Personality Theories In Psychology: Viktor Frankl

Victor Emil Frankl was born in Vienna on March 26, 1905. His father worked hard from being a parliamentary stenographer to becoming Minister of Social Affairs. Since I was a college student and involved in socialist youth organizations, Frankl He became interested in psychology

In 1930, he earned his doctorate in medicine and was assigned to a ward dedicated to the treatment of women with suicide attempts. As the Nazis came to power in 1938, Frankl took the position of Head of the Department of Neurology at the Rothschild Hospital. the only jewish hospital in the early years of Nazism.

But, in 1942 he and his parents were deported to a concentration camp near Prague, Theresienstadt.

Frankl survived the Holocaust, even after having been in four Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, from 1942 to 1945; This did not happen with his parents and other relatives, who died in these fields.

Due in part to his suffering during and while in the concentration camps, Frankl developed a revolutionary approach to psychotherapy known as logotherapy.

“Frankl returned to Vienna in 1945, and immediately became Head of the Department of Neurology at the Vienna Polyclinic Hospital, a position he would hold for 25 years. He was a professor of both neurology and psychiatry.

His 32 books on existential analysis and logotherapy have been translated into 26 languages ​​and he has earned 29 honorary doctorates from different universities around the world.

Starting in 1961, Frankl held 5 positions as teacher in the United States and n Harvard and Stanford University, as well as others such as Dallas, Pittsburg and San Diego.

He won the Oskar Pfister Award from the American Psychiatric Society, as well as other distinctions from different European countries.

Frankl taught at the University of Vienna regularly until he was 85 years old and was always a keen mountain climber. He also, at the age of 67, obtained his aviation pilot’s license.

Victor E. Frankl died of heart failure on September 3, 1997, leaving his wife, Eleonore, and a daughter, Dr. Gabriele Frankl-Vesely.

(Biography adapted from obituary on AP website (Vienna, Austria), September 3, 1997.

Both Victor Frankl’s theory and therapy developed from his experiences in Nazi concentration camps. Seeing who survived and who did not (who was given the chance to live), he concluded that the philosopher Friederich Nietszche was right: Those who have a reason to live, despite adversity, will resist He could perceive how people who had hopes of being reunited with loved ones or who had projects that they felt were an unfinished need, or those who had great faith, seemed to have better opportunities than those who had lost all hope.

His therapy is called logotherapy, from the Greek word logos, which means study, word, spirit, God or meaning, meaning, the latter being the meaning that Frankl took, although it is true that the others do not deviate much from this meaning. When we compare Frankl with Freud and Adler, we can say that in the essential postulates of Freud (he considered that the pleasure drive was the root of all human motivation) and Adler (the will to power), Frankl, in contrast, stands inclined by the will to meaning.

Frankl also uses the Greek word noös, which means mind or spirit. It suggests that in traditional psychology, we focus on “psychodynamics” or people’s search to reduce their amount of tension. Instead of focusing on that; or rather, in addition to the above, we must pay attention to the noödynamics, which considers that tension is necessary for health, at least when it has to do with meaning. People like to feel the tension that surrounds the effort of a valuable goal to achieve!

However, the effort put into the service of a meaning can be frustrating, which can lead to neurosis, especially that called noogenic neurosis, or what others usually call existential or spiritual neurosis. More than ever, people today are experiencing their lives as empty, meaningless, without purpose, without any objective…, and they seem to respond to these experiences with unusual behaviors that harm themselves, others, others. society or all three.

One of his favorite metaphors is existential void If meaning is what we are looking for, meaninglessness is a hole, a gap in your life, and in the moments when you feel it, you need to run out and fill it. Frankl suggests that one of the most conspicuous signs of existential emptiness in our society is boredom. He points out how people often, when they finally have time to do what they want, seem to not want to do anything! People go into a tailspin when they retire; students get drunk every weekend; we immerse ourselves in passive entertainment every night; Sunday’s neurosis, he calls it.

So that We try to fill our existential voids with “things” that although they produce some satisfaction, we also hope that they provide one last great satisfaction: we can try to fill our lives with pleasure, eating beyond our needs, having promiscuous sex, giving ourselves “the high life.” Or we can fill our lives with work, with conformity, with conventionality. We can also fill our lives with certain neurotic “vicious cycles,” such as obsessions with germs and cleanliness or a fear-driven obsession with a phobic object. The defining quality of these vicious cycles is that no matter what we do, it will never be enough.

Like Erich Fromm, Frankl points out that Animals have an instinct that guides them In traditional societies, we have come to replace instincts quite well with our social traditions Nowadays, we almost don’t even have that. Most attempts to achieve guidance within conformity and conventionality come face to face with the fact that it is increasingly difficult to avoid the freedom we now possess to carry out our projects in life; In short, finding our own meaning.

So how do we find our meaning? Frankl presents us with three great approaches: the first is through experiential values, or experiencing something or someone that we value. This could include Maslow’s peak experiences and aesthetic experiences such as seeing a good work of art or natural wonders. But our most important example is that of experiencing the value of another person, eg through love. Through our love, we can induce our loved one to develop meaning, and thus achieve our own meaning.

