Hineman, Ph.D., psychologist, Veterans Administration, Knoxville, Iowa 

Recalling Michael Whiddon 
When I received the sad news of Michael Whiddon's death I was busy preparing the opening of my new Institute of Logotherapy in Munich. I dropped what I was doing and recalled my brief meeting with him in Regensburg in 1983 and our more extensive meeting when he participated in a seminar I gave in Berkeley in 1984. 
How did I experience him? I felt empathy and respect. He did not say much in the seminar but when he did, his words were informed and wise. He sat in the back. During lunch break he stepped close to the flip chart to copy what I had written on it. Only then I realized how poor his eye sight was. Others might have asked me to write larger, or demanded copies of my lectures, or complained of his handicaps. 
Not Michael Whiddon. Quietly, modestly, he remained in the background, demanded no special favors, and yet acquired more knowledge than many others. I offered him a chair in front but sitting caused him pain. He had to stand up frequently and did not want to disturb. 
Only someone full ofconsideration for others, in the broadest and best sense, is able to provide such a living example of self-transcendence. 
Once I talked to him for a long time. He asked to be allowed to dictate to his wife his answers to my test questions. In the course ofthis talk I received the first inkling of his inner greatness. As he stood there -ill in body, healthy in mind, heroic in spirit -I clearly sensed the strength of an unconditional Yes to life rooted in unqualified faith in an all-pervasice meaning. I can hardly describe what I saw in his face: his agony choked my heart, but the dignity of his courage opened it in awe and admiration. 
During my seminar in Berkeley I myself was suffering. My father in Vienna underwent an operation. I hoped, worried, feared for his life, and undeniably felt guilt for not being with him. 
What comforted me more than the many words of sympathy I received was the upright figure of Michael Whiddon in the back of the seminar room. There he stood, in pain, hardly able to see, with little hope to be able to use for long what he learned here. But he stood, and his standing seemed to tell me: "It's all right ... remain standing ... look, look at me ... see, it's possible." 
Yes, it was possible. I concluded the seminar and was granted the gift to say good-bye to my father before he died. 
I should have written Michael Whiddon what tremendous help his example was in this critical moment of my life. Undoubtedly he would have felt good about my letter, but I never did write, and he never knew. 
All this went through my mind when I read the news of his death, and I knew what I had to do: calling out to him a last thank-you by recalling one episode of his life. 
I wish to conclude by saying that I am sad and happy at the same time: sad that Michael Whiddon has left us but happy that he lived and that our paths crossed. 
Elisabeth Lukas 
Logophilosophy as Preventive Therapy 
Mignon Eisenberg 
While teaching logotherapy in Israeli universities, it became clear to me that Frankl's message lies, at least partially, in the unique function of logophilosophy as prophylaxis and reinforcement against despair and hopelessness, the invitation to say yes to life. no matter what. 
This preventive quality is in accord with our yearning to rise above smothering frustration, painful life situations and blows of fate, and respond by making the mastering of this life of ours our foremost task. The reward is equal to the challenge: immunity to despair and energies freed for constructive action. The constant search for meaning vouches for its existence. In the words of the Austrian writer Franz Werfel, "Thirst is proof of the undeniable presence of water." 
After teaching gerontology for years and applying logotherapy to people in midlife and beyond, I was concerned that logophilosophy and existential analysis must be given priority in educating the young. 
Students must be helped to form healthy, affirmative attitudes toward themselves and others. to promote self-examination, and increase self-confidence and realistic expectations. By cognitively striving for these goals, the students equip themselves with skills and strategies to forestall despair, mitigate the impact of future crises and maximize their potential for living worthwhile lives. 
Like a farmer painstakingly ploughing the soil to soften it for absorbing the seeds, students must be helped to shed masks and the acquired layers of callousness, indifference, apathy, lack of affect and curiosity, mechanisms that have become second nature to so many in this computer age. Only after "unblocking'' can they fully use the liberating resources of their spiritual unconscious. 
In my teaching, five avenues were pursued: 
I. Consciousness-and awareness-raising as well as anxiety-reducing exercises such as yoga-breathing, transcendental meditation, autogenic training, guided phantasies, and autosuggestion were introduced for five to ten minutes as part of every session. Students were encouraged to do these exercises on their own, outside of class. Proper diet, gymnastics, and a brisk one-hour walk or swim were also recommended. 
2. 
Students were invited to a 15-minute personal encounter with the instructor. These one-to-one meetings increased the students' self-esteem. 

3. 
Small groups. Frequently, students were divided into groups of 4 or 5 for intensive discussion ofconcepts of logophilosophy and experiential exposure to one another. This experience was a useful microcosmic experiment of living in the world. 

4. 
Reaction papers. Students wrote at least two papers examining their attitudes to themselves, to significant others and society-at-large. This was an important vehicle for enhanced self-understanding. 

5. 
Life-history taking. During the course, students conducted 5-8 taped interviews with an older person and submitted a comprehensive written report. This assignment tended to reduce prejudices based on chronological age and fears of aging and death. 


