What is the purpose of logotherapy? What makes it different from psychotherapy?
Logotherapy aims to instill trust in the unconditional meaningfulness of your life and to search together with you to find your sense of purpose in life through a process of taking up challenges and making responsible choices that lead you to your authentic self.
The raw material logotherapy works with is the somatic, psychological and spiritual dimensions. What critical difference does incorporating the spiritual make? Is logotherapy for everyone?
Every person that comes for help in therapy has a soma, psyche and spirit. Every person is a human being. Someone who is under great stress, emotional imbalance or has challenging life circumstances may have more difficulty accessing their spiritual/noetic dimension but helping to access one’s humanity is part of the therapeutic process. Therefore unless they have lost their humanity yes, logotherapy can help everyone.
Does this emphasis on the spiritual turn logotherapy into a religious system? No, therapy and religion are still different systems with different goals. However both systems share a common base that cannot be ignored: refinement of one’s humanity.
If becoming human is to be a goal in therapy our fundamental perspective has to shift from “What can life give me?” to “What can I give to life?”
But is this therapy?! No one goes to therapy because they have a burning need to be responsible, to become more humane or to become aware of their unique life-tasks!
No one thinks that this is what they want. They have a problem that need solving and therapy is supposed to solve it. The focus is on their needs: ‘What can you do for me? Make this better. Help me function in the world.’
However once the human spirit is accessed and the mature adult comes out of hiding and the person comes into an authentic relationship with self and other, their perspective naturally shifts to one of reaching out to the world in a giving way.
There is an awareness that no matter what one’s situation is there are values to fulfill that no one else on earth can do particularly because they can only be done by someone with your particular life conditions. Psychological needs alone will never satisfy the desire to make sense out of life and to be our authentic self.
Despite all of the experiments that put us in the same category with rats, even thinking and feeling rats, there is a level beyond the animal level that makes us human. Psychotherapy must incorporate this dimension. Becoming human is a healing process.