Logotherapy in the Postmodern Age: What the Existential-Analytical and Postmodern Spirit canChallenge Each Other to Do.
By Prof. Dr. Heye Heyen
Originally presented to the 25th anniversary of The German Society for Logotherapy and Existential Analysis in Osnabrück on March 23, 2007.
Available in German here.
Translated by Tom Edmondson for Meaning in Ministry: Logotherapy with Pastoral Care
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,
"Logotherapy in the postmodern era" - this title names a thing and a place. “Logotherapy” is the thing. “Postmodern” denotes an aspect of the place where logotherapy is practiced in the 21st century. We freely chose the matter, logotherapy, and at some point, made it our business. In principle, each of us could have chosen something else instead. That doesn't necessarily apply to the location, to postmodernism.
None of us have been asked whether we would like to live and work in a world saturated with the postmodern spirit or would rather live somewhere else. In that case, some of us might have said: we'd rather be somewhere else, namely in a world of binding values and generally accepted truth. But none of us have been asked. For the cause we have chosen, the place is given to us by fate. It has been imposed upon us. So I may well say, for logotherapists in the 21st century it is part of the "task character of life" to be challenged by the postmodern spirit and to be a challenge to it.
PART I: WHAT IS POSTMODERN?
But what exactly is meant by the term “postmodern”? What I mean by this are two developments in particular, which are of course related and condition each other. I will outline them briefly. Firstly, there is the suspicion of the great narratives, secondly, the individualization and the associated compulsion to invent one's own life.
First of all: suspicion of the grand narratives. This expression is due to the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. In 1979 he published his programmatic book, which is now considered a classic of postmodernism, "La condition postmoderne"; the title of the German translation published in 1986 is: "The postmodern knowledge" („Das postmoderne Wissen“).
Lyotard understands a “grand narrative” or “meta-narrative” to be a theoretical system that claims to explain the world to us “validly and comprehensively and to oblige human action on the basis of such a unifying explanation.” According to the postmodern sensation, neither the Enlightenment, nor science and technology, nor Marxism nor Christianity can do this.
In religious education, we are talking about a patchwork religiosity of young people; an ideological patchwork quilt whose patchwork is collected from different traditions and systems, in contrast to the ready-made or inherited monochrome carpet with which one can compare the belief system that their parents have more or less adopted or rejected as a whole.
A few years ago, a student of Religious Education said: "Why, I imagine that the Christian God lives with Allah and Buddha in a kind of shared apartment." She does not need a truth to which these three would have to be transcended, be it a "God above God" in the sense of Tillich or a "super sense" in the sense of Frankl. She can also easily imagine life after death, in all seriousness, in such a way that the Christian goes to heaven, the Buddhist enters nirvana after a series of rebirths, and the atheist simply remains dead. Perhaps a little carelessly, I objected that logic dictates that after death there is only either heaven or reincarnation or nothingness, for example. The striking and, at the same time, significant thing for me was that this objection was not at all plausible to her. Here my modern reasoning had met her postmodern understanding or non-understanding. The one common truth that arches over everything like a dome has long since collapsed for her, and she doesn't even experience that as something bad or something to mourn. On the contrary, the dome no longer blocks the view of the sky, and even the rubble now has its own aesthetic fascination.
Second: The Individualization of Life worlds
Today, the individual has a degree of freedom to shape their professional and private life themselves, in a way that was almost unthinkable in previous generations. If I had been born just fifty years earlier, my career path would have been pretty much set from the moment I was born. I would have taken over my parents' farm in East Friesland, where I was born, and spent my life there until old age. The question "what do you want to be?" would never have arisen. And of course, not the question: high school, yes or no? Studies, yes or no? And if so, what and where? A wealth of my own decisions, all of which I was allowed to make myself – and of course had to do – would have been taken from me or withheld from me by the community (according to the guidelines of tradition). Marrying a woman suitable for the role of a farmer's wife, having children with her and staying with her until death would have been just as natural as remaining faithful to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in which I was baptized as a child until the end of my life. The question of why I am convinced of this, or whether I might not find the doctrine of the Reformed or the Catholics more convincing, would not really have arisen. Not to mention the possibilities that are open today: to leave the church, to become a Buddhist instead of getting married, to live in a sequence of life stage partnerships, with women or men, with children or without, to be sedentary or to live as a vagabond, to practice a profession or successively several different ones, and so on.
It is clear that today there are many more options available. This means on the one hand an increase in the freedom of choice, and on the other hand a multiplication of responsibility for the choices to be made. The fewer the directions, the greater the freedom to choose one's own path, but the more necessary the decision-making authority and the ability to orient oneself. I'll come back to that later.