Positive thinking, self-distancing, and self-transcendence proved strong prevention, coping, and survival devices. The most effective characteristic of successful living was the ability to laugh about and forget oneself. 
To promote realistic expectations, students were familiarized early in the course with the unavoidable facts of life --logotherapy's tragic triad of suffering, guilt, and death or, by adding injustice, "the tragic quadrangle." This prompted lengthy discussions about the highest and most enduring learning ~learning to be human and acquiring a new self-image having touched the abysses of guilt and suffering, and confronting death. Some quotations from students: 
Relaxation Exercises 
"In the course we did exercises while listening to breathing and the blood circulating in hands, body and head. We learned to relate to ourselves, first to soma, physically. This novel look into myself, through closed eyes and proper breathing, led to relaxation and re-energizing, a vital experience. In the beginning it was difficult to accept the fact that the instructor was 'playing' with us, instead of'teaching.' In retrospect. it was a natural reaction because I was aware of the others in the room and their probable scorn. The invitation to become aware of myself was at first threatening. But it taught me a strategy to prevent stress and despair, which I practice now on my own. especially before falling asleep." 
"At the beginning I laughed derisively. I did not take it seriously and did not believe it would relieve tension, probably because I was in perpetual motion, not resting for a moment. Yet, slowly, I did enter the relaxation process. I tried it on my own on different occasions, before examinations and critical encounters. and if I continue training, I believe I will reach the calm that now escapes me. The knowledge that it is possible, and my experience in class. assist me to go on and not despair." 
"Autogenic training, breathing and relaxation became part of my daily routine, especially at night before falling asleep, instead oftaking a tranquilizer after a day filled with activity, worry and stress. To learn to relax, switch off. recharge my batteries, to release my constructive energies, was one of the most vital benefits of my year of studies." 
Laughter and Inventiveness 
When I administered the Holmes Social Readjustment Scale, in a training session for professionals, demonstrating the connection between stress and physical illness, the question was raised: What about the stress of being in a perpetual state of anxiety about the future, even of our unborn children? The tension was resolved by a group member, who related the Hassidic tale about the rabbi telling a young boy: I will give you a ruble if you tell me a place where God dwells. The boy countered: And I will give you two rubles if you tell me a place where he doesn't. 
On another occasion, a logo-evening in a private home, I asked people to introduce themselves. A woman from a kibbutz introduced herself with this folk tale: Two frogs fell into a jar with cream. The one got paralyzed with fear and drowned in the cream. The other rapidly moved its front and hind legs until the cream was churned into butter. Then it climbed up and out. I am the second frog. 
To me, these stories reflected the sense of humor and resourcefulness that enable people to cope and survive. 
Healthy Tension 
"For a Jew there is perpetual tension. The Talmud says: It is not up to you to finish the job, yet you are not free to quit. That means, we are bound to be in tension between the responsibility to act, and our decisions what to do first, what next, what can be substituted and what is unique to this very moment." 
"This academic year, tension and stress were heavy. I want to succeed and have a problem functioning under stress with exams and assignments. Until my encounter with logotherapy, I was accustomed to see negative factors in stress and tension. After learning ofthe constructive function ofexistential stress and its significance for mental health, the tension between what I accomplish and what I intend to do, between what I am and what I can become, I began to understand the positive aspects ofstress. I can now turn a destructive factor into a motivating value. This lowered my anxiety. Repeating the new insight to myself over and over gives me new energy and has changed my attitude." 
Autosuggestion and Dereflection 
The two quotes are from life histories taken by students. The first, from interviews with old Salima, an illiterate, invalid Arab woman: 
"In spite of our cultural differences, there was a common dimension between Salima and myself~ our being human. In her I discovered beautiful virtues I would like to emulate. I refer especially to her undaunted optimism. I learned from her that the future is unforeseeable and that we must equip ourselves with faith and hope. Salima 's life story has enriched my world view and personal life and her advice has immunized me against despair: 'When I was ill and discharged from my job, I first thought my life was over. Yet, I gathered strength and met good people who helped me carry on. You must remember, even in the worst times, not to despair, never to stop hoping. You must always tell yourself: Tomorrow will be better."' 
From interviews with Hanutzkah, an old, childless widow: 
"What counts is not what you do but how you look at things, whether you know how to enjoy and appreciate them. My late husband always knew how to turn even a small thing into something beautiful. In the hardest times, when we knew we could not have the kids we wanted so much, instead of feeling sorry for ourselves we looked at the good things in our lives, the things we had despite pain and suffering. Now, when I feel sad remembering my husband, I phone my 'granddaughter' Rina, who lives across the street. I talk with her and we prepare our next visit, and I stop thinking of what cannot be changed, and think of what will be. Last night, when I felt sad, instead of thinking of my losses and getting lonelier and sadder, I decided to prepare a cake for her, like we did in Russia, and which my husband loved. Life is not easy. But what is more important than life itself. and what happens to us, is how we interpret what happens, and what we want to do. Today, as an elderly person, no longer able to do some of the things I used to do, I do small things, look after my dog, play with my little Rina, read, meet people. Not much. But I know that ifwe concentrate on little things. simple ones, which we can do, we enjoy life, and are filled with meaning. This is what I tell little Rina when she complains about the toy she wanted and her parents didn't buy. I tell her she must think of all the beautiful things she does have, and of all the good she can do as a result." 
Hanutzkah's and logotherapy's message helps me convey to my clients to accept their limitations and open to the challenges of life. ifwe succeed in seeing the good in each and every day, happiness ensues. 
Educating Young Children to Positive Thinking 
Matama Kashti's children's book Happy Days is full of examples of how to educate young children to positive views and cultivate potentials for joy and meaning every moment. Whoever is raised on books like this will have no problem making a long "happy list," without prodding. This is how I see logotherapy working as preventive psychology: There are happy days, when everyone is smiling; nobody is angry or sulking, no one lifts a finger in threat. Days on which no one says: You had it coming, I told you so. No hard words, no insults. Only good words, soft, clear. Days when no one forbids climbing into bed with shoes on, to thumb through big books and mumbling nonsense. Days of all right and without no-nos. Days ofsmiles and sparkling eyes. Days without anger and fighting, days of love, days with good friends and exciting games. Days of laughter, of hopping and jumping and dance. Days of warm sunshine and sidewalk skipping games, of light careless winds playing with the leaves and the hair of kids. Bright days of high skies and flowery fields. Happy Days. 
Growing Through Suffering 
"The discussions in logotherapy brought back memories of five years in my life of unhappy love, disappointment in the man who filled all my time and thought. During the course I understood that there was a purpose in my suffering, because through it I found meaning. After meeting the man and falling in love, I dropped out of school and devoted myself to his happiness. (I realized in this course that he was my first client as an unqualified social worker.) I was drawn to him and identified with his problems, anxieties, frustrations. I took a job in a bank and after working hours I came to his apartment, cleaning, laundering, cooking; all this so he could study quietly. I catered to him and consoled him. I believed his scholastic success would be mine. The reward I received was scorn and humiliation in front of others. My self-esteem and confidence dwindled. My moods were his moods, I lived him. The moment of truth came when I rea Iized I had to change, or my life would be ruined. When he finished his studies, I returned to school, though it was far from where he lived. The separation was almost intolerable, especially the realization that he did not love me. 1 felt used, insignificant, convinced that the school year would prove me a total failure. My only feeling was the wish to show him that I was strong and would succeed even without his help. I rose early and studied, evenings I worked hard physically. 1 returned to my apartment at night exhausted and continued studying until retiring in the early hours of the morning. At first, more than by the interest in studies, I was driven by a desire to forget and to subdue my rage. After anger, I reached acceptance. 1felt free to study and experienced the joy of learning. I recognized my worth, my strength, my ability to cope despite deep depression. My grades were good, people sought my company, I felt I belonged. My world was filled with curiosity and zest for learning. and I found fulfillment since I did not look for it. 1attained tremendous satisfaction in working with families and contributing to their lives. I found myself giving and receiving. By doing for others, I did for myself. I began to recognize the source of my power. My resourcefulness in counseling people in crisis brought happiness and recovery. This time it was inner happiness, free of frustration and expectations. In my free time I worked as a volunteer in prison. There I discovered, with greater force, that even people on the fringes of society can bestow what you expected from people closest to you. This is true meaning: the knowledge that you are contributing and that this contribution finds an echo. though your deeds may not be great. I taught illiterate prisoners to read and write. I learned to be by myself, to live alone and cope. I matured and learned to like and appreciate myself. There also were suffering and failures but 
I extracted from these small setbacks lessons for the future. Discovering positive lessons through pain and suffering has been the most enriching contribution to my mental health and well-being." 
Finding Meaning Beyond Suffering 
"Logotherapy does not give us placebos. it demands true and essential inner transformations. It ha~ a lot of common sense and does not avoid confronting suffering. When I started the course, my mother fell ill and it was hard for me to handle the situation. I despaired and could not function. I don't remember the exact moment, but in one of the classes I suddenly realized that since my mom fell ill. our relationship improved, an unexpected openness developed. We talked a great deal and were closer to each other. From this moment on, I tried to deepen the contact, to 'use' her illness to improve communication. The moment I realized this aspect oflogotherapy, to find meaning beyond suffering, I understood that I could transmit it to my clients. If I succeed in doing this, therapy turns into prevention. 
"There is no limit to life's meaning. I believe that the 'positive' view of pain will help me relieve clients who bitterly complain about their fate. If I can convey to them even one redeeming aspect of their condition, they will see their entire situation in a less threatening light. In the mental-health unit where I work, one patient said that he learned several important lessons about life during his confinement." 
Global Implications 
"Spiritual power is stronger than any other, and this perhaps is what our sages meant when they said: 'Who is a hero? He who transcends himself.' I must know that l have to hear the responsibility to respond to the needs of history, that I am irreplaceahle. As Rahhi Nahman of Brezlev said: "We must know that in the essence of creation we are unique and must bring our uniqueness to perfection.' If each person will recognize his or her responsibility and influence on others. perhaps we shall be able to lift the world out of its biological. animalist state. Students must he trained to sensitivity, to discern life's meanings and help make society more responsible. At the same time, students must be familiar with science. what it is and what it can do. Not only to become good scientists. but responsible citizens in a world so highly dominated by science. We have always felt responsihlc for those close to us. but we must feel responsihlc for future generations." 
My teaching has convinced me that the attitudinal values and personality theory of logophilosophy as life-and liberty-ensuring skills should be taught to parents, educators and children at the earliest possible stage. The three M's of logotherapy. meaning of life, the will to meaning, and the freedom to find meaning should even precede the three R's in the elementary curriculum of the school of living. 
M JG NON EISENBERG, Ph.D. is a logotherapist in Chicago, regional director ofthe Institute ofLogotherapy, andfor the past five years has taught the winter semester in various universities in Israel. 
Logotherapy and the Person of the Therapist 
James E. Lantz 
The therapist's developmental experiences, interpersonal history, professional background, and present psychosocial situation can all influence the treatment relationship between therapist and client. Of all factors affecting this relationship, the therapist's philosophy oftreatment is of particular importance. This article discusses two different treatment philosophies: the strategic approach and the open-system approach. 
The Strategic Approach 
Strategic psychotherapy methods are effective because they promote action and reactive insights in spite of clients' resistance or homeostasis.7.1 2 Such interventions are based on the idea that clients are not able to see beyond their own perceptions or ongoing patterns of interaction and psychological problem solving.7 In the strategic view, the therapist believes that input from the outside is needed to interrupt problematic patterns and to prompt clients to let new patterns evolve. In this way they will learn what has been missing. The therapist arranges a situation or crisis from the outside to bring about a change within the clients.7 Strategic methods are often used because they can bring rapid change, 12 but are criticized as superficial and because they ignore the internal dynamics of the clients. ~.11 
In the strategic approach, therapists basically remain emotional outsiders7 because they arc primarily interested in altering the structure and rules governing the functioning of their clients. This view believes that if therapists become even temporarily involved in the clients' emotions, this will prevent effective strategic interventions. 7 
In the strategic approach the personality of therapists has less significance than in the open-system approach. Since they remain outsiders to the clients' emotions and arrange strategic interventions from the distance, their personality has little impact upon the thoughts, feelings. and hehaviur of the clients. Therapists can remain kind and friendly but do not get emotionally or existentially involved. Clients experience the impact of the therapeutic interventions but do not experience the impact of the therapist as a person. Neither doest he client have much impact upon the therapist's emotional and noetic life. This is why the strategic approach does not seem compatible with the humanistic and antireductionistic stance of the logotherapist. 
The Open-System Approach 
In the open-system approach, suggested by some psychoanalyticaP0-11 •13 and 
existentialL28-9-10 practitioners, therapists are emotionally involved and become 
temporarily active in the clients'emotional system. Because ofthis involvement, 
both therapists and clients are learning and growing.4-I0-11 Many authorsL10-11 
consider this an open-system approach because it includes the therapists in the 
treatment in a way that allows them to be open to treatment system reflection. 
This permits a reciprocal process of growth in both therapist and client.4•10·11 
The open-system approach is compatible with logotherapy. 
The open-system approach encourages and, in fact, demands that therapists 
actively reflect upon, monitor, and utilize their feeling during treatment. In 
Yalom's 14 view there is such a thing as existential countertransference. This can 
be used to help both clients and therapists discover meaning.4•10-'4 
Existential Countertransference 
The Jones family requested family treatment because their fourteen-year old son had been running away from home. This pattern had started a few months after the father discovered he had leukemia. The parents insisted that they need not spend much time talking about the leukemia because this was handled by "medical authorities." Family treatment was needed only to stop the son from running away. In spite of the obvious connection between the son's problems and the father's leukemia, the therapist did not push the family to talk about the leukemia. The therapist also 'ran away.' This went on for a number of sessions until a colleague asked the therapist how he was doing with the Jones family in view of the fact that "Mr. Jones has a serious illness just like your father." The therapist had completely denied any connection between his work with the Jones family and the fact that his own father was suffering from a serious heart condition. 
In the next session. the therapist told the family that he was having difficulties 
working with them and that he needed to tell them why. He shared his feelings 
(fear, anxiety, concern, grief) about his father's serious condition. He told the 
family that he wanted to run away from his feelings about his father and that he 
felt he was helping them run away from their feelings about Mr. Jones' condi
tion. At this point the son began to cry and talked about his fear. He stated that 
no one wanted to talk about "Dad's problems" and that he felt "all alone." The 
therapist suggested to the son that "maybe we should run away together." The 
father then shared his feelings about "also wanting to run away." Mother 
pointed out that she felt "all alone anyway" and was "afraid to talk about 
anything." The family finally decided to "run away with each other" and talk 
with each other about the leukemia while they were "running away." Sessions 
were increased to twice a week and were used as "family runaway time." The son 
stopped really running away and the family started dealing with each other 
about the family tragedy. All members reported that they were content to at 
least be talking to each other in a meaningful way. 
Logotherapy and Therapist-Client Relationship 
Logotherapy stresses that meaning does exist, that every person has a will to find it and the freedom to achieve this goal.5 Logotherapy, therefore. assumes that successful psychotherapy helps clients find meaning in their lives.6 
If Frankl" is correct, failure to perceive meanings may result in psychiatric or existential symptoms. Yalom 14 and other existential thinkers consider true human engagement the most effective immunization against meaninglessness. Human engagement includes commitment and action for the benefit ofothers10 -individuals or the human race in gencralH --and always includes selftransccndcncc,' caring for others. Frankl" states that experiential values found in human relationships can protect us from developing an existential vacuum. If human engagement is important in meaningful living, it is also of great importance in the client-therapist relationship. 
Human Engagement 
A central issue in logotherapy, 5-1' and other existential thcrapies 1.1o.i 4 is the manner in which client and therapist work together. The therapist's presence can both facilitate and minimize engagement opportunities in the treatment relationship. 111 Human engagement increases the clients' opportunities to find meaning in interactions with the therapist and other significant persons. Without such engagement clients have less opportunity to find such meaning. u.9. JO 
Since therapists have an impact upon the clients' opportunity to discover engagement and meaning, their interactions are important. They arc based on certain assumptions which include: 
• 
Effective psychotherapy requires commitment to authentic communication by the therapist. 