The second way to find our meaning is through creative values, it is like “carrying out an act”, as Frankl says. This would be the traditional existential idea of ​​providing oneself with meaning by carrying out one’s projects, or rather, committing to the project of one’s own life. It obviously includes creativity in art, music, writing, invention and so on. It also includes the generativity which Erikson spoke of: the care of the future generations

The third way of discovering meaning is the one that few people besides Frankl subscribe to: attitudinal values These include such virtues as compassion, bravery and a good sense of humor, etc. But Frankl’s most famous example is the achievement of meaning through suffering. The author gives us an example of one of his patients: a doctor whose wife had died, he felt very sad and devastated. Frankl asked him, “If you had died before her, what would it have been like for her?” had to pay a price for surviving him and mourning him. In other words, grief is the price we pay for love. For this doctor, this gave meaning to his death and his pain, which allowed him to then deal with it. His suffering gave a step forward: with meaning, suffering can be endured with dignity.

Frank also noted that seriously ill people are rarely given the opportunity to suffer bravely, thereby maintaining some degree of dignity. Cheer up! We say, Be optimistic! They are made to feel ashamed of their pain and unhappiness.

However, in the end, these attitudinal, experiential and creative values ​​are mere superficial manifestations of something much more fundamental, the supersense. Here we can perceive the most religious side of Frankl: the supra-sense is the idea that, in fact, there is an ultimate meaning in life; sense that does not depend on others, nor on our projects or even on our dignity. It is a clear reference to God and the spiritual meaning of life.

This position places Frankl’s existentialism in a different place, say, from Jean Paul Sartre’s existentialism. The latter, as well as other atheistic existentialists, suggest that life at its end is meaningless, and we must face this meaninglessness with courage. Sartre says that we must learn to endure this lack of meaning; Frankl, on the other hand, says that what we need is to learn to endure our inability to understand in its entirety the great ultimate meaning.

“Logos is deeper than logic” he said, and it is towards faith that we must lean.

Victor Frankl is almost as well known for certain clinical details of his approach as for his theory in general. As we mentioned before, he believes that the existential void is frequently filled with certain neurotic “vicious circles.” For example, there is the idea of ​​anticipatory anxiety: Someone may be so afraid of experiencing certain anxiety-related symptoms that developing those symptoms becomes inevitable Anticipatory anxiety causes the very thing that the person is afraid of. Anxiety tests are an obvious example: if you are afraid of failing exams, anxiety will prevent you from doing well on exams, leading you to always be afraid of them.

A similar idea is hyperintention, which suggests overexertion, which in itself prevents you from succeeding at anything. One of the most common examples is insomnia: many people, when they cannot sleep, continue trying, following the instructions to the letter of any book. Therefore, trying to fall asleep has the opposite effect; That is, it prevents you from falling asleep, so that the cycle is maintained indefinitely (in parallel, and incidentally, the way in which sleeping pills are used excessively today causes the opposite effect!). Another example would be the way we feel today about being the perfect lover: men feel like they have to take longer, women feel obligated to not just have orgasms, but multiple orgasms, and so on. Too much worry in this area will inevitably bring with it the inability to relax and enjoy the experience.

A third variant would be hyperreflection In this case it is about “thinking too much.” Sometimes we are waiting for something to happen, and it does happen, simply because its occurrence is strongly linked to our own beliefs or attitudes; the prophecy of self-completion. Frankl mentions a woman who, despite having suffered from bad sexual experiences in her childhood, developed a strong and healthy personality. When she had the opportunity to approach the world of psychology, she found that literature mentioned that such experiences left the person with an inability to enjoy sexual relations; From here on, the woman began to have these problems!

A part of logotherapy also uses these terms: the paradoxical intention is to desire precisely what we are afraid of. A young man who sweated profusely when he was in social situations, he was instructed by Frankl that he think about wanting to sweat. Part of his instructions read: “I’ve only sweated a quarter of the time before, but now I’m going to sweat for at least ten quarters of the time!” Obviously, when he set out to do it, he couldn’t do it. The absurdity of the approach broke his vicious circle.

Another example can be found related to sleep disorders: following Frankl, if you suffer from insomnia, do not spend the night tossing and turning, counting sheep, moving from one side to another to fall asleep, get up! Try to stay awake as much as you can! Eventually you will find yourself falling like a rock into bed.

Another technique is dereflection. Frankl believes that Many problems are rooted in an excessive emphasis on it Often, if you distance yourself a little and get closer to others, problems usually disappear. If, for example, you have difficulties with sex, try to gratify your partner without seeking your own satisfaction; Worries about erections and orgasms disappear and realities reappear. Or just don’t try to please anyone. Many sex therapists maintain that a couple does nothing more than “make out and touch each other,” avoiding orgasm at “all costs.” These couples simply last a couple of nights before what they considered a problem is definitively resolved.

In any case, no matter how much interest these techniques have aroused, Frankl insists that in the end These people’s problems are really a matter of their need for meaning Therefore, although these techniques are a good start to therapy, they are not under any circumstances the goal to be achieved.

Viktor Frankl has written a number of books introducing his theory. One of them From Death Camp to Existentialism It focuses on his experiences in a concentration camp.

This article is merely informative, at PsychologyFor we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

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