PART II: A PLEA FOR AN UNPREJUDICED ATTITUDE TOWARDS POSTMODERNISM
But first I would like to ask the question which brings me to the second part of this lecture: What attitude do we as logotherapists take towards postmodernity? And I would like to answer that myself with a plea for an attitude that is as open and fearless as possible, as free of prejudice as possible.
With a gaze that is as unclouded as possible, that does not place unnoticed a film over the image he is looking at, so that he can no longer distinguish, “What do I really see in the picture? And what do I see on my own slide?” I am thinking in particular of two slides that should be avoided or, if necessary, recognized and removed: optimism about progress and pessimism about progress.
a) Progress or development optimism.
Optimism about progress, i.e. the belief that human development is always going up, seems – if I interpret history correctly – to be a rather short-lived phenomenon. The only example I will briefly mention is the so-called “actually existing socialism”. In East Germany, for example, they still had vivid dreams and visions in the early years, but it didn't take a generation before the dreams of socialist man basically died and were only artificially held up.
b) Progress or development pessimism
Pessimism about progress, on the other hand, seems to me to be much more tenacious: the idea that human development is always going downhill. Particularly in moral terms, it is occasionally assumed without reflection and without examination that human history is a history of the decline in values.
It can be observed again and again that older people realize with regret—or even with uncertainty—that some values that have meant a lot to them since childhood mean significantly less to their grandchildren's generation, and not just in our time. This is only too understandable, since it can be an insult when children or grandchildren are indifferent to values that are downright sacred to them. This explains a certain point of view of an older generation.
But does that also mean that objective values are actually falling more and more? I imagine there would be a general value index, similar to the DAX on the stock market. If I know how high the DAX is, I get an idea of whether it is worth buying or selling shares, for example. Even if it can, of course, be the case that one or the other individual share can be much higher or much lower than the DAX suggests. So, if there were such a value index, it would of course fluctuate, similar to the DAX. But would it really have been falling steadily for years or centuries or millennia? Were the values that people lived by fifty or a hundred years ago really higher than they are now? There is no question that there have been changes in individual values. But was the total of realized values really higher back then? And should it really have been even higher a thousand or even three thousand years ago? Is humanity becoming more and more immoral? When I look at the history of the last decades—which I have witnessed myself—and also when I look at the history of the last millennia, I don't find that to be confirmed.
I will first briefly mention an example that dates back about 3000 years. At that time King Solomon reigned, whose wisdom is praised in the Bible. I don't want to deny his wisdom either, but I would like to mention a historical detail that is mostly suppressed in children's Bibles. Once Solomon ascended the throne, his first action after the death of his father David was to eliminate any rivals to secure his power. That's why he had his brother Adonijah and two of his father's military leaders summarily murdered. When I compare this to the rulers of today's Western world, I cannot say that the moral standards that underpin their actions are lower than those of Solomon's day.
Now a small example from the history of the last decades. When I compare the students I work with now to the students from a good 30 years ago, I keep noticing two differences that sometimes puts me to shame. On the one hand, there is a culture of mindfulness and friendly interaction with one another. Compared to this, the climate among us back then was cooler, harsher and, above all, more opinionated. But on the other hand, I notice the naturalness with which younger people orient themselves towards values that could be summarized with the keyword "preserving creation". Compared to that, I myself, like many of my fellow students in the 1970s, was frighteningly blind to ecological values from today's perspective.
If the index of moral values knows fluctuations, and also shifts and changes in individual values, but if the overall level has remained more or less constant over the centuries and millennia, I think that is a sufficient reason to assume—and until proven otherwise—that it will not be any different for today's (next) generation. On this basis, logotherapy can face postmodernism without prejudice. Not as the morally superior who wants to show the morally inferior the right way, but in Socratic dialogue with each other.
The Story of Peter Sinking
At this point, I would like to briefly highlight a very old story that has a strong symbolic power. It is found in the New Testament. Nevertheless, I am not concerned here with a theological interpretation, but with the question of how people at that time dealt with the threat to their common identity posed by all kinds of turbulence in the market of worldviews. It could be that there are some parallels to be drawn to the identity of logotherapy in the 21st century.
In the second half of the first century, the young Christian communities lived in a multi-religious and multi-cultural world, which in many respects can certainly be compared to the world today. The number of Christians, which was still very small, had to assert itself against various branches of Judaism, against the Roman imperial cult and against various religious currents and practices of the Hellenistic-Roman culture. And it also had to redefine its own foundations and self-image. If Jesus himself had expected and proclaimed the imminent coming of the kingdom of God, and if the first Christians themselves had reckoned with the imminent return of Jesus, they also had to deal, to an increasing extent, with the disappointment that this had not happened. One had to be prepared to adjust to an extended existence in the world.