• 
The role of the therapist cannot be divested of its essential humaneness. 

• 
The therapist's ultimate concern is similar to that of the client. 


Commitment to authentic Communication. Logotherapists view treatment as a joint venture between therapist and client, directed toward developing increased meaning and engagement within the client's life. The Iogotherapist's ta,k includes active participation in helping clients to discover meaning. The relationship between client and therapist is a "noctic" problem-solving process. Therapists are most effective when they model self-transcendence. Such modeling is similar to Buber\2 I-Thou relationship and can occur only through the active use of the therapist,· opt:, system, the subjccti,e response to clients within the experience or directly working with them. Authentic interaction hctween client and therapist is most likely when the therapist is active, innovative, candid, provocative, directive, investigating, supportive, encouraging, explicit, intrusive, engaging, observant, clarifying, optimistic, experiential, and confrontivc. 1 Effectin: iogothcrapists will not present themselves to their clicnb as a blank Freudian screen nr as external, strategic manipulators.5-0-9 
The Therapist '.I-Human Role. It has hcen pointed out that meanin!,tful communication between client and therapist depends on therapists' ilcccptance that their evoh ing as persons is effective therapy, 10 and that their personality is a potent factor in thcrapy. 12 Mullan and Sanguilliano 10 feel that the therapist~' realization that the; never can be fully trained or completely knowledgeable permits psychotherapy its fundamental creativity. The therapists' willingness to change may well be their best asset in helping other human beings. Their potential to help is intimately linked with their changing relationship to the self, others, and the world at large. 1-10•14 Effective therapists cannot be just pro
310
grammed sets of technological responses to the client's pain.2 , 
Ultimate Concerns of Therapist and Client. Sullivan13 has noted that client and therapist are at a basic level more similar than they are different. Frankl6 and othersL3 have pointed out that every human being must face tragedy, despair, death, suffering, and existential anxiety. Such feelings and situations cannot be evaded or permanently changed.3 
The presence of human tragedy in both client and.therapist is of significant consequence to the outcome of treatment. 10 Recognition and acceptance of tragedy by both can lead to engagement and self-transcendence. Denial of human tragedy cheats both client and therapist because it prevents authenticity between them which is based on their common responsibility of finding meaning in an often chaotic and painful universe. The therapists' responsibility for entering the clients' lives in a way that promotes client growth can occur only when therapists recognize a common bond between themselves and the clients. 1. 10 This common bond is different from superficial identification. It can only exist with the therapists' realization of tragedy in human existence and their willingness to find meaning in spite of tragedy and pain. The therapist's vigorous yes to life, as it really is, is experienced by the client as a core and basic sense of permission to grow.1,10,14 
JAMES E. LANTZ, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor, Ohio State University, College ofSocial Work, and Clinical Director ofVillage Counseling Associates, Columbus, Ohio. 
REFERENCES 
I. Andrews, E. "Understanding and Working with Family Units, "in Eisenberg, S. and Patterson, 
L. (eds.). Helping Clients with Special Concerns. Chicago, Rand McNally, 1979. 
2. 
Buber, M. Between Man and Man. London, Paul Kegan, 1947. 

3. 
Camus, A. The Myth of Sis)phus. New York, Alfred Knopf, 1955. 

4. 
Curry, A. "The Family Therapy Situation as a System." Familr Process, 5, 131-141, 1966. 

5. 
Fahry, J. The Pursuit of Meaning. San Francisco, Harper and Row, 1980. 

6. 
Frankl, V. The Will to Meaning. New York, New American Library, 1969. 

7. 
Haley, J. Problem Solving Therapy. San Francisco, Josscy Bass, 1976. 

8. 
Lantz, J. Familr and Marital Therapy. New York, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1978. 

9. 
Lant7, J. "Meaning in Family Therapy." International Forum/or Logorherapy, 5(1), 44-46, 1982. 


IO. Mullan, H. and I. Sanguilliano. The Therapist's Contribution to the Treatment Process. Springfield, Charles C. Thomas, 1964. 
11. Skynner, R. "Group Analysis and Family Therapy," International Journal of Group Psychotherapy, 34, 215-224. 1984. 
12. 
Strupp, H. "Towards an Analysis of the Therapist's Contribution to the Treatment Process," Psychiatry, 22. 249-362, 1959. 

