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Advanced Syllabus: Skills Training and Fields of Application

Cost for Advanced Course: $2400

Twenty-four meetings run for two hours each session. Student project presentations happen during meetings twenty-two to twenty-four. Attendance is mandatory. Students are free to schedule one-on-one supervision meetings as needed.

Meeting One | Orientation

  • Course goals, content, and requirements
    • reading assignments
    • 6 transcriptions, 2 of which to bring to class
    • project of 10 pages due at the end of the course both in writing and to present orally
  • How we heal through meaning
  • Believe in the meaning-seeker

Preparation for this class:

Meeting Two | The Helping Relationship

  • How to avoid iatrogenic damage
  • The uniqueness of the logotherapeutic encounter: Facilitating a dialogue with conscience
  • How to talk about values but not impose values
  • How to facilitate a conversation with a conscience
  • Join with the person in a basic trust in life; don’t side with them as a victim against the world

Preparation for this class:

  • The Life-changing Impact of Viktor Frankl’s Logotherapy, case of unwanted girl pp. 242-244
  • The professional relationship
  • Practicum case supervision

Optional:

  • Understanding Man’s Search for Meaning p. 11
  • Living Logotherapy: Logotherapy Principles and Methods p. 170, p. 73, p. 77, p. 40

Meeting Three | Strengths of the human spirit

  • The healthy core
  • Self-transcendence vs. Self-actualization
  • We are motivated towards meaning and purpose
  • Conscience is our sense of meaning
  • Choice, defiant power, humor, and spiritual elasticity

Preparation for this class:

Optional:

  • Living Logotherapy: Logotherapy Principles and Methods pp. 33-42

Part Two | Methods and Techniques

Meeting Four | Logotherapeutic Listening

  • Taking note of false beliefs
  • Hearing the unheard cry for meaning
  • Picking up meaning-hints: keywords that reveal why they feel the way they do
  • Understanding what matters to them most

Preparation for this class:

  • Logotherapeutic Listening: The-changing Impact of Viktor Frankl’s Logotherapy: Anneke p. 154-158
  • Elizabeth Lukas’s video on Social Phobia from the beginning until 12:53 minutes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S3T62iuQWM

Optional:

  • Living Logotherapy: Principles and Methods, p. 78-91

Meeting Five | What is Socratic Dialogue

  • How Socratic Dialogue in logotherapy is similar to Socrates and how it is dissimilar
  • Meaning-hints and meaning-crisis: central focus of the dialogue
  • The dynamic of a challenge from without together with a longing from within
  • The buried choice
  • The meaning of the moment: responsibility as the essence of human existence
  • Dealing with the past: discernment of a personal destiny: how past hurts and experiences felt in the present moment give shape to a unique mission in life

Preparation for this class:

  • Assignments from The Will to Meaning on a) objective meaning b) fruitful tension c) relationship to past (See Assignments document)
  • The Doctor and the Soul on the best move in chess (See Assignments document)
  • Introduction to Socratic Dialogue

Optional:

  • Living Logotherapy: Logotherapy Principles and Methods pp. 42-50, p. 56
  • Guideposts to Meaning: The Buried Choice p. 27

Meeting Six | Interventions of Socratic Dialogue

Presentations/documents to read/assignment questions to answer/links to listen to in preparation for this class:

  • Logotherapeutic “diagnosis”: Identify the meaning of crisis
  • Identify the origin of the problem: soma, psyche, noös, or combination?
  • 10 Interventions of Socratic Dialogue

Meeting Seven | Therapy of Love

  • Logotherapeutic empathy and the healing concept in logotherapy
  • Recognizing personal strengths and uniqueness
  • Authentic being
  • Four conversational elements in the rhetoric of love
  • Encouraging the meaning-seeker to continually learn from life

Preparation for this class:

Optional:

  • Living logotherapy: Logotherapy Principles and Methods, p. 91-108
  • The Therapist and the Soul, Lukas, Ch. 3