In this context, the evangelist Matthew told a story that begins with the following image: The 12 disciples, representing the Christians, are all sitting together in a boat. The boat is an old symbol for the Christian community—for the church. It is not surprising that it is night in this story, which makes it difficult to orient oneself precisely. A storm comes up. High waves crash against the boat. It becomes almost impossible to stay the course. It is as if the boat had become the plaything of the waves. The men are afraid that the boat could capsize and sink. And maybe even that they won't survive the whole thing.
Matthew's listeners recognized their own situation in this story. How should they preserve their identity? Perhaps by clinging to tradition and shielding themselves as much as possible from the turbulence coming from outside? They will have eagerly awaited where Jesus, the foundation and symbol of their Christian identity, would be painted into this picture. And they will have been amazed when they heard that Jesus is not here in the boat with the disciples, not in the place of relative safety. Rather, he enters the scene on the water, on the waves. And they will have been even more amazed at where Jesus is calling Peter, that he doesn't say what most would have advised him: “stay on the boat, hold on tight to the mast, there you have beams and boards under your feet, there you are comparatively safe.” Instead, Jesus calls him to get out of the boat, to set foot on the water that has no beams, to go out to sea, to take on the challenge of the turbulence of water and wind, as it were, to defy them. And also, when a particularly high wave attracts his anxious attention and thus, as Logotherapists know, probably became much bigger than it already was, to succumb to it a bit and sink in. Even when this happens in this story, Jesus does not take back his call, does not say: "You should have stayed in the boat," but reaches out his hand and pulls him out.
By the way: when the great Catholic theologian Karl Rahner pleaded for a “tutorialism of risk,” he meant pretty much exactly this: If the church wants to secure its own identity, it must paradoxically leave the place of relative security and take the risk to enter into the turbulent storms of the time. Perhaps something similar applies to us as logotherapists.
PART III: LOGOTHERAPY AND POSTMODERNITY IN NECESSARY DIALOGUE
So why is it important that in a postmodern landscape the logotherapeutic cause continues to exist? Above all, what would be missing if we as logotherapists were no longer there?
If I try to imagine this, my concern is also, but not primarily, for the clients, the patients who are now receiving help through logotherapeutic counselling or treatment. Thankfully, there is a very wide range of different therapies, counselling and pastoral care. And I would have the hope that those seeking help would find something of equal value somewhere there.
But what would be missing above all—because there is hardly anything corresponding for it under a different flag and under a different name—is the logotherapeutic voice in interdisciplinary conversation about people. Where physicians and psychologists, philosophers and theologians, pedagogues and sociologists work on the question of how the human being is to be adequately understood and what the conditions are for the possibility of successful human life, the logotherapeutic contribution to the conversation seems to me to be indispensable. After all, where else can we find an explicitly therapeutic perspective in clarity that sees the human being centrally as a meaning-oriented and value-related subject? A perspective that also takes the question of man for an important truth without, however, dictating the answer to the question of truth, as happens in some sects, for example.
A prerequisite for the logotherapeutic voice to be heard is our recognizability in the therapeutic and anthropological landscape. To stay with the image of the landscape, there must be signs and a placename that everyone recognizes: “I am now entering "Logotherapy City." This city can certainly afford all hospitality. It does not need a city wall, an anti-non-logotherapeutic protective wall. But it needs the town sign by which it can be recognized by everyone. And thus, a place on the map that can be defined and found.
Now someone might ask: “How does Logotherapy City actually fit into the postmodern landscape? Is it mainly a foreign body there, which is crassly different from the surrounding places? Or are there similarities and congruities?” There are in fact a number of affinities, in addition to clear differences, which I will come to later. To put it another way, in Logotherapy City and in some postmodern places, similar dialects are spoken, which can make it easier to understand each other.
The New York professor of psychology, Paul C. Vitz, has described three characteristics of Viktor Frankl's psychology which he believes can basically be regarded as postmodern.
First, he says that if various reductionist images of man are a hallmark of modernity, then Frankl and postmodernism are pulling in the same direction insofar as they want to overcome this. Seen in this light, Frankl's emphasis on the quest for a higher meaning may have a greater chance of being understood and accepted in postmodernism than in modernism.
Secondly, if various deterministic images of man are a hallmark of modernity, then Frankl and postmodernism are pulling in the same direction insofar as they want to overcome this. In this way, Frankl's emphasis on human agency may have a better chance of being understood and accepted in the postmodern than in the modern.
And thirdly, if modernity is characterized by the striving for autonomy and thus inevitably by a certain anti-social attitude, then Frankl and postmodernism are also pulling in the same direction to the extent that they want to overcome this. So, Frankl's emphasis on responsibility or (to use Buber's words:) of the "I and Thou" instead of the "I" have a greater chance of being understood and accepted in postmodernism than in modernity.