13. 
Sullivan, H. The Psychiatric lntervies. New York, W.W. Norton, 1953. 

14. 
Yalom, I. Existential Psychotherapy. New York, Basic Books, 1980. 


Logodrama and Philosophical Psychotherapy 
William S. Sahakian 

In logotherapy we seek meanings to enrich our lives and to place them on course for more effective and healthful living. Psychotherapists should not enforce their own meanings on others, because what might prove meaningful in one person's life need not hold much (if any) meaning in another's. True, the temptation is there, but it would be professionally unethical to do so. Why is it that the meanings which enrich our lives do not have the same importance for others? When something is richly meaningful for us, it is hard for us to understand why it should not be meaningful for others. Often this predicament drives logotherapists to search for a good test or questionnaire designed to uncover meanings designed for a given patient. 
Definition of Philosophical Logodrama 
There is, however, a simple, yet excellent, objective test for finding meanings in a patient's life. I have used it with remarkable results. So as not to confuse it 33 I
with the "logotherapeutic group session" that Frankl calls "logodrama,"3• p. have termed it philosophical logodrama. It was described briefly in an earlier paper: 
Modifying Frankl's logodrama in order to extend its utilitarian value, the senior author on a number of occasions when employing logotherapy has instructed clients to imagine themselves in their eighties or nineties with life behind them, and to report what they would most like to have accomplished in life, to provide if possible a table of priority of values that would have given one the most satisfaction in life. In this manner, the determination both for the therapist and the client concerning what is most meaningfully worthwhile in life is facilitated. From this vantage point, both the client and therapist are properly oriented to pursue a meaningful life for the client and 
, P· 241
a successful therapeutic session for the psychotherapist. 10 
When is Philosophical Logodrama Indicated? 
Having been successful with philosophical logodrama, I utilize it whenever the opportunity presents itself. Actually, philosophical logodrama is so simple to administer that any interested logotherapist can employ it without extensive training. 
One of the most valuable aspects of philosophical logodrama is its ability to bring into focus the patient's meanings in life. A difficult task for the logotherapist is to assist patients in finding those meanings that are relevant io them without becoming subjective by imputing the therapist's personal meanings to the patient. What is meaningful for the therapist is rarely meaningful for the patient, at least it is not as significant as it is for the therapist. 
But it is still more difficult to find meanings that hold value for the lives of patients. Logotherapists wrestle with the temptation of convincing patients to acquire ( or at least to consider) meanings they themselves cherish rather than spending endless hours in search of meanings pertinent to the patient's life. True, some meanings hold universal value, yet in therapy it is usually not the universal meanings, but the particular ones that are relevant to the patient's life, and prove effective in restoring mental health. 
Application of Philosophical Logodrama 
Although, as a logotherapist, I have employed philosophical logodrama on a number of occasions, there was one patient with whom the results were dramatically effective. Rather than mingling several case studies in discussing logodrama, I shall concentrate on this specific one by treating it in depth. 
The patient, having just passed her thirtieth birthday, was despondent over bidding her youth farewell. Why so many women (and men) think that once reaching the age of thirty, life deteriorates, I cannot comprehend. This particular woman, however, was quite pretty, and perhaps she felt that her attractiveness had peaked, and all that remained was withering. 
But her problems were compounded, leaving age but a miniscule consideration; nevertheless age loomed high in her mind as a gnawing concern. The fact that she had seen a psychiatrist for years availed her little; nor did it do much to alleviate her depressed state. Not that the psychiatrist was found wanting, for he was highly respected. Rather, it was psychoanalytic therapy that had failed this patient. She seemed to have had her fill of psychoanalysis because when she came to me she insisted on undergoing existential psychotherapy, but in any case something other than psychoanalysis. 
Existential Psychotherapy and Logotherapy 
Although Frankl4• p. 13 often refers to logotherapy as existential psychiatry, this patient did not have logotherapy in mind when requesting existential psychotherapy. She was in quest of autonomy, the ability to make choices, and authentic selfhood, the features stressed by existential psychotherapists such as the American psychologist Rollo May,H the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Bins
423 448
wanger, 1 and the entire existential school of p~ychotherapy. 10 · rr. 
Existential psychotherapy is rooted in the German philosophy of Martin Heideggcr5 and the Danish philosophy of Soren Kicrkegaard.6 Existential psychotherapy rests heavily on the Hcideggerian concept of Dasein, and the Kierkegaardian view of freedom, choice, and anxiety. Like Frankl's existentialism (and I loathe to use the term "existentialism" when referring to Frankl's psychotherapy), both existentialism and logotherapy lay great emphasis on the individual's assuming "responsibility. "They likewise stress "consciousness" and "individualism." According to existentialists, freedom and choice render individuals authentic, with genuine rather than spurious selves. To lose oneself in the crowd by following group behavior makes for anonymity, the loss of individuality, and consequently the forfeiture of personal identity (genuineness or selfhood). By choice, fatalism is transcended. Also through choice, awareness is heightened, persons transcend themselves, and authentic selfhood is gained because people arc thereby enabled to choose the personality they seek to become. Paraphrasing Socrates, Kierkegaard admonishes: "Choose thyself!" 
The crux of existential psychotherapy is the encounter of patient and therapist. In existential psychotherapy, therapists refrain from making choices for their patients. Rather, as facilitators, they aid patients in making their own responsible choices, notwithstanding confronting obstacles and difficulties. Patients transcend the self, they are becoming the self they prefer to be. 
Kairos, Presence, and the I-Thou Relationship 
Patients are not things to be manipulated. On the contrary, the entire therapeutic process is an "I-thou" relationship, as Martin Buber2· r-3 phrased it, so as to prevent the psychotherapeutic process from being reduced to an "I-it" relationship. I do not have the source at the tip of my fingers, but Buber had a critical experience in which he was late for an important engagement. I believe he was to be on the air and could not be delayed. A young man, however, approached him, pleading for help. But Buber brushed him aside saying that he would attend to him on his return, and promptly left for his appointment. Apparently, the young man could not wait, for when Buber arrived he found that the fellow had committed suicide. 
Buber felt that if he had treated them.an as a person rather than as a thing (an impediment to be thrust aside), an "I-thou" relationship would have been established, and he would have attended to this man's need despite his own pressing appointment. Instead, he viewed his relationship with the man as an "I-it," a "thing" that was in his way to be circumvented. Patients are not things to be manipulated, to be thrust aside, or to be treated as a "thing" or as a mere impersonal object that happens to be in the room. They are human beings with pressing needs requiring special assistance. Often the situation is such that if you do not personally help them, and help them when they request it, irreparable damage can result. 
The "I-thou" relationship as found in existential psychotherapy is a genuine human "presence" that both therapist and patient undergo together as an interpersonal experience. "Kairos" too is an important existential tenet, for it represents the moment of decision, the turning point in therapy and in the patient's life. While existential psychotherapy and logotherapy share some common views, the two are distinctively different psychotherapies. 
The Patient and Her Condition 
When my thirty-year-old patient first came to me, it was obvious that she had not one but a number of problems; worse still, each seemed to compound others. Being pretty, she had little difficulty attracting men. This married mother of two young children left her husband to shack up with an artist. It soon became apparent why. She fancied herself an artist, or at least a student of art. Her appreciation for art was evident. Influenced by her paramour, the artist, she was on hashish. 
The Initial Psychotherapeutic Session 
As I often do during the initial psychotherapeutic session with a patient, I asked what she hoped to accomplish during therapy. Usually I prefer patients to focus on one major concern. This woman, however, had a number of them disturbing her. Above all she wanted a personality that was strong and decisive. Most of all she desired the ability to make choices, decisions of her own choosing, choices of crucial import. Up to now everyone else seemed to make decisions for her: her parents, her mother-in-law, her husband, and her lover. She wanted to be strong enough to escape their influence, especially with respect to the things that affected her personal life. 
But she wanted much more. She wanted help in divorcing her husband. She sought freedom from hashish, and even to be freed from her paramour. Paradoxically, she requested help in making highly personal decisions affecting her future, educational plans, and career goals. Worse still, she wanted all of these concerns attended to at the same time. Needless to say they could not be. 
In her early sessions she kept injecting the matter of divorcing her husband, but as often as she mentioned it, I would suggest that we leave that consideration for a later session. Concerns that troubled me about her situation were more basic. She had to get off hashish, and she had to escape the clutches ofher lover. Once I had the assurance that these were accomplished, the direction of therapy moved toward setting her life and personality in order. At this point philosophical logodrama came into play. 
The Utilization of Philosophical Logodrama 
It was close to three months ofseeing this patient approximately twice a week before I utilized "philosophical logodrama." The reason for its implementation was that I could not discern from the patient what was truly important to her. What did she really want to get out of life? What were the most meaningful things in life for her? The more I asked. the less she told me. 
Did it mean that she was a victim ofexistential neurosis? From appearances it would seem so. But I was convinced that it was otherwise. Her only boredom was with her messed up life. Actually, she did not want to share with me that which mattered most in her life because she was too embarrassed to reveal it to anyone. Thus it was left for me to differentiate those things which were meaningful in her life, and the search was consuming too much time from each session. I had to find out what these meanings were. I had to break down her recalcitrance. Unless I did, our therapeutic sessions would be reduced to one lengthy exercise in futility. 
Thus I turned to philosophical logodrama. I asked her to bring to the next session a slip of paper on which she listed the things that to her were most meaningful, in order of priority. Included would be an inventory of things to which she aspired, or that she had already accomplished which left her with a deep sense ofsatisfaction. Things she cared most for would be listed with things she hoped to get out oflife. "List ten items on the slip if possible," I said, "at least five." Her assignment was to inform me what life could expect from her being here on earth. More important than what she wanted to get out oflife was what contribution she wanted to make to this world. What legacy would she leave behind enabling her to bid a fond farewell to life? It must be something that would leave her with the feeling that she had a good life. 
How disappointing the next session was when she came with nothing in hand. The session came and went. We made no headway. She liked to talk, but not of things of any significance. It was difficult to keep her from straying from the subject of the meaningfulness of her life. 
I needed a breakthrough iffurther progress was to be made. To avoid further disappointment, I instructed her that before coming to the next session, she was to post a piece of paper in front of her. in a place where she spends most of her time. That happened to be in the kitchen. so I told her to tape it to the wall or cabinet or refrigerator. where she would be most apt to sec it. Her assignment was to jot thoughts on it as they came to her. Rearrange them in order ofpriority if that was necessary. 1suggested that the best way to do it is by visualizing herself at ninety on her death-bed. Reflecting on her life. she was to ponder as to whether she was pleased with the life she lived. She was to meditate on her accompli~hments. on those things ~he wanted to get out oflife so that she could take pleasure rn saying to herself: "I lived a good life. I have no regrets. It was all so well worthwhile." I closed the ses,ion with: "Report the results to me al our next session." 
It worked! So weil did it work. and so effective was it that we had our breakthrough. The difference was the paper serving as her constant reminder. It not only reminded her, but it served as her conscience. To face it challenged her sense of responsibility. It stood as a constant reminder that did not allow for excuse. 
This session proved climactic. She revealed things that embarrassed her and which inhibited her from daring to undertake this task. She had kept secret things that were of greatest importance and meaning to her. but felt that if she shared them with anyone she would be laughed at. It was easier for her to write them on paper and. at that, only when alone, and to deliver them to me in the form of a note instead of voicing them. She did not want to hear herself uttering these meanings that were sacred to her, especially in front of another person. It was not that these meanings were so sacred. it was her sense of inferiority, her belief that she was demanding from life more than she thought herself capable of or even worthy of. She must have thought to herself: "Who do I think I am to expect so much from life?" or "It is audacious ofme to presume to give so much to life." 
But she did not expect more from life than she was capable of delivering. What she wanted was to be an artist. Not only an artist, but an art critic to boot. Still more, she wanted to use painting in a manner that would benefit others. This would be her legacy to the world. 
Her work was cut out for her. She knew what she would have to do. What she needed was support. Support is one of the major contributions a psychotherapist can offer patients. She arranged to go to the Museum of Fine Arts. There she became involved with their school ofart. She studied. She needed a job, and due to her diligence she found one. It was precisely what she needed, a task of teaching problem-youth painting. She used painting to reach them, to get them to express their feelings and emotions through painting, and for them to have a psychotherapeutic experience through painting. 
What more could she ask for? What a gift she had to offer others. Life for her began when she transcended herself, when she stopped living merely for self and began contributing to the lives of others. What a great feeling to be able to leave the world better than when you found it, that the world is a better place for your having lived on earth. 
In just a matter of months miracles (at least in her estimation) took place. She realized important meanings. She felt a deep sense of accomplishment. Life was meaningful; it was good to be alive. She was contributing to the lives of others, and that became an important meaningful event in her own life. When I told her that I was now ready to discuss her divorce. she blurted: "I don't want a divorce: I love my life: I love my children; l love my husband." When life acquires rich meanings, everything is wonderful. With her own life in order, divorce had lost its meaning. 
When I announced that our psychotherapeutic sessions had come to a close, she agreed to go along with my decision but with the proviso that should she need me in the future I would be willing to accept her as a patient. Six months later she phoned. I wondered what had gone awry. Happy was I on learning that she merely wanted to report that all was well with her life, her marriage, and her family. She merely felt the need to express her appreciation. 
Were it not for philosophical logodrama, l fear logotherapy with this patient might have had to have been aborted. Why philosophical lor;odrama is not used more in therapy i~ probably due to the fact that it is not widely known. Its utilization should be encouraged as an effective instrument for discerning those meanings that lie latent in patients, and for those meanings that patients are not cognizant ofwhile undergoing the process oflogotherapy. It is certainly a major strategem in the arsenal of psychotherapy. 
WILLIAM S. SAHA KIAN, Ph.D., a practicing logotherapist, chairs the Department of Philosophy at Suffolk University. Boston. 
REFERENCES 
I. Binswanger. L Heing-in-1/1('-\,\Vrld New York. Basic. 1962. 
2. Huher. M. I and Jhou. 2nd ed. New York, Scrihner. 1958. 
3. 
Frankl. V. E. Ps1·cho1heran and t.x'istentialism: Seleczed papers on logotherapr. !\cw York, Washington Square Pre,s. 1967. 

