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(More customer reviews)Frankl's logotherapy enables people to once again discover the quality of life. Frankl believes that the first two schools of Viennese psychotherapy (Freud and Adler), which he calls the depth psychology, must be complimented the logotherapy - the height psychology. His therapy explores man's future instead of his past. Summarizing the Freudian concept as the will to pleasure and the Adlerian concept as the will to power, Frankl points out that man's basic motivation in life is neither pleasure nor power. Each person lives to discover the meaning of life and thereby to fulfill it - the will to meaning. Life is too meaningful for man to comprehend: it is essentially incomprehensible because it lies on a higher realm than that of man's. During the World War 2, Frankl survived four concentration camps including Auschwitz. In the camps, most of the inmates despaired that if they did not survive the camp, there was no meaning in suffering. Frankl, on the other hand, believed that if there was no meaning in suffering, there was no point in surviving the camp. In other words, the meaning of life was either unconditional regardless of the situation one was facing, or it was none at all. In the camps, Frankl would console his inmates telling them, "Someone looks down on each of us in difficult hours ?a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead ?and he would not expect us to disappoint him. He would hope to find us suffering proudly ?not miserably ?knowing how to die.? He would explain to them that it was not them asking the meaning of life. It was life asking them the meaning, and they had to answer to it. What Frankl witnessed in the camps contradicted Freud's theory that if people were left without food for few days, their wants would be reduced to the common desire for food. While some inmates behaved according to their instincts, as Freud predicted, there were also others who lived up to this challenge. Frankl witnessed people who gave away their last piece of bread and others who organized religious activities, which resulted in execution if they were caught. One of logotherapy's techniques to help people discover values is to have them imagine their lives from their deathbeds and look back on them. During such exercises people often find that their current definition of success differs significantly from that on their deathbeds. They realize that they do not wish they had made more money, had more sex. It is interesting to note that virtually everyone points to relationship as their most cherished value. They wish that they had spent more time with people they care about. Logotherapy bases its therapy on the fact that man is a self-transcendent being. Psychotherapy which views man as a self-contained being is bound to fail. Frankl's favourite analogy regarding this matter is the eye. The function of the eye is to transcend itself: healthy eye does not see itself. The more it self-transcends, the more it actualizes itself. Only when there is a problem, such as glaucoma, does it notice itself. Man actualizes himself in the same way. Self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendent. Man is most human when he is occupied with something other than himself - when he is serving others?needs. The best time to take a picture of man is when he is least conscious of himself. How unnatural the picture looks when he is told to say cheese, to notice himself. Man neither lives by himself nor for himself. Man who views himself as a self-contained being is bound to live in despair. If he were to weigh the suffering and joy in life, he will find that the suffering outweighs by far. Every approach to suicide prevention needs to be grounded on the irreducibility of the unique human phenomenons and the self-transcendent nature of man. Only then can he find the meaning in suffering and thereby meet the challenge. He then realizes that life expects something from him in every situation. This "mere?realization in itself may even put an end to suicidal thoughts. Painting green the leaves of a dying tree lasts only so long, while watering its roots naturally turns them green.Frankl warns us of the serious consequences of reductionism. And his logotherapy thoroughly deestablishes the reductionism in psychotherapy and reinstitutes the human realm in psychotherapy. Logotherapy has a significant contribution to make in our world where more and more people are seeking psychotherapy to address this human realm. Logotherapy, then, is a psychotherapy for the man in the street ?all of us.
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Emphasizing spiritual values and the quest for meaning in life in its approach to the neurotic behavior, by the founder of logotherapy.
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