Someone can grow up in poverty, pull himself up by his bootstraps and become a successful doctor and then feel his life is deeply unsatisfying because there is a specialty he was aching to develop and never did. On the other hand someone can be a small country doctor and not have the prestige of having “made it big” in the world, but his work is richly satisfying. Fulfillment comes in doing what you are uniquely equipped to do.
By this statement Frankl is hinting at his own choice of logotherapy over following the party line of Freud, with whom he corresponded and later Adler, with whom he had a falling-out. Frankl insisted on sticking to his convictions and carving out the area of psychology that was dear to his heart and in which he felt he could make a special contribution.
That area is what he referred to as “a psychotherapy in spiritual terms.” He insisted on the necessity to look beyond the origin of psychopathology to the distress of the human spirit and to alleviate this distress.
This kind of approach incorporates values and therefore he is aware of the danger of the practitioner imposing his personal philosophy in therapy.
Because of this, Frankl recognized the need to show a good enough reason for including the spiritual component.
In a very practical sense, people coming for help confront you with philosophical questions. To trace a pessimistic view of life only to an inferiority complex is working at cross-purposes with the client. If you occupy yourself with hinting at the pathological roots of a philosophical question you will be disregarding the person’s question.
Psychotherapy simply does not have the tools for straightening out a distorted world-view, because the validity or lack of validity of a world-view does not depend on the psychic origin of those ideas. For example, if a person’s belief in the existence of God came out of a fear of powerful natural forces, this does not mean that God does not actually exist.
Frankl compares digging for psychic origins of ideas to a man who, confronted with a stork, exclaimed “Why, I thought storks didn’t exist.” Because the stork has a “secondary” use as the bearer of babies in the nursery myth, shall we therefore assume that the bird itself is a fable?”
Therefore, philosophical questions have to be dealt with in a straightforward way in their own right, regardless of the psychic health of the holder of the ideas.
(The Doctor and the Soul pp. 9-16)