4. 
___ The Unheard Crrfur Meanin1s: AychothPrapr and Humanism. New York. Simon and Schuster. 1978. 


5. 
Heidegger, M. Being and Time. New York. Harper & Row, 1962. 

6. 
Kierkegaard. S. Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Princeton. NJ. Princeton University Press, 1941. 


, . May. R. ··contrihutions of Existential Psychotherapy." In May, R. ct al. (eds.), Exis1enre: A New Dimemion in Aychiatn and Psrchu/ugy. New York. Basic. 1958, 87-91. 
8. ___ "Existential Basis of Psychotherapy." 2nd ed. In May. R. (ed.), Existential Psrcholugr. New York. Random House, 1969. 
9. Sahakian. W. S. Psychotherapy and Counseling: Techniques in Intervention. 2nd. ed. Hmton, Houghton Mifllin, 1976. 
IO. Sahakian. W. S. and Sahakian. B. J. "Logotherapy as a Personality Theory.'" Israel Annals of Psrchiacrr and Related Disciplines, 1972, JO. 230-244. 

Just before the Forum went to press, we were shocked and grieved to learn that Professor Sahakian died of a massive heart attack. 
Professor Sahakian was noted for his theory of psychological clinical treatment called stoic philosophical psychotherapy, which he used in the private psychotherapy practice he conducted since 1951. 
In his biography in "Who's Who in America" in 1976, Dr. Sahakian described his philosophy of life: 
"Complete confidence in oneself with a committed sense of purpose greatly aids in the realization of one's goals. A zest derived from the excitement of competition and a 'joie de vivre' enhances a person's opportunity for success; and in turn a joy of living is a concomitant of a sense of achievement and fulfillment." 
He received numerous awards, among them a meritorious achievement award in psychiatry and an Outstanding Educators of America award. 
He was horn in Boston. He received his bachelor of science at Northeastern University with a major in psychology and sociology in 1944; a Ph.D. at Boston University in philosophy in 1951, and a Master of Divinity degree at Boston University in 1947. Dr. Sahakian also held an honorary degree from Curry College in Milton and did graduate study for seven years at Harvard. 
Dr. Sahakian also was author of nearly two dozen hooks, scores of articles and chapters. 
He was a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Massachusetts Philosophical Association and the American Philosophical Association. 
Dr. Sahakian was a personal friend of Dr. Viktor Frankl and was instrumental in introducing Dr. Frankl to the American scene. Dr. Sahakian was an outstanding logotherapist in theory and practice, and logotherapy loses in him an illustrious spokesman and good friend. 
The Institute of Logotherapy, Berkeley 

39 
Logotherapy East -West 
Rudolph Krejci 

When World War II ended, aside from the destruction and loss of lives, the main problems of living assumed their traditional setting and prewar thinking reemerged within the same Western framework of ideas and values. Physical reconstruction was only marginally complemented by mental and spiritual reconstruction. Like after World War 1, when only Albert Schweitzer and Mahatma Gandhi and their followers were seen as giving hope and reassurance that humanity could prevail among the prevalent barbarism so after World War II Viktor Frankl's teaching radiated optimism, affirming a life guided by search for meaning, thus becoming a spiritual and inspirational message for his growing number offollowers. In both cases the spiritual sparks were accompanied by the ideological and political fighting ofthe superpowers, and the cultural exhaustion in the general Ptolemaic ethnocentricity of Western culture. 
Viewing the history ofthe past forty years, two unique major ways ofthinking emerged. One is the new scientific tradition of quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity; the other is the world of the East and its variety of non-Western values which were generally ignored by the Western educated public. Within the two traditions different sets of assumptions produced a transitional shift which changed the entire fabric of today's world culture. A deeper awareness by both produced close affinities between a growing number of thinkers and scientists, West and East. 
Within the growth of logotherapy in the postwar period were trends that contributed to overall integration on the psychological and the cultural/crosscultural level. Frankl emerged from the Western tradition of thinking and the dehumanizing atmosphere of World War II. At the same time, Hiroshi Takashima (whose internment in Japan is little known in the West) combined the oriental tradition ofthinking and values. With a complementary formulation of logo-philosophy in both theory and practice. Frankl and Takashima are medical doctors and philosophers integrating within their respective traditions the complementary aspect ofa new human science. Both inspired followers all over the world: they worked on the new synthesis which one day will represent the unification of all human efforts, past and present, to guide the race in the future. 
I discussed these ideas of integration and synthesis with Takashima. As I seek a universal acquaintance with Western ideas and also with non-Western paradigms of human thinking and values I have become acquainted with fundamental differences between Eastern and Western cultural traditions -Eastern and Western logos (meaning) -which I will describe through my own categories of understanding. 
The following comparisons between the predominant Western and Eastern world views are derived from a few basic and differing assumptions about human nature, the world, and how to view the relationships between them. The presentation may seem analytical, but the final aim is a synthesis of the different and distinctive ways of thinking, and the corresponding pragmatic projections in everyday living. 1 
TRADITIONAL WORLD VIEWS WESTERN EASTERN 
The World and the Human Being 
objective survival of fittest emphasis on individual young age is the goal 
conquest of nature aggressiveness time = live it up now adversary relationship each day is a means to some end self-assurance emphasis on written verbal ability important life worth living in reaching goals, 
accomplishments emphasis on intellect one works for goals 
private property of land unlimited rights of ownership subjective survival through cooperation emphasis on social group old age = wisdom 
worship of ancestors harmony with nature patience time is like a river complementary relationship daily experience -goal in itself appearance of modesty emphasis on oral listening ability important life loved in living it 
emphasis on the whole of man 
one enjoys working not being in a hurry to finish it 
Land use of land one cannot really own land, only use 
it temporarily 
Logic 
impersonal, cool, abstract, dictatorial yes =yes; no =no yes cannot be no and vice versa 
opposition of is and is not 
human-made to assist people to find fulfillment 
yes slides over to no, and no into yes; no walls between yes and no 
unity of is and is not, and nonexistence and existence 
Humans and Machines 
glorification of mechanical devices, machine is god 
machine acts as a person 
a person like a machine is sum of replaceable parts; humans are goods-producing mechanism machine is noncreative, impersonal, has no meaning 
machine knows no ethics and aesthetics 
emphasis on life as a whole 
Psychology 
psychology = "rat"ology  psychology  -nonexistent  
analytical -apart from medicine and philosophy  incorporates the soul into the whole  
mechanistic degradation of human personality expressed in behaviorism, conditioned reflex, artificial  

insemination. automation. vivisection, H-bomb 
life is exterminated, dissected in order to be studied 
treats malfunctioning parts 
Medicine psychosomatic 
treats the whole 
one secs the doctor only when one preventive medicine, maintaining the 
has to; interest of doctor and patient are opposite 
fragmentary-analytical quantitative, testomaniac 
object of art tells us what it is 
harmony of mind and body 
Education 
synthetical-how parts comprise the whole -understanding qualitative 
Aesthetics 
the observer tells the work of art what it is 
Culture 
result of mixing of heritages and  results through millennia accumu 
blood  lated experience of homogeneous  
people without mixing of heri 
tages, ideas, blood  
Religion  
monotheistic  pantheistic  
small part of life  way of life  

