Personality Theories in Psychology: Viktor Frankl

Victor Emil Frankl was born in Vienna on March 26, 1905. His father worked hard from being a parliamentary stenographer to becoming Minister of Social Affairs. Since he was a college student and involved in socialist youth organizations, Frankl he became interested in psychology.
In 1930, he earned his doctorate in medicine and was assigned to a ward dedicated to treating women with suicide attempts. As the Nazis came to power in 1938, Frankl assumed the position of Head of the Department of Neurology at Rothschild Hospital, the only jewish hospital in the early years of Nazism.
But in 1942 he and his parents were deported to a concentration camp near Prague, the Theresienstadt.
Frankl survived the Holocaust, even after having been in four Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, from 1942 to 1945; This was not the case with his parents and other relatives of him, who died in these camps.
Due in part to his suffering during his life in the concentration camps and while he was In them, Frankl developed a revolutionary approach to psychotherapy known as logotherapy.

Both Victor Frankl's theory and therapy developed out of his experiences in Nazi concentration camps. Seeing who survived and who did not (who was given the chance to live), he concluded that the philosopher Friederich Nietszche was right: Those who have a reason to live, despite adversity, will resist. He was able to perceive how people who had hopes of reuniting with loved ones or who had projects that felt like a unfinished need, or those who had great faith, seemed to have better opportunities than those who had lost all hope.
His therapy is called logotherapy, from the Greek word logos, which means study, word, spirit, God or meaning, meaning, being the latter is the meaning that Frankl took, although it is true that the others do not deviate much from this sense. When we compare Frankl with Freud and Adler, we can say that in Freud's essential postulates, (he considered that the drive pleasure was the root of all human motivation) and Adler (the will to power), Frankl, in contrast, was inclined to the will to sense.
Frankl also uses the Greek word noös, which means mind or spirit. It suggests that in traditional psychology, we focus on the "psychodynamics" or finding people to reduce their amount of stress. Instead of focusing on that; or rather, in addition to the above, we must pay attention to the noödynamics, which considers that tension is necessary for health, at least when it has to do with meaning. People like to feel the tension involved in the effort of a worthwhile goal to achieve!
However, the effort put into the service of a sense can be frustrating, which can lead to neurosis, especially that called noogenic neurosis, or what others usually call existential or spiritual. More than ever, today's people are experiencing their lives as empty, meaningless, purposeless, aimless..., And it seems that they respond to these experiences with unusual behaviors that harm themselves, others, society or others. three.
One of his favorite metaphors is the existential emptiness. If meaning is what we are looking for, meaninglessness is a hole, a hole in your life, and in the moments when you feel it, you need to run to fill it. Frankl suggests that one of the most conspicuous signs of existential emptiness in our society is boredom. He points out how people often, when they finally have time to do what they want, seem to not want to do anything! People go into a tailspin when they retire; students get drunk every weekend; we immerse ourselves in passive entertainments every night; Sunday's neurosis calls him.
So that we try to fill our existential voids with "things" that although they produce some satisfaction, we also hope that they will provide one last great satisfaction: we can try fill our lives with pleasure, eating beyond our needs, having promiscuous sex, giving us "the great lifetime". Or we can fill our lives with work, with conformity, with conventionality. We can also fill our lives with certain neurotic "vicious circles," such as obsessions with germs and cleanliness or with a fear-driven obsession with a phobic object. The defining quality of these vicious circles is that no matter what we do, it will never be enough.
Like Erich Fromm, Frankl points out that animals have an instinct that guides them. In traditional societies, we have come to replace instincts fairly well with our social traditions. At present, we hardly even have that. Most attempts to achieve guidance within conformity and conventionality meet head-on with the fact that it is increasingly difficult to avoid the freedom we now have to carry out our projects in the lifetime; in short, find our own meaning.
So how do we find our meaning? Frankl presents us with three great approaches: the first is through experiential values, or experiencing something or someone that we value. This could include Maslow's peak experiences and aesthetic experiences such as seeing a good work of art or natural wonders. But our most important example is experiencing the value of another person, e.g. through love. Through our love, we can induce our loved one to develop a meaning, and thus achieve our own meaning.
The second way to find our meaning is through creative values, it is like "carrying out an act", as Frankl says. This would be the traditional existential idea of ​​providing yourself with meaning when carrying out your own projects, or rather, to commit yourself to the project of your own life. It obviously includes creativity in art, music, writing, invention, and so on. It also includes the generativity of which Erikson spoke: taking care of thefuture generations.
The third way of discovering meaning is one that few people other than Frankl subscribe to: attitudinal values. These include such virtues as compassion, courage, and a good sense of humor, etc. But Frankl's most famous example is the achievement of meaning through suffering. The author gives us an example of one of his patients: a doctor whose wife had died, felt very sad and desolate. Frankl asked her, "If you had died before her, what would it have been like for her? The doctor replied that it would have been extremely difficult for her. Frankl pointed out that by having died first, he had avoided that suffering, but now he had to pay a price for surviving and crying for her. In other words, the penalty is the price we pay for love. For this doctor, this made sense of her death and her pain, allowing him to deal with it later. His suffering took a step forward: with a meaning, suffering can be endured with dignity.
Frank also noted that seriously ill people are rarely afforded the opportunity to suffer bravely, thereby maintaining a degree of dignity. Cheer up!, we say, Be optimistic! They are made to be ashamed of your pain and unhappiness.
However, in the end, these attitudinal, experiential, and creative values ​​are mere superficial manifestations of something much more fundamental, the supersense. Here we can perceive the most religious facet of Frankl: the supra-sense is the idea that, in fact, there is an ultimate meaning in life; sense that it does not depend on others, or our projects or even our dignity. It is a clear reference to God and the spiritual meaning of life.
This position places Frankl's existentialism in a different place, say, from Jean Paul Sartre's existentialism. The latter, as well as other atheist existentialists, suggest that life at its end is meaningless, and we must face that nonsense with courage. Sartre says that we must learn to bear this lack of meaning; Frankl, on the other hand, says that what we need is to learn to bear our inability to understand in its entirety the great ultimate sense.
"Logos is deeper than logic"she said, and it is towards faith that we must incline.