Meeting Eight | The Problem as a Crisis of Meaning

  • Meaning crisis: central focus of dialogue
  • 4-part model for logotherapy exploration
    • Focus on the unscathed human spirit to reveal (a) how the person has experienced meaning and (b) what meaning is waiting for the person to experience
    • Hearing the problem as an unheard cry for meaning: the man who gave his wife away (noögenic depression and despair in contrast to psychogenic depression) and the boy who lied
  • Pathology of Psychopathology
  • Frankl’s categories of neurosis
  • Misperceptions as a source of emotional distress and mental ill-health
  • Marching south
  • Existential vacuum
  • Collective neurosis

Preparation for this class:

  • Frankl’s categories of neurosis
  • The Life-changing Impact of Viktor Frankl’s Logotherapy: Depression pp. 179-181, pp.148-151
  • Will to Meaning: on boredom, despair, and the subhuman level (See Assignments document)
  • The Doctor and the Soul on presentist existence (See Assignments document)

Optional:

  • Living Logotherapy: Logotherapy Principles and Methods p. 111, p. 120, p. 34-36, p. 197
  • Meaning in Suffering: Boy who Lies Case 9

Meeting Nine | Depression and trauma

  • How to know when to refer to a psychiatrist
  • Clinical Depression/Major Depressive Disorder and Suicide
  • Trauma

Meeting Ten | Dereflection and Paradoxical Intention

  • Dereflection:
    • The first step in distancing from symptoms
    • Counters hyper-reflection
    • Releases from identification with symptoms
    • Helps access self-transcendence
    • Distress of stress vs. tension of direction; obsessive-compulsive behavior
  • Paradoxical Intention:
    • Counters hyper-intention and the noödynamics of fear
    • Breaks the vicious cycle of anticipatory anxiety
    • Humor, self-detachment, and the defiant power of the human spirit

Preparation for this class:

  • Dereflection: The Life-changing Impact of Viktor Frankl’s Logotherapy, pp. 161-162
  • Will to Meaning, pp. 126-128
  • Paradoxical Intention: The Life-changing Impact of Viktor Frankl’s Logotherapy pp. 165-168
  • Elizabeth Lukas video on Social Phobia from 12:53 minutes until the end https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S3T62iuQWM

Optional:

  • Several cases in Psychotherapy and Existentialism, Frankl

Meeting Eleven | Attitude Modification

  • Empathetically challenge false beliefs
  • Confront inconsistencies
  • Avoid toxic positivity by acknowledging the bad and finding the good
  • How attitude modification allows us to formulate a meaning-reframe, i.e. to change our narrative and tell our story in a different way
  • Broaden perspective to find areas of freedom and responsibility
  • Clarify values to find meaning in suffering; shift attention from victim to victor
  • Accept challenges as a task
  • Affirm, encourage, and celebrate achievements

Preparation for this class:

  • The Life-changing Impact of Viktor Frankl’s Logotherapy: Suffering as an Achievement: pp. 143-145

Optional:

Meeting Twelve | Overview of steps, phases, and techniques

  • 4 steps of therapy (Lukas)
    • Distancing from symptoms
    • Modification of attitudes
    • Reduction of symptoms
    • Orientation towards meaning
  • 3 techniques of Viktor Frankl
    • Socratic Dialogue
    • Dereflection
    • Paradoxical Intention
  • 3 techniques of Elizabeth Lukas
    • Modification of attitudes
    • Suggestive training of the will
    • Naive questioning
  • 3 phases of psychotherapeutic counseling
    • Diagnostic phase
    • Therapeutic phase
    • Follow-up phase

Preparation for this class:

  • Meaningful Living p. 61-62, p. 47, p. 42-45, p. 69, p. 177

Meeting Thirteen | Authentic versus Inauthentic Being

  • Existential background of Frankl’s logo-philosophy
  • The “secular” and “religious” existentialists

Preparation for this class:

  • No special preparation necessary

Meeting Fourteen | Relationship to Ultimate Meaning

  • Deep dive into Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning
  • Discussion on the unity of the personality as a marker of health and sanity

Preparation for this class:

  • Read Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning
  • Read The Spirit of Logotherapy, by Stephen Costello (Logotherapy Institute of Ireland)
  • Assignment questions on Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning (See Assignments document)
  • Frankl, 1977 interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4uAsVvtqIQ
  • The Spirit of Logotherapy

Meeting Fifteen | Meaning-centered vs. problem-centered

  • Focus on meaning, not the problem
  • The problem as a task
  • Understanding causes of behavior (self-knowledge) and finding strategies to overcome personality challenges (logotherapeutic approach)

Preparation for this class:

  • Living Logotherapy: Logotherapy Principles and Methods p. 66

Part Three | Fields of Application

Meeting Sixteen | A Unique Approach to Family Counseling

  • Principles of meaning-centered family therapy
  • Marital counseling
  • Healing trauma in relationships

Preparation for this class:

  • The Life-changing Impact of Viktor Frankl’s Logotherapy pp. 181-184
  • Living Logotherapy: Logotherapy Principles and Methods p. 272
  • A Unique Approach to Family Counseling, p. 92

Meeting Seventeen | Logotherapy with youth; logotherapy and other theories

  • Logotherapy with youth
    • The experience of meaning in the childhood years
    • Educational programs
  • Logotherapy and other theories
    • Psychoanalysis
    • Humanistic psychology
    • Cognitive Behavioral psychology
    • Existentialist psychologies
    • Mindfulness

Preparation for this class:

  • No special preparation necessary

Meeting Eighteen | Medical Ministry

  • Physical illness and disability
  • Blows of fate
  • Ageing and midlife crisis; life review
  • Death and dying, hospice work, grieving, stages according to Kubler Ross

Preparation for this class:

  • Medical ministry
  • Case of Karen
  • Case of Ping

Optional:

  • Living Logotherapy: Logotherapy Principles and Methods p. 178-197
  • The Life-changing Impact of Viktor Frankl’s Logotherapy: Sudden death pp. 82-83; Unresolved Grief pp. 79-82

Meeting Nineteen | Addictions and Eating Disorders

  • Addictions and eating disorders: pathway to freedom
  • Getting to the source of the problem
  • Appreciating the value of life

Preparation for this class:

  • Living Logotherapy: Logotherapy Principles and Methods, p. 161, p. 166
  • The Life-changing Impact of Viktor Frankl’s Logotherapy pp. 85-92

Optional:

  • Say Yes To Life, Viktor Frankl

Meeting Twenty | Ways out of the existential vacuum

  • ’Toxic positivity’ versus the healthy ‘holding of space’ for seeing hope, beauty, possibility when in logotherapy session with a client.
  • Cultivating a relationship with conscience
  • Dealing with the challenges of our times, our part in the bigger scheme of things
  • Discerning and realizing a personal destiny and mission in life

Preparation for this class:

  • Living Logotherapy: Logotherapy Principles and Methods p. 218, p. 231, p. 204

Optional:

Meeting Twenty-one | Optimal Mental Health

  • Definition of mental health: Identify as spirit
  • Tension of direction versus a search for happiness and a state of homeostasis
  • Conscience as the detector of meaning
  • Accepting fate and finding areas of freedom
  • Signs of health: free to take a stand, meaningful choices, resilience, integrity (behaviors match values), curiosity, healthy relationships
  • Basic trust: Living with paradoxical perspectives, seeing conditions as commissions, the meaning of surrender, meaningful part of a meaningful whole

Preparation for this class:

  • No special preparation necessary

Meeting Twenty-two | Student presentation of projects

Meeting Twenty-three | Student presentation of projects

Meeting Twenty-four | Student presentation of projects

Required Reading for Class

  • The Life-Changing Impact of Viktor Frankl’s Logotherapy, Teria Shantall
  • Living Logotherapy: Logotherapy Principles and Methods, Elisabeth Lukas

Required Reading for Assignment Questions:

  • The Will to Meaning, Viktor Frankl
  • Meaning in Suffering, Elisabeth Lukas
  • Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, Viktor Frankl
  • The Doctor and the Soul, Viktor Frankl

Instructors: