Logotherapy

Logotherapy and Existential Analysis are two sides of the same coin of psychotherapy.

Logotherapy is helping to search for a possible, personal meaning in relation to a situation or condition, and others. Logotherapy is integrative since it is integral reality based, actual meaning – person centred psychotherapy. The search for meaning which Logotherapy initiates, is the search for the last resort of personal freedom to exist and live for a loved one and/or for a humane cause. It may be a goal very close by and practical to do or to live for , but it may also be an existential and ethical source of strength helping a person to face fate, physical and psychological illness, deprivation, loss, and eventually dying.

Existential Analysis is a twofold process of exploring the client’s past and present action, experience and attitude in relation to the question of being, or of having been responsible as a person on the one hand, and of finding intrinsic, unconsciously operant values related to dignity. The other side of Existential Analysis is the phenomenological scientific approach to questions concerning the human condition, the so-called meta-clinical issues.
As such, Logotherapy and Existential Analysis is the foundation of ‘noodynamic psychotherapy’. The school of Logotherapy and Existential Analysis was founded by the late Austrian Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. multi Viktor E. Frankl (1905 – 1997). Logotherapy was ‘invented’ in the years 1925 – 1945, as a school is also known as ‚the third Viennese school’, the school of psychotherapy which emerged on the one hand from Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalysis and on the other hand from the Individual – Psychology from Alfred Adler. Initially it was meant to be additional, to fill out lacunas in existing schools like the first two Viennese schools, and later on to emerging schools like the behavioural and Rogerian, and other ‘existential therapies’. At the same time however, Logotherapy itself developed into a powerful separate approach, with its specific terminology, analysis, diagnose, range, interventions and treatment. Many other schools have benefited from Logotherapy and Existential Analysis over the years, and new methods have been developed from Logotherapy in many adjacent fields.
Professor Frankl taught at Stanford (Palo Alto) and San Diego and at many other US and Canadian university colleges, he taught in the Eastern European states, as well as in Western Europe, in South Africa, in South America and in Japan. His last lecturing visit before he passed, was to China. Viktor Frankl’s books have been translated into 28 languages. He was awarded 31 international doctorates.

Logotherapy and Existential Analysis is supported by a vast group of internationally respected scholars and researchers. It is recognised by the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association and by the WHO of the UN. In Europe, the European Association for Psychotherapy in Vienna affirmed the scientific and therapeutic validity of Logotherapy and Existential Analysis, by awarding EALEA the accrediting status concerning the European Certificate for Psychotherapy.

Info and bibliography:
Contact the Viktor Frankl Institute in Vienna and/or visit:
www.logotherapy.univie.ac.at