Christianity talks of Logos, Word, the world is no word, flesh is no Flesh, and Incarnation and temflesh; excarnation, silence, absorppestuous temporality tion, harmonious peace; silence 
roars like thunder 
Science 
theoretical-analytical-fragmentary practical-synthetical-pragmatical 
objective, mechanistic, deterministic, realistic, materialistic 3 dimensional space and 1 dimension 
of time causality without observer 
Philosophy 
abstract discipline with little or no relevance to life 
divide and conquer 
theory of knowledge, reality, values, being, mind, action, history, science 
fragmentary, compartmentalized causality 
more you talk-more you know less you talk-less you know 
silence -sign of ignorance doers do, not doing = laziness 
contradiction = greatest sin of our intellect 
skeptical undertones 
analytical 
science = philosophy = religion = literature =art 
just different aspects of the same enterprise of living 
observer is everything; future oriented (how); close touch with life 
those who know don't talk those who talk don't know 
by not doing you do; by doing you don't do 
paradox an overwhelming principle of life 
mystical undertones 
synthetical 
The generalizations expressed above can be criticized as being just that, generalizations. These columns contain differences even between categories within the columns but the categories are general distillations of many cultural traditions and not meant to be strictly representativ of each distinct culture. My intention is to propose common Occidental and Oriental assumptions in which diametrically opposed theories and practices are often evident. 
Conclusions 
The seemingly irreconcilable contradictions of East-West world views are the result of millennia-old Eastern philosophical value systems which organized their societies. In the West a relatively new way of thinking in the postRenaissance period emerged, expressed through Newton's mechanics, an elegant mathematical formulation ofthe laws governing the forces of the universe. The assumptions underlying Newton's mechanics found its application in the whole sphere of humanistic and social sciences. In this world view, regarded by many as the last word of science, the West declared everything that was non-Western as antagonistic, nonscientific, and obsolete. 
At the beginning of the twentieth century two new theories, relativity and quantum mechanics, slowly replaced Newtonian thinking. It was only a question of time when this new way of thinking, based on a radically different set of assumptions, would find its implications in a new world view. We should not be surprised to find these new theories to be the subject of multi vocal interpretations depending on the total human constitution and imagination of the individual interpreter. Those acquainted with the millennia-old cultures of the East discovered rather close affinities in the thinking and logics of the Orient, and this helped them to a new identity in their search. The variety of interpretations cannot be evaluated as right or wrong but rather toward a more or less convenient or imaginative formulation. 
We are now witnessing some new general features summarized in the following table. 
EMERGING COMPLEMENTARY WORLD VIEW 
as non-objective non-mechanistic non-deterministic non-fragmentary 
emerging potentialities -freedom space -time continuum 
Ontology: holistic, the world consists of processes of fields of energy 
Epistemology: knowledge consists of approximative pictures of holistic processes and their interrelations formulated at different levels of conventional temporary agreements (Stochastic and Baylesian methods) 
Axiology:  values in their totality represent the highest achievement of human race individually and collectively experimental and attitudinal values  
Principles: Formal Science:  anthropomorphism complementarity uncertainty there are no isolated or preferred places in the universe indecida bility assumptions father their children not vice versa process -fluctuation paradox holonomy post-Godellian mathematics Logic: complementary (both subject and object, idealistic and materialistic, question and answer  
Natural Science:  relativistic and quantum physics fully integrated with biology  
Psychology and Social Sciences:  non-deterministic psychology, sociology, economics, anthropology, politology become just different aspects of the new science of man and woman  
Philosophy:  unification of all the mental fields within which humans operate. There are no privileged mental places that the human mind can operate in. Let's put the fragments together again to be molded into a whole, thus ceasing to exist as fragments.  

GRAND UNIFICATION THEORY= RELIGION= SCIENCE= PHILOSOPHY= ART 
The new constructive role of philosophy is closely connected with the most advanced way of thinking in contemporary sciences, religions, and arts, and must create a new global synthesis from the elements oftraditional Western and Eastern ways of thinking. As in the past when Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Descartes, Hume, Confucius, Lao-Tse, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed and others offered a new constructive synthesis, the new emerging synthesis will affect people worldwide as never in the past.2 
Logo philosophy's Role 
Philosophy has to take the responsibility for precisely the role long vacated during the progressive fragmentation of human endeavor during the last few centuries. Logophilosophy has contributed more than any other postwar school of thought to the internal integration of human nature within medicine, psychiatry, psychology, and related fields including education, and so is ideally suited to facilitate a new creative synthesis of beliefs, ideas and practices in the various cultural tranditions of today's world.3 
The search for Ultimate Meaning unifying religion, science, philosophy and art will in due time provide us with a new constructive synthesis unifying East and West in the form of a new world view. 
RUDOLPH KREJCI, Ph.D. is professor ofphilosophy, University ofAlaska, Fairbanks. 
REFERENCES to books and articles that helped focus on the ideas expressed in this essay. 
I. Nakamura. Hajime. Parallel Development, Kodansha LTD. Tokyo, New York. 1975, pp. 475-567. ___ Ways of Thinking ofEastern People. East-West Center Press. Honolulu, 1964, pp. 
3-40. Northrop, F. S. C. Meeting uf East and West, Macmillan Co., I 946, pp. 1-15. 
2. 
Bene,ch, Walter and Krejci. Rudolph. An Introduction to Thinking. University ofAlaska, Fair

banks, Alaska, 1986, pp. 100-106. ___ An Introduction to Logics. University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Alaska, 1985, pp. 1-64. 

3. 
Fabry. Joseph. The Frontiers of Logotherapy, Analecta Frankliana, 1980. pp. 331-339. Stark. Patricia. Logotherapy Comes ofAge: Birth of11 Theon·, International Forum for Logothcrapy. Vol. 8, No. 2. 1985. pp. 71-75. Takashima, Hiroshi. l.ogotherapy und Buddhistic Thought, International Forum for Logotherapy, Vol. 8, No. I. 1985, pp. 54-56. Kovacs, George. Vik tor E. Frankl's Place in Philosophy, International Forum for l.ogothcrapy, 


Vol. 8, No. I, 1985, pp. 17-21. Edwards. Cliff. Logotherapy and Zen, Analecta Frankliana, 1980. pp. 301-309. 
Logotherapy and the Amish: 
Meaning and the Maintenance of a Traditional Society 
Henry Troyer 