Victor Frankl is almost as well known for certain clinical details of his approach as for his theory in general. As we mentioned earlier, he believes that the existential void is often filled with certain neurotic "vicious circles." For example, there is the idea of ​​anticipatory anxiety: Someone may be so scared of certain anxiety-related symptoms that getting those symptoms is inevitable. Anticipatory anxiety causes the very thing that the person is scared of. Anxiety tests are an obvious example: if you are afraid of failing in tests, anxiety will come to prevent you from doing the tests well, leading you to always fear them.
A similar idea is the hyperintention, that suggests overexertion, which in itself prevents you from succeeding at anything. One of the most common examples is insomnia: many people, when they cannot sleep, continue to try, following the instructions to the letter of any book. Therefore, trying to fall asleep has the opposite effect; that is, it prevents from falling asleep, so that the cycle is maintained indefinitely (in parallel, and in a incidentally, the way sleeping pills are overused today causes the effect contrary!). Another example would be the way we feel today about being the perfect lover: men feel that it should take longer, women feel compelled not only to have orgasms, but multiple orgasms and so on. successively. Too much concern in this field will inevitably bring with it the inability to relax and enjoy the experience.
A third variant would be hyperreflection. In this case it is a question of "overthinking". Sometimes we are waiting for something to happen, and it does happen, simply because the occurrence of it is strongly linked to our own beliefs or attitudes; the prophecy of self-completion. Frankl mentions a woman who despite having suffered from bad sexual experiences in her childhood, she developed a strong and healthy personality. When she had the opportunity to approach the world of psychology, she found that literature was she mentioned that such experiences left the person with an inability to enjoy relationships sexual; From here on, the woman began to have these problems!
A part of speech therapy also uses these terms: the paradoxical intention is to desire precisely what we are afraid of. A young man who sweated profusely when in social situations was instructed by Frankl to think about wanting to sweat. Part of his instructions said, "I've only sweated a quarter of the time before, but now I'll do it for at least ten quarters of the time!" Obviously, when she got into it, she couldn't do it. The absurdity of the approach broke his vicious circle.
Another example can be found related to sleep disorders: following Frankl, if you suffer from insomnia, don't spend the night tossing and turning, counting sheep, moving from side to side to fall asleep, Get up! Try to stay awake as long as you can! In time you will find yourself falling like a rock on the bed.
Another technique is reflection. Frankl believes that many problems are rooted in an overemphasis on it. Often times, if you move away from yourself a bit and get closer to others, the problems usually disappear. If, for example, you have difficulties with sex, try to gratify your partner without seeking your own satisfaction; the worries about erections and orgasms disappear and the realities reappear. Or just don't try to please anyone. Many sex therapists maintain that a couple does nothing more than "make out and touch", avoiding orgasm "at all costs." These couples simply last a couple of nights before what they considered a problem is definitely resolved.
In any case, however interesting these techniques may have aroused, Frankl insists that in the end these people's problems are really a matter of their need for meaning. Therefore, although these techniques are a good start to therapy, they are not under any circumstances the goal to be achieved.