Logotherapy: An Overview

Abstract

Viktor Frankl is the founder of Logotherapy which has come to be called the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy (after Freud’s psychoanalysis and Adler’s individual psychology). Logotherapy finds its philosophical roots in existentialism and phenomenology, its psychological roots in psychoanalysis and individual psychology, and its spiritual roots in a profound commitment to the human being as an irreducibly spiritual creature. It is perhaps in the area of the conception of the human being that Frankl’s differences with those schools of thought which constitute the roots of Logotherapy can best be distinguished. The anthropology of a therapeutic system profoundly influences the entire system. Most psychology has grown from a view of humanity as a creature of biology fully explicable in terms of the commonalities between humanity and the rest of the living creatures.