During the past decades, a strong movement in Western societies has been striving toward alternate and simpler life styles, in an effort to escape the "rat race" of modern urban living, and aspire to a life that offers meaning and fulfillment. It is a movement from a familiar life style to an unfamiliar one; from well-trodden to long abandoned paths; from a life providing little meaning to one rich in meaning. This movement may be a reaction to the problems introduced in society (e.g., personal insensitivity and materialism) during the shedding of its traditions. Traditions provided security and stability, an "obligative quality" to meaning and values. With the loss of traditions, an important "guiding principle" is lost. 2 This movement attempts to recapture some of these losses. 
Nearly everyone in modern urban society is independently mobile, police and fire departments offer their services, commercial insurance provides protection against any conceivable kind of misfortune. Welfare, unemployment benefits and workmen's compensation provide safeguards against inability to support oneself and family. Many risks therefore have been removed or taken over by institutions. We consider such services essential to modern living, but also have relinquished our need to exercise survival skills. Life has been made easy with modern labor-saving conveniences and gadgets providing us with much leisure time. Part of the challenge of living has been removed. Without challenges and struggles, life for many people becomes empty and meaningless, a condition which Viktor Frankl calls the "existential vacuum. "2• P-83 
It may be of "therapeutic" value to examine societies that have chosen to retain a traditional life style and reject risk-removing institutions and laborsaving aspects of modern life. The Amish are such a society. They have successfully maintained their traditional ways along with their values and beliefs in the face of relentless external pressure to conform to the dominant American society. 
From the vantage point of mainstream America, the Amish would seem to be sacrificing many of the physical comforts and pleasures of modern living. Are they compensated for those sacrifices? Since their members are not coerced by any economic or political system to remain Amish, what keeps them together as a community? What does the community offer to entice its members to remain a part of it? 
This paper aims to show that by successfully resisting the pressures to conform, they have also avoided the existential vacuum of dominant Western society. 
The Amish Way of Life 
The Amish trace their roots to the Anabaptist movement ofthe Reformation. It began in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1525, and spread rapidly throughout much of central and northern Europe. The Mennonites were one of the main groups to emerge from the Anabaptist movement, and the Amish were a conservative split offthe Mennonites. During the 18th and 19th centuries, many ofthe Amish migrated to the United States where they flourished. Those who stayed in Europe were eventually assimilated back into the Mennonites. 
The Old Order Amish people live in nuclear families in rural communities of relatively closed enclaves. More than I00 such communities exist in the United States and Canada. Many are small, twenty or twenty-five families, but a few communities consist of hundreds, even thousands. of families. The largest Amish community is in Holmes County, Ohio, and surrounding areas. The best known and second largest is in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Amish communities are found in a11 Midwestern states as well as in Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Montana, and Texas. 
The Amish shun most modern conveniences and labor-saving devices. They generally do not use electricity or modern communications (telephones. radios, television). Farming and tramportation are accomplished with horses rather than with cars, tractors and other motorized vehicles. Another obvious distinction is their dress which is carried over from 19th century Europe with little modification. Materialism and conspicuous consumerism are absent. 
Other distinctions are less obvious. The Amish do not hold public offices or serve in the military forces. They have no church buildings but worship in their homes on a yearly rotation basis. Their value system stresses hard work, thriftiness, honesty, and mutual aid. 
The Amish are basically agricultural. They acquired their agricultural tradition in Switzerland, Alsace, and the Platinate, long before coming to North America. As tenant farmers in Europe, they established a reputation as excellent farmers because they practiced innovative agricultural methods and their above-mentioned values.8 They distinguished themselves with their well-kept farms. Tht:ir emphasis on tilling the soil has become a strong aspect of their character, and helped them maintain their isolation as the dominant American society became urbanized and industrialized. 
Conformity to an internal set of norms, a very prominent feature, is the primary method by which individuals adapt to the culture ofthe Amish. It helps them resist conforming to the dominant society, and maintenance of their own distinctive set of norms is therefore important in the maintenance of the status 
quo.4, p. 293 In outward appearance, this conformity gives rise to a remarkable degree of material uniformity. In Western society, a person's or family's status is made evident by dress, size and style of home, and mode of transportation. Dress among the Amish is nearly uniform. There is little room for variation in design, though some in color. Houses are similar in design, but much variation is permitted in room arrangement. The decor and other features are remarkably uniform. Transportation by horse and buggy is also uniform and normally leaves no room for showing off status or wealth. The only exception is among 
unmarried young men who tend to drive slick, spirited horses with harnesses decorated with shiny loops and rings. 
This material uniformity safeguards against focusing undue attention on material aspects. By not emphasizing material things, the Amish concentrate on the intangible securities of life, particularly human relationships. 
Existential Aspects of Work 
Maintaining dignity and respect are very much a part ofthe occupation of an Amish person. The most respectable occupation for an Amish man is farming, and most young men aspire to own and operate a family farm. Most building trades, particularly carpentry and masonry, are honorable, such as logging, sawmilling, butchering, harness-making, and blacksmithing. Factory work and unskilled jobs carry little honor and are below the dignity of most Amish people. Employment by a non-Amish business is considered degrading. It is common, however, for a young man to work as an unskilled laborer for a few years to accumulate some capital before starting his own farm. Working as an unskilled laborer is more acceptable if it is understood to he temporary employment. 
It is no accident that the respectable occupations are those in which the work supports and integrates the community. For instance logging, sawmilling, carpentry and cabinet-making arc important in building and maintaining Amish farm buildings. Buggy-building, harness-making and blacksmithing are clearly occupations serving a society that uses horses for transportation and farming. The least desirable occupations are those which do not serve the community. 
The shortage of farm land in the larger Amish settlements forces many families to find non-farming employment, particularly factory work.9 This situation creates a tension between values and reality. 
Unemployment in the Amish society is nearly absent, according to the 1980 
U.S. census. It is not their practice to accept unemployment or any kind of government benefits. By not accepting modern labor-saving devices, they escape the pitfall of"unintentional leisure called unemployment" and its associated neurosis.3· p. 24 Unemployment benefits are to compensate for lack of income, hut as Frankl says, "Financial compensation, or for that matter social security, is not enough. One does not live by welfare alone. "3• P 5 
The Problems of Wealth 
For the Amish, maintaining the dignity and honor ofwork is more important than compensation. High paying jobs and wealth in general are not sought after, perhaps because wealth would create the awkward condition of inequity. Wealth and consumerism are played down. Wealth creates a problem in the Amish society, as it does in many traditional societies, because there is no acceptable method for "enjoying" or displaying such wealth. For instance in the Yoruba society of southwestern Nigeria, conspicuous consumerism by a wealthy person would suggest to other society members that the person has engaged in insufficient charity_ 1. P· 35 
This practice of eschewing wealth leads to a paradox. There is a good correlation between the proportion of a township's population that is Amish (determined from the Ohio Amish Directory, 1981) and the proportion of people living below the poverty line (determined from the 1980 U.S. Census). Therefore, according to government reckoning, many of the Amish live in poverty. The Amish would not admit, however, that any significant amount of poverty exists among themselves. Among the surrounding non-Amish community, the Amish are generally perceived as being wealthy -which, incidently, the Amish also deny. 
Maintenance of a Tradition 
There is a deliberate attempt by the Amish to perpetuate a traditional way of life. They arc distinctive both in outward appearance (driving horse and buggy and wearing 19th century European garb) and in their inward beliefs and values. In outward appearance, they have not always been distinctive. In earlier years, their external appearance was similar to their non-Amish neighbors; their distinctiveness was primarily int heir creed. As their surrounding world changed and shifted toward the present modern state, the Amish, by not participating in the changes, became increasingly distinctive. Gradually this increased distinctiveness, and their consciousness of it. helped develop a strong sense of community. It also helped to give concrete expression to their interpretation of the Biblical concept of being separated from the world. 
Their separateness is maintained by keeping out the external influences that would make them compromise their internal standards and entice them to accept the standards of the dominant society. One way to block external influences is to limit exposure to the news and advertising media. Hence radio and television are forbidden. Most households do not subscribe to newspapers or news magazines. They nearly all receive The Budget, a weekly tabloid published at Sugarcreek, Ohio, which carries mostly letters from Amish correspondents throughout North America. Thus, they are poorly informed about current events. The isolation, achieved by screening out external influences, protects them from compromising their traditional beliefs, and serves to focus attention on the reality of their own world. 
The religious faith of the Amish pervades every aspect oftheir lives. They feel that living off the land, tilling the soil and staying close to nature keeps them in close communication with God. It is their belief that modern conveniences and mechanization induce pride and leisure which prevent a close relationship with God. Their life is well suited to a rural, agrarian setting, in which they are comfortable. They see the cities as places of laziness, leisure, temptation, wickedness, and violence. 
Members of the Amish society are highly dependent on each other. Their lifestyles do not permit a high degree of individual autonomy. They perpetuate conditions that promote dependence on each other, and discourage conditions that promote independence. Interdependence mandates strong interpersonal relationships. Such relations must be cultivated lest they risk alienation from each other. 
This emphasis on relationships and security rather than on material gain is common in traditional soC1et1es. After years of studying the economics of fertility in developing countries, J.C. CaldwelJI· r. 33 stated that "the emphasis in tropical Africa and other Third World societies tends to he far more on security and on being guaranteed survival through times ofduress than it is on maximizing profits in good times." Commenting on the importance of relationships among the Julani people of Upper Volta, Paul Riesman7• r. 71 stated that "we are not dealing with a society of consumption, so to speak. Human energy not engaged in production of goods for subsistence is used to maintain relations between people -not only to maintain them but to maintain them in a particular form." 
Security based on interdependence and relationships is therefore not unique to the Amish. What is significant is that they have deliberately retained and culti\ ated this kind of security rather than to succumb to thegesellsdwft-type of security offered by the industrialized society around them. 
Eschewing materialism and modern labor-saving devices is necessary to maintain the Amish wav of life for a number of reasons. Materialism and consumerism arc rejected because they induce pride and competitiveness. whereas humility and self-depreciation are virtues striven for. Labor-saving devices make individuals and family units more independent of others in the community. Independence, however, is frowned upon hecause the society rather than the individuals or families are important. Also, labor-saving devices free up time for leisure and idleness, which are considered evils breeding discontent. 
The wisdom of rejecting laborsaving devices is illustrated hy the experience of the Hutterites (spiritual cousins of the Amish). The Hutterites decided years ago to use modern labor-saving devices (e.g., mechanized farming) and to engage in limited consumerism (e.g., to buy rather than make their own shoes). This has led to excessive idleness and unemployment among the young men.6 
Meaning During Old Age 
Aged members of the Amish continue to be fully integrated into their society. They are honored and respected. Younger members solicit their advice and opinions on farming methods, childrearing, and unusual problems that may arise. Older members cherish the memories of the past and continue to live in a transcendental way through their children who are now living the kind of lives that they themselves had lived. Frankl likes to quote Martin Heidegger: "Das Vergangene geht; das Gewesene kommt which he translates to "What has passed, has gone; what is past, will come." The temporal aspects ofthe past have fled, but we can continue to live the experiences ofthe past. Older Amish people who have accumulated financial resources are expected to make low-interest loans to younger people who start farming. Old people who are disabled are never sent to nursing homes and are rarely institutionalized. They are cared for by the family and community. 
Retirement in an Amish community is not an abrupt change from full to non-employment. An older couple gradually decreases their productivity, and unloads their responsibilities. A farmer couple who wish to discontinue farming will find a way to continue to work and be productive. They may move away from the farm, but most likely will remain on the farm and move into a smaller house (the Daady haus, present on most Amish farms). The man may take up another occupation -but may also simply continue to work on the farm, helping the new owners who most likely are a married son or daughter. The wife will continue with the household responsibilities. Rarely does an Amish couple retire in the sense that they cease to make any contributions to the community. 
There is no need for older people to boast of their continued productivity or of their assistance to the younger members. They are expected to support the community, especially the young. The old are still a part of the community; it's still their community. When they become disabled and require continued care from other members, they will not feel guilty for being a burden to society. Care for the aged is a family and community obligation taken for granted. 
This strong intergenerational integration provides stability and assures that older members continue to feel useful and needed. The process of aging is therefore not dreaded as it is when members ofa society are removed from their lifetime surroundings and made to feel a liability to society. The Amish experience existential aging as described by Frankl: "What will it matter to [the aged person] if he notices that he is growing older? Has he had any reason to envy the young person he sees, or wax nostalgic over his lost youth ... For the possibility open to a young person, the future that is in store for him? 'No, thank you,' he will think. 'Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These are the sufferings of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire. "'3, P-105 The lives of aging Amish persons are stable and secure, and they can live with a sense of fulfillment and satisfaction. 
Conclusion 
I have tried to show that members ofthe Amish society experience existential meaning by deliberately maintaining a traditional type of community. This article does not advocate that Western society return to a previous way of life. Rather, it points out that certain values logotherapy found health-promoting may have been abandoned too quickly in modern living, as for instance attainment of individual independence without a corresponding sense of responsibility. It may not be possible, or even desirable, in Western society to abandon labor-saving devices, but it has been shown by logotherapy5 that affluence and leisure can become breeding-grounds for existential frustration and noogenic neurosis. Logotherapists warn of the dangers of a pyramidal value system where one value is dominant and life becomes empty when this value is no longer attainable. Western societies are in danger that material goods, power. status, or pleasure may become such dominant values. The Amish experience confirms the "prescription" of logotherapy that self-transcendence is an important way to the meaningful life -the reaching out to others, be it family, community, friends or even strangers in need. The Amish know intuitively that softening life's struggles, adding conveniences, and seeking pleasure does not bring happiness and that their way of life, and not the direct pursuit of pleasure and happiness, brings meaning. 
HENRY TROYER, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Basic Life Sciences (Anatomy) at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, School of Medicine, Kansas City, Missouri. 
REFERENCES 
I. Caldwell. J.C. The Theory of Fertility Control. New York, Academic Press, 1982. 
2. 
Frankl. V. E. The Will to Meaning. New York. New American Library. 1969. 

