Sources and inspirations of logotherapy

The Viennese melting pot

Logotherapy was not a sudden “revelation” of Frankl's. It grew out of 1920s Vienna, an environment of lively debates about the human being. As a secondary-school student Frankl corresponded with Freud, and as a medical student he belonged to the circle of Alfred Adler - and it was from Adler that he took the very concept of the meaning of life (Adler wrote a book on the meaning of life). Frankl, however, broadened it considerably: in Adler meaning remained flattened, whereas in Frankl it became the central category of anthropology - see Third Viennese School.

Existential psychiatry

The first name of Frankl's approach was existential analysis - related to the Daseinsanalyse of psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, who combined psychoanalysis with existential philosophy. Frankl also repeatedly referred to Victor Emil von Gebsattel and Medard Boss. They shared the conviction that therapy should focus on specifically human experiences: love, free will, conscience.

Phenomenology

The phenomenological method - describing direct experience - was born in psychology (Carl Stumpf) and later developed by philosophers (Husserl, Heidegger). For psychotherapy it means working with how a person experiences themselves and the world. That is why logotherapy does not ignore feelings: they are the starting point, a “compass” pointing to existentially significant experiences.

Max Scheler

The strongest influence on Frankl came from the phenomenologist Max Scheler and his ethics of values (Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values). Frankl recalled that for years he treated this book almost like a Bible. Karol Wojtyła drew on the same source - hence the clear kinship between Frankl's and Wojtyła's personalist theses on the human person.

The camp experience

The word “logotherapy” appeared as early as 1926, so the approach did not originate in the war. The camps were, however, a kind of experimentum crucis for it - a test confirming that this approach “works” even in the most extreme conditions.

Faith

Frankl was a believer, brought up in the Jewish tradition. He sympathised with the Christian idea of love of neighbour but remained Jewish and was buried in a Jewish cemetery. He did not impose his faith on patients - he uncovered the spiritual dimension “from below”, through the experience of freedom and responsibility (see The Unconscious God).