Replies

I Googled Frankl today. His Logotherapy is described as "the third Viennese school." I wondered how on Earth I hadn't heard of him. That in turn sent me back to my old psych books, especially "Systems and Theories in Psychology." It appears Frankl was an unknown to most of the US establishment 35 or so years ago. OTOH, from his bio I gather he had gained some fame in Europe at least by that time.

The occasional new system notwithstanding, there is still some interest in "the talking cure" for certain neurotic disorders, but it's obviously pretty limited. OK, I'm not keeping up at all anymore. Still, I can tell that pharmacology has practically taken over compared to my college days. That's not too surprising, since 1) we keep finding chemical imbalances and genetic predispostions in mental illness, and 2) the cure rate from psychoanalysis back when was about the same as the untreated spontaneous recovery rate.

Thanks for writing!

Still, I can tell that pharmacology has practically taken over compared to my college days. That’s not too surprising, since 1) we keep finding chemical imbalances and genetic predispostions in mental illness, and 2) the cure rate from psychoanalysis back when was about the same as the untreated spontaneous recovery rate.

Two eminently fair and reasonable statements here, VadeRetro.

I must say, however, that I find your hardware/software model of mental health highly suggestive, as when you earlier said, “All the real progress in psychiatry has been messing with the hardware, mostly pharmacologically.” The statement implies that the software side has been neglected, that in fact the “talking the problem through” therapeutic approach has had little if any actual successes to report. Indeed, it seems not to have any actual science to it.

And so maybe that’s a fair statement, too. Look at the “software tools” that have been proposed, e.g., that of Freud and Jung. Freud’s model of the human psyche is the complex id/ego/superego; the inference from which ultimately boils down to all human motivation being the result of sexual urges, usually repressed (i.e., consigned to unconscious levels of the psyche). Making these subliminal drives available to consciousness, and “talking through the issues” attended thereby, is what spells successful “treatment” for the patient. In short, Freud reduces all of human nature and behavior to the sexual impulse. Okay, fine: but he cannot demonstrate that on a scientific basis, and so it is not surprising that he never did.

Then you’ve got Jung, who seems to propose a theory of a collective consciousness that is somehow “normative” for human beings. If we tune ourselves into that, then we’ll be fine, psychologically speaking. But this is nutz: Who gets to define what is “normative” about a putatively beneficial “collective consciousness” to which we should all adjust if not the practitioner himself? Doesn’t seem very “scientific” to me. Rather it sounds like an invitation to any and all would-be self-appointed “healing” gurus to come out of the woodwork….

Well, not to put too fine a point to it, but both these approaches look idiotic to me. Not to mention that neither has a rigorous scientific basis.

I noticed, VR, that you didn’t respond to my assertion about the diagnosis of ADD being targeted against young boys especially. Personally, I find this a deeply disturbing social phenomenon. The way I think of it, the feminization of the public schools over the past few decades has resulted in a “denaturing” of young boys, which is fully aided and abetted by the psychiatric and pharmaceutical communities, to their great respective profit. I need not remind you that it is the “hardware approach” to the human psyche that enables this sort of thing.

As for what Viktor Frankl’s Logotherapy might look like: I’ve been searching for his books (I have/had two of them) all day. Unfortunately, my personal library is strewn over four rooms, and I haven’t found it yet. So I have to reply from memory at this point.

As I recall, during World War II Frankl was sent to a Nazi concentration camp. Somehow he managed to survive the ordeal. But while his personal circumstances were so desperate, he noticed that all around him he could see acts of human kindness, of self-sacrifice in the interest of friends, of solidarity among the prisoners as fellow human beings that had to stand together as a community against the oppression, so to declare and claim their own personal and common humanity. And Frankl concluded from horrific experience that man’s ultimate freedom is his freedom to choose, to declare how he wills to react/respond to potentially fatal conditions that he did not himself make, but in which he finds himself suspended, with his life at stake.

All of which observations, however, do not give us a clue about what an effective psychiatric logotherapy — treatment of the “software” — might look like. I have a few scattered ideas. But I’m interested in hearing your view, if you have one you’d like to advance now or later.

Probably that would help me to refine my own.

Thank you ever so much for writing, VadeRetro!