People feel helpless in situations that are beyond their control. This includes illness, disability and a wide variety of life challenges.
In addition to feeling they cannot change situations, people feel powerless to change themselves, since they trace their behavior to instincts in the unconscious, and what is unconscious, they presume, must be more powerful than they are.
Traditionally, psychology strove to uncover unconscious processes of the instincts, but it turned out that understanding their behavior didn’t make people any better at changing it.
Instincts are not all that is unconscious in a person. Spirituality can be unconscious as well. Freud overlooked this.
Psychology never set out to uncover unconscious human spirituality the way it tried to uncover instinctual processes.
In part, this is because psychology did not recognize human spirituality as something worth revealing. Psychology also believed spirituality belonged only to the religious domain.
But Frankl with his spiritual approach called logotherapy was not all that interested in uncovering unconscious spirituality either.
It didn’t much matter to him whether spirituality was conscious or unconscious. My guess as to why this distinction was not important to him is because unconscious instincts tend to compromise one’s self-interests, whereas unconscious spirituality is a positive force, even if it remains unconscious.
The truly critical distinction is not between the conscious and unconscious but between the spiritual and the instinctual.
While the border between unconscious and conscious is fluid, with awareness sometimes moving back and forth between them, a sharp line has to be drawn between the spiritual and instinctual.
Instincts belong to somatic and psychic “facts.” These are the “givens” of fate, the raw material of tendencies we’re born with or learned early on.
In contrast, spirituality belongs to what Frankl calls “existence.”
That is, human existence, which is characterized by freedom and responsibility, is essentially spiritual.
Spiritual existence is the source of one’s power to change in spite of instincts that militate against change.
Freedom and responsibility, not the acceptance of “facts” as fate, marks authentic humanness.
Therefore, it is of much greater therapeutic import to discover the freedom and responsibility hidden in the spiritual unconscious than it is to uncover tendencies lurking in the instinctual unconscious. (pp. 25-28)