LOGOTHERAPY (Spirit Wellness or Soul Health)
is the existential or lifestyle approach for developing a life filled with meaning and
significance in well functioning families, faith communities, companies and
neighborhoods where we find a lasting sense of belonging among the good people
with whom we share faith, hope and love.
Logotherapy is a world class psychospiritual system for winning
a satisfying life by normal persons who apply existential psychology and
metaphysical philosophy in the best approach to living, loving, laboring and
leading well yet identified by the human race.
Logotherapy helps heal people suffering from mental illness, neuroticism
or psychopathy but is most useful for normal persons making their way through
the high expectations and disappointments -- plus the joys and sorrows of
everyday existence.
The spiritual values, positive attitudes, high expectations,
mature beliefs and responsible choices that were to eventually be woven into
Logotherapy first appeared in Jesus’ Sermon On The Mount.
spiritual values
positive attitudes
high expectations
mature beliefs
responsible choices
These five key aspects of Logotherapy offer brilliant
solutions to life’s challenges that Mahatma Gandhi called the most meaningful
discourse about living with satisfaction and joy taught by any learning master.
The very fact that world class scholars are still praising Jesus’ constructs two
thousand years after the wandering rabbi and field preacher first uttered them
in a primitive land to simple farmers and shepherds – verifies their world class
value.
Logotherapy is much more about living with a healthy sense
of purpose in our normal relationships and activities than
by dealing with mental illness through psychotherapy or
psychotropic drugs. Therefore we offer neither psychiatric
care nor medicinal treatment. Of course, while Logotherapy's
powerful insights and methods are intended for normal men
and women who seek significance in the midst of life’s
complications, they also help heal more frustrated persons
regain their psychospiritual perspective and emotional
health.
Logotherapy does indeed strike a resounding cord in contemporary
minds and hearts for millions of normal souls who struggle to make life come out
right. Through the last half century Logotherapy has become the action arm of
existential psychology -- although it goes much further in serving thoughtful
persons than psychology alone.
The initial concepts that lead ordinary women and men
through increasing knowledge and wisdom with purposefulness
and generosity that nurtures their souls, were next
elaborated on by John the Beloved, Paul the Apostle, the
Buddha, Lao Tsu, Soren Kierkegaard and more recent
life-style scholars that included Otto Rank, Carl Rogers,
Ernest Becker and others. However, it remained for Viktor
Frankl, the brilliant successor to Sigmund Freud and Alfred
Adler as leader of the Third Viennese School of
Psychotherapy, to go beyond psychiatric traditions to
systematize this very potent approach to fulfillment.
Viktor Frankl
combined lifestyle (existential) psychological knowledge with
philosophical wisdom into a unified psychospiritual whole
that keeps lives and souls satisfied. He learned that after
we meet our clamoring physical needs – after a society
becomes affluent and comfortable, men and women absolutely
must open sources of meaning or become frustrated with their
lives. While Freud considered pleasure to be the most important human need and Adler thought
power was crucial, Frankl thought in terms of a sense of purpose being most crucial to living well. Finally, Professor Jard DeVille, who cheerfully admits to being the dwarf seated on his friend and mentor’s giant
shoulders, can occasionally see further along the path of
knowledge than Viktor could. Therefore, in his twenty books
and graduate courses about Logotherapy, Jard DeVille integrates
Viktor Frankl's crucial need for meaning with his own vital approach to belonging
that leads to the following equation.
LOGOTHERAPY = f(Personal Meaning x Communal Belonging)
Psychospiritually maturing men and women need ways to live, love, labor and
lead others, by building on the crucial choices that make life meaningful and significant in places
blessed by human hearts where we share faith, hope and love.
Any thoughtless secular approach that draws from time
expired assumptions, worn out traditions and self-defeating
ideologies leads to the complaint -- Too soon we get old and too late we get smart.
Katherine
Hendricks, who became a successful mining company executive,
lamented after a FRONTIERS OF FULFILLMENT seminar at the University of Arizona. We paraphrase --
I seem to be working sixty
hour weeks only to pay for the house and the Mercedes while
my family falls apart. I sometime feel I’m going mad because
I’ve won everything I’ve ever wanted and it isn’t enough to
keep me happy. And I cannot even tell my therapist what has
gone wrong.
IS THIS PAINFUL MALAISE ALL THERE IS TO LIFE -- TO MY
LIFE?
WHAT HAPPENED TO ALL THOSE WONDERFUL DREAMS I HAD?
WHAT CAN I DO TO BETTER HELP OTHERS AS SOCIETY FAILS?
What indeed?
Multitudes of persons feel
much as Catherine did but we are pleased to report that she
and her husband introduced some key Logotherapy constructs
into their marriage and family and that choice saved their
relationships. Most people admit that they suffer through
three or four disappointments for each period of joy. A
great many graduates from Harvard, Southern Methodist and
other great schools reported that life and careers have
become painfully boring and much less satisfying than they
had expected when they graduated twenty years earlier. Too
many women and men dread the final twenty years before
retirement after life has become routine and lost its great
challenges. And multitudes of career workers wither away
soon after retiring because they lost the purposes of life
that sustained them. About half of all new marriages fail
because of sexual or financial dissatisfactions and many
careers are sacrificed in self-defeating searches for
success.
Many American women and men
now say that they feel frustrated because the nation has
lost its way and fear they cannot recoup their former
significance. Some existential scholars call this widespread
existential frustration the mass neurosis
of the twenty-first century– while Frankl called it the
existential vacuum of modern industrial life. We
use those terms but also call this ailment of the human
spirit psychospiritual bankruptcy
We all must find avenues of fulfillment as did one elderly nanny
who sorrowfully counseled with Frankl because she felt that her life had been
wasted. We paraphrase -
Anna - I’m so discouraged because
my life is over. I reared another family’s children and
grandchildren and had none of my own. And now they are all
grown and although the family takes good care of me, no one
needs me any longer. I get so discouraged that I could cry.
Frankl
-- You feel that your life was
wasted? That you raised the children to turn out badly?
Anna
-- Oh no! They’ve done well.
One boy is a professor and another is a sea captain with his
own ship. And the girls have dress shops all over France and
Italy. They’ve all succeeded.
Frankl
-- But they’ve forgotten you? Is that it?
Anna
-- Not that either. When they come home at Christmas or
on holiday, they always visit with me. We talk about the old
days and they give me presents and some silver and we go on
auto rides with their children and dine out together. They
are always generous and kind to me.
Frankl
-- Anna! Anna! You have it all
wrong. You must take pride from having cared for those
children. You life wasn’t wasted. It was invested! Your love
is still being reflected by the new generation in their own
children. You taught two generations generosity and love.
And as far as being useless … go to your rabbi and ask to
help with the babies in the nursery during Sabbath and
volunteer to help neighborhood mothers. You can still be
needed in an avocation.
Anna
-- (After a long pause) Why, Doctor Frankl, I believe
that you are right. My life isn’t over after all. Children
still need me. (She thanked him, found places in which
to use her skills as a volunteer and never returned with another lament.)
Logotherapy will teach you how to -
LIVE - Consistently according to sound psychospiritual principles
LOVE - Deeply enough to manage interpersonal relationships well
LABOR - By sharing the rewards of achievement with your helpers
LEAD - Wisely enough to create a great community of alert achievers
If you allow our Logotherapy courses, seminars or sessions to focus your heart and mind, you will learn
how to apply Logotherapy so wisely and well within your home, community, congregation and professional
arena you will want your meaningful and fulfilling life to continue forever.
