The logotherapist tries to broaden the patients attention to potential meaning and responsibility in the world
Meaning to ones life can change between people and situations and each has their own responsibilities. This emphasis on responsibleness is reflected in the categorical imperative of logotherapy, which is: “Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!” Frankl believes that there is nothing which would stimulate a ones’s sense of responsibleness more than this maxim, which invites them to imagine first that the present is past and, second, that the past may yet be changed and amended. Such a precept confronts them with life’s finiteness as well as the finality of what they make out of both their life and themselves.
Logotherapy tries to make the patient fully aware of their own responsibleness; therefore, it must leave to them the option for what, to what, or to whom they understand themselves to be responsible. That is why a logotherapist is the least tempted of all psychotherapists to impose value judgments on their patients (Psychiatry plays a moralizing role for society by defining behavior in terms of normal and abnormal), for they will never permit the patient to pass to the doctor the responsibility of judging. It is, therefore, up to the patient to decide whether they should interpret their life task as being responsible to society or to their own conscience. There are people, however, who do not interpret their own lives merely in terms of a task assigned to them but also in terms of the taskmaster who has assigned it to them.
Logotherapy is neither teaching nor preaching. It is as far removed from logical reasoning as it is from moral exhortation. To put it figuratively, the role played by a logotherapist is that of an eye specialist rather than that of a painter. A painter tries to convey to us a picture of the world as they see it; an ophthalmologist tries to enable us to see the world as it really is. The logotherapist’s role consists of widening and broadening the visual field of the patient so that the whole spectrum of potential meaning becomes conscious and visible to him, which perhaps may be tuned out due to learned helplessness.
References
- Frankl, Victor. (1946). Man’s Search for Meaning Chapter 2 Logotherapy In A Nutshell (p. 122). Boston, MA: Beacon Books.
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