**Book notes - The Will to Meaning. Foundations and applications of logotherapy. Viktor E Frankl.**  **Introduction** - Approaching human beings merely in terms of techniques necessarily imples manipulating them, and approaching them merely in terms of dynamics imples reifying them, making human beings into mere things.  - I had simply taken them as human beings and not mistaken them for mechanisms to repair - Man, free and responsible, therapy not excusing, or providing cheap escape from guilt (that they got no choice, as if bio/psycho/social forces them).  - It is a prerogative of man to become guilty, and his responsibility to overcome guilt.  - Psychotherapy is based on encounter. Human beings confronts the other with logos, that is, the meaning of being.  - If psychotherapy theories are like a house - there are many levels.  - Psychoanalysis also sync with Logotherapy: - Psychoanalysis two concepts - Repression - cause of neurosis - Need to increase awareness, make unconscious conscious. -- in the light of modern therapy is = Promote Self-understanding - Transference - cure - Related to "I-Thou" relationships - Encounters.  - "Where id is, ego should be; but the ego can only become only through a Thou"  **Foundations of Logotherapy** **Metaclinical Implications of Psychotherapy** - "As long as man regarded himself as a creature, interpreted his existence in the image of God, his creator; but as soon as he started considering himself as a creator, begin to interpret his existence merely in the image of his own creation, the machine." - Logotherapy 3 pillars: - Freedom of will  - "Man's freedom is no freedom from conditions but rather freedom to take a stand on whatever conditions might confront him" (Freedom to choose)  - Yes, limited in term of bio/psyho/social forces, man can rise above circumstances, heroism!  - Human is unique human quality - Self -detachment! Laugh at one self. It highlight man ability to distant, and choose his attitude towards himself. Seen in this light "A person is free to shape his own character, and man is responsible for what he may have made out of himself. - A new dimension, above somatic and psychic phenomena - Noological dimension define as spiritual dimension here. When man reflect upon himself. Conscious - People will say that conscious simply conditioning process. Not conscious but fear of punishment. Reductionism - LOVE, a unique human quality :  - Self-Transcendence - Reductionism = Love is simple for sex,  - due to specializing, science. Danger not to over generalise. To restore a unified concept of man in face of scattered data, facts, and findings that compartmentalize science of men.  - Science not ideology. Reductionism has become the mask of nihilism.  # Dimensional Ontology.  [Viktor Frankl’s Laws of Dimensional Ontology and The Fallacy of the Dominant Dimension (leadingsapiens.com)](https://www.leadingsapiens.com/viktor-frankl-laws-dimensional-ontology/) ![[Screenshot 2023-07-16 at 9.51.28 AM.png]] ^3999db - 1) One and the same phenomenon projected out of its own dimensions into different dimensions lower than its own is depicted in such a way that the individual pictures contradict one another.  - 2) The projection of different phenomena into a lower dimension results in isomorphies - By having become a human being, in no way ceases to remain an animal, any more than an airplane ceases to be capable of moving around the ground of the airport.  - Freud "ground floor and basement of the edifice, the lower dimension"  - Neurosis maybe psychogenic, somatogenic, or noogenic.  - Noogenic may be result from frustration of the will to meaning, existential frustration. - Pathology is ambigous in that, in a given case, we will have to search for the logos of pathos, for the meaning of suffering. Therapy, therefore must be multidimensionally oriented. We are treating diseases but dealing with human beings. - What matters is never a technique per se, but rather the spirit in which the technique is used. (Client is more than the symptoms/psychatric dimension) - Science cannot cope with reality in its multidimensionality but must deal with reality as if reality were unidimensional.  - "I for one am convinced that if there is such thing as heaven, and if heaven ever accepts a prayer, it will hide this behind a sequence of natural facts." -- what they say projection, or attribution. - Will to meaning - Meaning of Life **Self-transcendence as a human phenomenon** - Homeostasis principle does not yield a sufficient ground on which to explain human behavior. Charlotte Buhler "conceives of man as living with intentionality, which means living with purpose. ..the Individual...wants to create values...."Human being" has a "primary, or native orientation, in the direction of creating and of values."  - The more one aims at pleasure, the more his aim is missed.  - Hyper-intention and hyper-reflection are likely to create neurotic patterns of behavior.  - Pleasure normally achieved as a side effect of attaining a goal. Goal is the reason for happiness. Thus, cannot pursue happiness for it's own sake.  - Adlerian - status drive also is self-defeating. Success and happiness must happen, and the less one cares for them, the more they can.  - Both happiness and success are mere subsitutes for fulfillment - Theories we know are build upon studying patients. Not of health.  - Man, then, lacking a reason for pleasure, provides himself with a cause whose effect is pleasure.  - Self actualisation, if made an end in itself, contradicts the self-transcendent quality of human existence. Like happiness, self-actualization is an effect, the effect of meaning fulfillment.  - Maslow's own view - since he admit himself that the "business to self-actualization" can best be carried out "via a commitment to an important job" - (LSD/Alcohol/God is important to me (because of the meaning/reason) because it gives me happiness)./  - Ungersma : Freudien pleasure principle is the guiding principle of a small child, Adlerian power principles is that of a adolescent, will to meaning is the guiding principle of the mature adult.  - Another human capacity that of creating and using symbols. (Language is symbols) - I have said that man does not care for pleasure and happiness as such but rather for that which causes these effects. ... Let us imagine that an individual is mourning the death of a beloved person and is offered some tablets of a tranquilizing drug to bring him relief from his depression. Except for the case of neurotic escapism, we may be sure he will refuse to tranquilize his grief away, for he will argue that this will not change anything, the beloved will not be revived this way. In other words, the reason for being depressed will remain reason for his depression rather than with the removal of this depression. (How to help client have meaning?) - From life experience - man is pushed by drives but pulled by meaning, and this implies that it is always up to him to decide whether or not he wishes to fulfill the latter. Thus, meaning fulfillment always implies decision making.  - (It is about personal responsibility but not simply about 'will power') - There are periods (in society) of increasing and decreasing tension which may also be observed in the history of humanity. Freud's age is tension, now release.. yet too free, also problem. People live in existential vaccum - Education reinforce the existential vaccum - "don't pressure the youth" (That's the homeostasis theory. People who are spared tension are likely to create it, either in a healthy or in an unhealthy way.  - "The collective obsessive fear that meaning and purpose might be imposed upon ourselves has resulted in an idiosyncrasy against ideals and values. Thus, the baby has been dumped out along with the bathwater, and ideals and values have been dismissed altogether." - First world problem got more neurotism compared to 3rd world, they have more tasks to complete.  - Freedom balance with responsibleness.  **What is meant by meaning?** - Existence falters unless there is "a strong idea" or a strong ideal to hold on to.  - Self-transcendence is the essence of existence. Being human is directed to something other than itself.  - being human means living in the polar field of tension established between reality and ideals to materialize. Man lives by ideals and values - Man's original and natural concern with meaning and values is endangered by the prevalent subjectivism and relativism. Both are liable to erode idealism and enthusiasm. - Don't always try to interpret values as if it mean something else.. take it at face value - Sometimes a cigar is nothing but a cigar - Meanings and values are relative, and unique.  - Meaning differ from man to man, from hour to hour.  - Each man's life is unique in that no one can repeat it. Sooner or later his life will be over forever, together with all the unique opportunities to fulfill the meanings. - Uniqueness of meanings: - There is no such thing as a universal meaning of life but only the unique meanings of the individual situations. But there are collectively distilled essence, universal, shortcut. - However, there are also situations which have something in common, and consequently there are also meanings which are shared by human beings across society... throughout history.. rather than being related to unique situations, these meanings refer to the human condition. And what is understood by values.. So that one may define values as those meaning universals which crystallize in the typical situations a society or even humanity has to face.  - Values alleviates man's search for meaning, spared him making decisions (e.g If i take on the value that man should be ___, it guides him in his actions and fulfilling them gives meaning). However, may experience "Value collisions. However, different values may SEEMS to be overlapping, but it is not, it's just one is higher level/dimension then the other. - Man is pushed by drives. But he is pulled by values. he is always free to accept or to reject a value he is offered by a situation.  - Projective Tests - reading or getting signs simple confirm what has already been decided. "Meaning is just something we are projecting into the things around ourselves, things which in themselves are neutral." We give them meaning.  - How we look at reality is subjective. But does not detract the objectiveness of reality itself.