A (psychic) character is a “created being”. It corresponds to a psychological type, a race, a mentality, it is inherited and shaped by the environment. In contrast, a (spiritual) person is a “creating being”. It engages with character, with its faculties and its suggestibility. In logotherapy, the beloved phrase: “One does not have to put up with everything about oneself” is actually a core statement about personal points of view.
“It is not only heredity and environment which make a man. A man also makes something of himself: “the man” (the person) “from himself” (from his character). Thus, following Allers’ formulation: man “has” a character, but he “is” a person – and one can add, he “becomes a personality”. Inasmuch as the person who “is” engages with the character that he “has”, taking a position towards it, he transforms it and himself, and “becomes” a personality.”18
People with identical genes can, under very similar environmental conditions, end up with very different ways of life, as we know from research into twins, which always makes clear that a common inheritance and experiential background produces both similarities and differences. I myself have known a gypsy family about which records have been kept for three generations in the files of a charitable organization in Munich. One can see from the files that nine children were born between 1945 and 1955, and they all grew up under the same pressure in the same criminal family milieu, being trained to steal from a young age. If any of the children returned home in the afternoon or in the evening without “loot”, there were beaten.
Of these nine children, one grew up to be a decent man. As an adult, he has never been in trouble with the law, he has learned a proper profession, and he has started a family that lives peacefully and respectably. This one man disproves all the theories of developmental psychology. No one should blame the eight other children of the gypsy family who struggled through life as adults as best they could; they had a really heavy burden to bear. But one feels the greatest respect for the ninth.
In the course of my educational counseling, I have repeatedly met children who have had lovingly caring parents but nevertheless developed badly. There is everything in every person, angel and devil. The human is the being who builds murderous rockets, and at the same time the being who protests against this; the being who hunts seals to extinction, and at the same time the being who desperately tries to save this species. Everything is always there in every one of us.
“So what is a human being? A being who always decides what he or she is. The being who invented gas chambers; but at the same time the being who has entered the gas chambers, upright, with a prayer on the lips.”19
The relationship between freedom and personality can be expressed as Frankl’s equation:
Freedom from character = freedom for personality
The spiritual freedom of a human being includes an ability to step back from one’s own inclinations, conditioning and character traits. This is the basis for the human capacity for self-distancing, which, like the capacity for self-transcendence, is harnessed by logotherapy for healing purposes. Since this capacity for self-distancing is a fundamental anthropological phenomenon existing at the noetic level of the human being, which cannot itself become sick, the following separation scheme naturally presents itself for psychotherapy: a separation between the sick part of a patient’s psyche and the healthy part of the patient’s psyche, including his or her (not sick) spirituality – the “intact” part.
Patient
“intact” part sick part
| Definition: “intact” part = the healthy part of the psyche together with the part of the spirit that cannot become sick. | Sick part = the sick of the psyche |
The central concern of logotherapy is to strengthen the patient’s “intact” part, and to use the powers concentrated there to deal properly with the sick part.
In the diagram the therapeutic extension of the “intact” area is represented by the curved line extending into the sick area. One might argue that it makes no difference whether one occupies oneself primarily with the sick part of a person and tries to reduce it, as psychotherapy has generally attempted to do, or whether one attempts to extend the “intact” area of a human being as logotherapy does. In fact, it is not the same at all. In the one case, the therapist “looks” for the patient in the sick area, in the other case in the healthy area.
Anyone who is familiar with the therapeutic profession knows how much the charisma of a therapist is able to set in motion in a patient. What the therapist thinks and feels flows into patient’s thoughts and feelings in the interaction process and changes them. Thus when therapists and life coaches keep their sights on the essential freedom, the fundamental intactness of the human spirit, the meaning orientation and the unique personality of every individual, in addition to the part of a sick person, that is still healthy, in spite of all psychic disorders and confusions, then sooner or later we will have patients who are no longer completely at the mercy of their disorders and confusions, because they sense (through the charisma of their therapists) that human beings can be self-determining like no other creature, every day newly decide what they will be the next day, and that even the most severe illnesses, which admittedly have a fateful aspect, can only cripple one part of them, but can never destroy their dignity. If patients are able to recognise this, they have already taken a huge step towards health.
There is one last danger to mention: collectivism. Its dangers hardly need to be explained, when one thinks about some of the crudest collectivist judgments such as: “All redheads have tempers” or “All blondes are dumb”. In statements like this, assessments and forecasts about people are made solely on the basis of their race or character. The collectivist thinker is too comfortable to examine the personality of the person concerned. Such a person forgets that genetic heritage constitutionally and dispositionally pre-forms the psychophysical element of the human being, but ultimately everything depends on what the person concerned does or does not make out of these resources. Since this is a personal act of self-determination that cannot be derived from belonging to any type or race, but rather derives from the nous, the collectivist assessment is invalid: human beings are not predictable, calculable, or even evaluable on the basis of character.
Collectivism is also dangerous with regard to self-assessment. It is a prominent error, indeed, perhaps the error of the neurotic, to believe that he or she has a predetermined character, and cannot behave in opposition to this character. It is only this error that makes psychic disorders possible, not any neurotic disposition of character!
“Whenever a neurotic speaks of his or her self or personal way of being, he or she tends to imply that this way of being could not be otherwise. The identification of a character trait automatically becomes a stipulation. The neurotic thinks that having this character trait is just the way it is, and there is no possibility of being any other way …
Yet the neurotic person is not only concerned with his or her own individual character, with the id, but also with something beyond individuality, something collective within the self – the “person” that is active in and through the self … In this context it must appear to us as extremely questionable when we perceive that these days people are generally inclined to refer in all sorts of ways to the characteristics of any group (class or race) to which they