What is logotherapy?

Maybe you are living in a time when you feel that, despite having many things, you find yourself with an internal void. Learning what logotherapy could help you.

Sometimes, it seems that for many things we may have around, these are not enough to make us feel fullness, But what can we do in these cases?

To handle this situation, an interesting approach arises: logotherapy. Is about a psychotherapeutic method that helps people regain the meaning of their lives. It allows those who suffer from existential emptiness to overcome it and channel their lives again.

Most traditional therapeutic paradigms han ignored part of the psychological dimension of man, such as the will to meaning, and this is what is proposed to recover the logotherapy.

A review to understand what logotherapy is

Logotherapy is the Viennese school of psychology born with the psychiatrist and neurologist Viktor Frankl, after Freudian psychoanalysis and the individual psychology of Adler Alfred. Frankl's approach is based on the "Will of meaning", as opposed to Adler's doctrine that promotes "Will to power."

From the logotherapy what is tried is that the human existence has a meaning, and this takes greater force when we discover that its creator, Viktor Frankl, was a prisoner in the concentration camps.

Frankl believes that, within this dark experience, he managed to survive because, mainly, He found a way to make sense of his existence. This amounts to saying that he found a logos, which is a word of Greek origin to designate the meaning or meaning of something.

Attitude is everything

There may not be someone better to tell us that the difficulties can be overcome. Well, his stay in the concentration camps in Auschwitz was as terrible as you can imagine. But, It was the position he took on life and what happened to him that allowed him to survive.

The fact of having assumed the right attitude to the difficult experience he lived during World War II it made those traumatic circumstances become learning opportunities.

You may want to read: Discover why difficulties give us part of happiness

The slopes of logotherapy

Logotherapy has three aspects: one anthropological, another of psychotherapeutic origin and another philosophical. From anthropology, take the freedom of will to affirm that Man can make his decisions and is free to choose his destiny.

“The ruins are often the ones that open the windows to see the sky” -Viktor Frankl-

From psychotherapy, freedom of meaning is promoted, and from philosophy the meaning of life is reaffirmed, which is impossible to lose – according to the postulates of logotherapy.

A lived experience

Viktor Frankl really knew the meaning of living under the postulates of his own theory, since praxis developed it while in concentration camps. It was in those places where Frankl realized the need to release everything he had in life and be left alone with the essence.

This is the only way to see things within ourselves, that we never even imagined that they could exist, and that are the truly important ones. When we begin to see all those things of the essence, Then our life is capable of regaining consciousness and feeling happy.

Don't get lost: How to be happy?

The practice in therapy

From the above, it is understood why psychodrams are so important in therapies. That is, to make dramatizations with patients so that they see their essence. So, if each person took a minute to think that their life ends right now, I would surely make many significant changes.

These changes are what the person must introduce in their life to see the difference and achieve their own sense of life or logos. Frankl said:

“Man in search of meaning is not an ingenious title for a book. It is a definition of being human. The human being is a seeker of meaning. ”

Frankl's experiences in the concentration camps caused him to condense all his ideas into a book entitled "Man's Search for Meaning". One of the enigmatic phrases that this author's thought contains, and that belongs to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, says:

"Who has a why for live, you'll find almost forever the how."

The dimension in which logotherapy intervenes is existential. People who experience conflicts of values, or live existential crises, can benefit from it.