3. 
____ The Unheard Crrfor Meaning. New York. Simon and Schuster. 1978. 

4. 
Hostetler. J. A. Amish Society. Third edition. Baltimore. The .Johns Hopkins University Press. 1980. 

5. 
Lukas. E. Meaningful Living. New York. Grove Press, 1986. 

6. 
Peters. F. "Evidence of Fertility Decline Among the Hutterites." Intercom (Population Reference Bureau). 1981. 9(5). 8-10. 

7. 
Riesman. P. Freedom in Fulani Social Life. Martha Fuller (Trans.). Chicago. The University of Chicago Prrss. 1977. 

8. 
Seguy. J. "Religion and Agriculture Stress: The Vocational Life ofthe French Mennonites from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Centuries." Michael Shank (Trans.). Mennonite Quarter/r Review, 1973. 47, 182-224. 

9. 
Troyer. H. and Willoughby. L. "Changing Occupational Patterns in the Holmes County, Ohio Amish Community." In Internal and External Per.spectives on Amish and Mennonite Life. Warner Enninj<er. ed. Essen, U niprcss, 1984. pp. 52-80. 


53 
Discerning Meaning Through a Self-Discovery Program 
Florence I. Ernzen 

This article summarizes a class and group activity based on Viktor Frankl's philosophy, held in a non-denominational Christian church. The program consisted of nine sessions, each presenting a lesson period followed by smallgroup sharing based on James C. Crumbaugh's exercises.2, P-189ff 
The purpose was to find personal meanings and develop goals that give life a sense ofdirection and worth. Twenty women participated, ages ranging from 30 to 75 years. 
Class Content 
Each class focused on specific concepts of logotherapy. Most class members were familiar with Man's Search/or Meaning, 3 but not with the application of logotherapy in their personal lives. Following is a list of lesson subjects. The exercises refer to Crumbaugh's book. 
I. Introduction and Overview Historical background and class description Exercise 1 -Finding a purpse in life, self-evaluation 
2. 
Explanation of logotherapeutic concepts including: Will to meaning, human dimension, spiritual distress, self-transcendence, and dereflection Exercise 1 -Continue with self-evaluation 

3. 
Self-Transcendence and the Meaning of Death Exercise 2 -"Acting As If' 

4. 
The Meaning of Love -Our lives in relation to others Exercise 3 -Establishing an encounter 

5. 
The Meaning of Work -Creative Values Exercise 4 -A-L, Creative values 

6. 
Experiential Values Exercise 5 -A-F, Finding values in experience 

7. 
The Meaning of Suffering -Attitudinal Values Exercise 6 -A and B, Finding values in attitudes 

8. 
Re-evaluation and Commitment Exercise 7 -Commitment 

9. 
Review and Celebration 


The exercises were given as assignments and became the basis for group discussion. 
Class members were encouraged to develop notebooks for study guides and exercises, and to clip articles about "ordinary" people who found meaning and purpose in their lives. This helped shift attention to the choices others had made, and their own potential to make choices. They saw opportunities everywhere to live with greater awareness and dedication. After a forty-minute lesson, each session focused on a specific concept oflogotherapy. I incorporated writings by other authors who present similar principles. 
I frequently quoted Norman Cousins, 1 because he writes eloquently of the triumphant power ofthe human spirit. We discussed the characteristics ofthose who have made significant contributions to others, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, Mother Theresa, and Gandhi. We explored their meaning orientation, noetic resources, and commitments to others and to causes. In the early sessions participants expressed an underlying dissatisfaction with their lives. They felt insignificant and tended to devalue their own history. The exercises encouraged a shift away from the missing parts to the bigger picture. They examined their past failures and successes and began to appreciate their uniqueness. As they explored the past they uncovered "lost" treasures. One woman remarked, "You have given me back my past." Within her past experiences she found unexpressed interests and talents she was now ready to pursue. The group members were generous in their support of each other. They showed tenderness and encouragement for quieter participants. 
Frankl's concepts provided food for thought. We discussed the meaning of work, of love, of suffering. There was a deep desire to understand logotherapy as a philosophy. The group developed a sense ofthe uniqueness and irreplaceability of each person. A new confidence and a new freedom allowed participants to live with a greater awareness of choice. They chose to handle their jobs with more attention. They enriched their relationships through concern for others. They took an extra moment to enjoy a sunrise. They brought new vitality to the group which served to motivate and strengthen others. 
Especially useful were the exercises of writing their own epitaphs, expressing the meaning of life in one word, and describing their most satisfying experiences. In small groups we explored the values represented in their answers. Responses were supportive and appreciative. The variety of the exercises, and the lessons on logotherapy, expanded their awareness. They began to see individual patterns in their past experiences, perceived the depth and breadth of their lives, and rethought their personal assessments. 
Exploring experiential values opened up many new experiences. Group members went hiking, visited an urban campus to see Taiwan dancers, signed up for a cruise, and attended an art auction. They expressed a new appreciation for the importance of these values. Prior to the class some members saw themselves as being very serious. They had not given themselves permission to enjoy life. They were delighted to relate their new experience. One could feel the energy and the "surprise" they enjoyed in discovering this unexpressed part of themselves. 
Class Assessment 
During the final meeting participants were free to express their assessment. Here are samples: Jeannine, age 60, "I always felt that what I did (for a living) was essentially insignificant, because it was not creative. It was not artistic or important. I have 
come to realize that I love my job. I love working with figures. I get lost in them. I am good at my work and I appreciate myself now. I cannot recall a more beautiful fall. The colors are more vibrant, the days more beautiful than ever before." 
Ellen, age 40, "I had so many daily tasks I hated. I felt they were insignificant and tiresome. Now I view them differently. Each task is now an assignment. I can choose how to go about doing them, whether it is charting records (she is a public health nurse) or some other routine. I find myself actually enjoying them. It is amazing." 
Gail, age 30, "I really didn't like myself when I started the class. My responsibilities seemed so continuous and overwhelming. (She is a homemaker with pre-school children.) I realized I had to change my feelings about myself. I have started an exercise and meditation program. I get up while the rest of the family is asleep and walk and start the day peacefully. I also take time to meditate. My whole day is different when I start the day this way." 
Claudia, age 58, "When I started the class I thought I wanted to change my life and travel. (She babysits each day.) As I read over my answers to the exercises I realized I was looking for peace in my life. The other day I had such an awakening. I was rocking a small boy, he was so relaxed. There was a little squirrel outside on a tree branch. I felt complete peace. I felt I was in touch with the infinite. I didn't want it to end. I wanted to hold on to that moment forever. The peace I wanted so much is available to me right where I am." 
Linda, age 65, "I have learned that sometimes we want changes in our lives, but they seem big and complex, and so we don't "do" anything. I have learned that just beginning to set a few goals or make a few plans sets a whole series of responses in motion. The universe really responds. You don't have to make big changes. Make small changes and you begin to move forward in wonderful ways you never would have dreamed possible." 
The feelings expressed by the participants were significant because they had become aware of the resources of their own human spirit. It was not because of the "teacher." They had discovered truths about themselves and taken responsibility. 
The Self-Discovery Program enriched all participants. It generated appreciation for oneself and others. The members expect to continue with the exercises on their own and continue adding to their notebooks. They asked for periodic meetings to refresh their understanding and renew friendships. 
FLORENCE I. ERNZEN, MWS, is a social worker in private practice in Dearborn Heights, Michigan. 
REFERENCES 
I. Cousins, Norman, Human Options. New York, Berkley Books, 1981. 
2. Crum baugh, James C. Everything to Gain: A Guide to Self-Fulfillment Through Logoanalvsis. Chicago, Nelson Hall. 1973. 
3. Frankl, Viktor E. Mans Search/or Meaning. New York, Washington Square Press, 1985. 
The International Forum for 
LOCOTHERAPY 
JOURNAi Of SEARCH FOR MEANINC