Recollections

The Beginnings of Logotherapy Meanwhile Fritz Wittels, the first Freud biographer, Maximilian Silbermann and I had founded the Academic Society for Medical Psychology, and I was elected its vice-president. Silbermann was president, and his successors were Fritz Redlich and Peter Hofstadter. On the advisory board were Freud, Schilder, and the notables of Vienna in the 1920s, then the mecca of psychotherapy. It was in the study group of this society that I gave a lecture before an academic audience and first spoke of logotherapy. The alternative term, Existence Analyse, Existential Analysis, I used from 1933 on. By that time I had systematized my ideas to some extent. As early as 1929 I had developed the concept of three groups of values or three possible ways to find meaning in life, even up to the last moment, the last breath. The three possibilities are 1. a deed we do, a work we create, 2. an experience, a human encounter, a love, and 3. when confronted with an unchangeable fate, such as an incurable disease, a change of attitude toward that fate. In such cases we still can wrest meaning from life by giving testimony to the most human of all human capacities, the ability to turn suffering into a human triumph. It was Wolfgang Suchek who dubbed logotherapy the third Viennese school of psychotherapy. One could say that Huckel's basic biogenetic law was confirmed in me, the law that says ontogenesis repeats phylogenesis in abbreviated form, for somehow I personally had passed through the first two schools of Viennese psychotherapy also in abbreviated form, since in 1924, as already noted, one of my articles had been published on recommendation of Freud, and only a year later another appeared in Adler's journal at his own recommendation. So I participated in the development of psychotherapy, but I also anticipated some developments. I will only mention paradoxical intention, which I began to use in 1929 and named only later in 1939 in the Schweizer Archiv für Neurologie und Psychiatrie, Swiss Archive for Neurology and Psychiatry. Since then distinguished behavior therapists often have pointed out that paradoxical intention anticipated behavioral treatment methods developed in the 1960s. Also in my 1947 book Die Psychotherapie in der Praxis, Psychotherapy in Practice, I described in detail treatments for impotence which in the 1970s were hailed as a new sex therapy by Masters and Johnson. I am indebted to behavior therapy in many ways. It pulled, as it were, the chestnuts out of the fire for me in my struggle against psychoanalysis and against individual psychology. To apply a German proverb, when these two schools fight with each other, the third, Viennese school, rejoices. I am always glad if logotherapy does not have to criticize others, even when criticism is fully justified and long overdue. As for logotherapy itself, it was no less an authority than Gordon Allport of Harvard in his forward to man's search for meaning who called it the most significant psychological movement of our day, and Juan Batista Torello said that it presented the last true system in the history of psychotherapy. If this is so, then Sondy's fate analysis should be mentioned as another highly systematized theory. However, the systematizing is the only and purely formal similarity between our contributions. Personally, I consider the Sondy test a fine play with ideas, but nothing more. Torello claims that I would take my place in the history of psychiatry as the man who therapeutically tackled the sickness of the century, the sense of meaninglessness. It is true that logotherapy, when all is said and done, was developed for that purpose. But if one searches for the ultimate causes and deepest roots, the hidden reasons for my creating logotherapy, I can only name one thing that spurred me on to develop and to continue working on logotherapy tirelessly, the compassion I feel towards the victims of today's cynicism which has also infested psychotherapy that rotten trade. When I say trade, I refer to its commercialism and by rotten I mean its scientific uncleanness. If one faces patients who not only suffer psychologically but who in addition have been harmed by psychotherapy, one's heart goes out to them, and indeed the fight against these depersonalizing and dehumanizing tendencies which have their roots.