2. Example: a bad childhood
People who have suffered an unhappy childhood are not free from its effects, but they are free to adopt different positions towards it. Some parents say: “I was beaten when I was growing up, so beating is in me. If I get angry, I’ll beat my children too!” Other parents say, “Because I was beaten as a child, I want to make things better for my children. That’s why I do not beat them!”
Upbringing undoubtedly has a powerful influence, but not an allpowerful one. With a certain degree of maturity, every human being is free to educate him or herself. The act of self-education is then less and less dependent on “the will of the parents”, rather than on an “ought that should be experienced by the individual as his or her own” (Frankl).
3. Example: instinctive actions
An animal cannot act against its instincts. If it is hungry and sees food, it “must” pounce on it and devour it. A person, on the other hand, can be hungry (– fate), and still give the last piece of bread which he or she still possesses to a comrade who might need it more urgently (– freedom). In the first, somatic, dimension, the stomach will growl and the sinking blood glucose level will cause discomfort. In the second, psychic, dimension, the desire for bread and fantasies about food will cause torments. This is the “psychophysical parallelism” mentioned by Frankl, in which the first two levels are interwoven. But in the third, noetic dimension, a person separates him or herself from the fact of hunger, and decides – if this is what he or she wants for any meaningful reason – to overrule the inner psychophysical pressure.
Humans thereby prove themselves able to respond to the conditions of fate in freedom, and, in doing so, they are responsible for their response. The non-deterministic outlook of logotherapy implies the re-admission of responsibility and possible guilt in the psychotherapeutic concept of the human being.
Where there are no choices at a given time, there can be no guilt. Since we have no ability, for example, to change our past, we cannot be guilty towards it. (This says nothing about whether we were guilty in the past, at the time when we could still make choices about it.) On the other hand, when we have choices, we are responsible for the choice made. And it may happen that a bad, a wrong choice is made. The terms “good or bad” or “right or wrong” are difficult to define, which is why they are replaced in logotherapy by the words “more or less meaningful”. In other words they are measured according to the concrete meaning of the corresponding life situation. Guilt is then: choosing against meaning.
“Humanity has developed a maximum of consciousness – of knowledge, of science – and a maximum of responsibility; but at the same time it has developed a minimal sense of responsibility. The man of today knows much more than ever, and is also responsible for many things - for more than ever; but what he knows less about than ever, is his responsibility.”9
According to a logotherapeutic outlook, fate never fully explains a person’s behaviour, for a human is not a victim, but a co-creator of his or her destiny. Logotherapy abhors the widespread “victim ideology” in psychology, and the tendency to provide psychological excuses by asserting human dependencies. To assert, for example, that a murderer had to murder because of terrible childhood circumstances or long-suppressed feelings of hatred, is too facile. This criticism on the part of logotherapy does not, of course, apply to cases in which there is limited responsibility as a result of psychosis. It applies to authentic cases such as the following: A 41-year-old Swede was released because of a supposedly severe mother complex after he strangled his wife and stabbed his two children. The court sent him to a psychiatric institution, where he was discharged as cured after a few months. He took the money from his wife’s life insurance and started a nice new life with his girlfriend, in which his wife and children would have been in the way.
Logotherapy asserts that a person can always take a position with respect to his or her childhood circumstances, feelings of hatred, mother complexes, etc., and decide what he or she makes of them; and that it is actually the worst “condemnation” to be denied this last room of manoeuvre and seen as a spiritually incapable marionette, a “homo-automaton”, a product of heredity and environment who is unalterably subservient to external conditions. It is precisely this statement that characterises pan-determinism, which commits the error of sparing nothing from deterministic interpretation. However, in fact, there are always still personal choices that are not defined, there always remains a small amount of unpredictability in human life.
Logotherapy has reversed the old deterministic question, which asks what determines a person’s feelings and actions, and asks where this ineliminable residue of indeterminateness, which is still present in distress and illness, comes from. Its answer: it comes from the noetic dimension. Thanks to it, human beings can defy their fate, dissociate themselves from their inner states, resist their external circumstances or accept their limitations heroically. On the psychological level, such freedom does not really exist: nobody can choose his or her condition. Anxiety, feelings of anger and instinctual drives are not selectable, conditioning cannot be annulled, social formation cannot be shaken off, limitations of ability cannot be lifted. Reducing the spiritual to the psychic, as pan-determinism does, deprives human beings (at least theoretically) of individual responsibility and delivers them to fate.
What does all this mean for practical psychotherapy? Simply: if we admit that even a psychically disturbed human being has spiritual freedom, we must also respect that human being. A patient shares responsibility for his or her own healing – to the extent that the spiritual dimension is still “open” – and also has the freedom to destroy his or her life. Ultimately, healing is not “do-able”; it can only be promoted, and relies on the self-healing powers of the body and the psyche, and the willingness of the spirit to be healed. Therefore, one of the basic rules of logotherapy is:
One should offer help,but not take away responsibility!
Unfortunately, psychotherapy often works the other way around, because a therapist strictly avoids giving instructions or disappears behind an impenetrable wall of non-comment. On the other hand, too much responsibility is taken away from the patient, in that all internal and external difficulties are traced back to conflicts initiated by others, and this makes the patient a helpless victim. In logotherapy, concrete help is offered, but responsibility remains with the patient.
Conscience, the “Organ of Meaning”
We have illustrated the noo-psychic antagonism by means of the dialectic between fate and freedom. Here the psychic “determinateness” of the human, everything which is fated, stands against the spiritual “indeterminateness”, everything which is free. We contrasted what is psychically imposed with what can be chosen by the spirit. From the resulting freedom (not from, but for something), we deduced the basic responsibility of the human and the possibility of guilt. But this does not end the chain of logical consequences. For, as freedom presupposes choice, a more or less meaningful choice presupposes the recognition of meaningful and not meaningful, and to ensure this recognition a special “organ” is needed in the human organism: the conscience.
“Meaning not only must but can be found, and human conscience is the guide in the search for it. In a word, the conscience is a meaning organ. It could be defined as the ability to perceive the unique and one-off meaning hidden in every situation.”10
What conscience reveals to humans is a trans-subjective meaning, which applies to values in the world, their preservation and multiplication, and not subjective meaning in the service of individual need satisfaction. It would be very dangerous to restrict the decisions of conscience to the perception of what seems “subjectively meaningful ”. This would mean that a terrorist could claim that it seemed meaningful to him to plant bombs. But this sort of “meaning for him” is not what is