I myself would like to add a fourth point, even if some of it has already been mentioned with the keyword “reductionist images of man”. I specifically mean Frankl's critique of psychologism and the respect for what is genuine that is to be protected as a result. Psychologism is based, like all other "isms”, on the fact that a certain perspective (here a psychological one) is made absolute and all other perspectives are subordinated to it as relative. Again, since the postmodern mind has a strong tendency to regard all possible perspectives as relative (but as such quite valid) and none as absolute, a logotherapeutic and a postmodern interest have a similar gradient.
Of course, that doesn't mean that I expect that Max Scheler's opus “Formalism in Ethics and Material Value Ethics” will experience a new wave of reading and reception. On the contrary, I would be very surprised. But a logotherapeutic interest is not about Scheler as such, but about the function that his Material Ethics of Values had for the young Frankl and his critique of psychologism. I expect a similar function for today's readers, also for those who do not read philosophical books, rather, for example, from the poem by Erich Fried, which is often quoted in logotherapeutic circles:
Was es ist. What is it.
Es ist Unsinn sagt die Vernunft It's nonsense says reason
Es ist was es ist sagt die Liebe. It is what it is, says love.
Es ist Unglück sagt die Berechnung It's bad luck says calculation
Es ist nichts als Schmerz sagt die Angst It's nothing but pain, says fear
Es ist aussichtslos sagt die Einsicht It is hopeless says insight
Es ist was es ist sagt die Liebe It is what it is, says love
Es ist lächerlich sagt der Stolz It's ridiculous says pride
Es ist leichtsinnig sagt die Vorsicht It's frivolous, says the caution
Es ist unmöglich sagt die Erfahrung It's impossible, says the experience
Es ist was es ist sagt die Liebe. It is what it is, says love.
But now to a topic where the relationship between logotherapy and postmodernism cannot be described by saying that the two go in roughly the same or a similar direction, but in which they relate to each other like supply and demand. I have already indicated that the greater freedom of choice for postmodern people, which is at the same time an obligation to choose, also requires greater decision-making competence and a greater ability to orient oneself than was necessary in earlier phases.
So, how does postmodern man find his orientation? How and where does he find the criteria he needs to be able to make the many decisions that are demanded of him in shaping his life? To follow an absolute external authority, e.g., a guru, unconditionally is no longer (or at least very difficult) possible for a postmodern man—I would like to say, “thank God!” But a democratic voting body, so to speak, within or around it, which could take over the function once held by the authority figure, is not yet fully developed. And so, on the one hand, I see postmodern people with a need for guidance and decision-making authority. And on the other hand, I see the Logotherapists who have the right tools in-house for this. So I hope that these two sides will find each other.
The logotherapist has learned to ask about the values that are at stake in the decision-making situation in a Socratic conversation, to name them, perhaps also to put them in the picture with imaginative processes and to feel and experience them there. And the end will very likely be that those looking for orientation will realize: "Here and now, this value weighs much heavier for me than that one."
At this point, of course, there is—at least implicitly—a confrontation between a logotherapeutic and a postmodern basic assumption. In other words, there will be a critique of an aspect of the postmodern mind by the existential mind. For existential analysis and logotherapy, the idea that all values are equally valuable and equally important at all times, that all truths are equally true and all paths are equally valid (and therefore ultimately indifferent) is unacceptable. If the postmodern spirit challenges the existential analytical spirit to contradiction anywhere, it is certainly here. If twenty options out there are all equally worth choosing, then no one knows why they should choose any of them. In other words, where differences in value are no longer perceived, meaning also disappears from view.
I do not see the existential-analytical-logotherapeutic contradiction to this primarily in the dissemination of a philosophical doctrine, but in the fact that we keep an eye on the problem and that we do our part in the Socratic conversation so that the differences in value and the resulting difference in meaning can be discovered and experienced. And at the same time, that it can be experienced and remains useful to ask and search for truth and to argue about the question of truth.
This does not mean, of course, that we as logotherapists claim that we—or even, we alone—have found the only truth and that we are therefore called to pass it on and to teach it. The fact that for a postmodern feeling and for a postmodern perspective the great all-encompassing dome of the one absolute truth has been broken and collapsed need not unsettle the logotherapist, in part it will even find his approval. I quote Viktor Frankl: "As long as we do not have access to an absolute truth, we must be content with the fact that the relative truths correct each other."
As a theologian, I am familiar with the following thought: The claim to absolute truth belongs to God alone and to no other authority. To consider a human cognition or construct to be absolute would be to idolize it. It would be, so to speak, idolatry in the field of cognition. At the same time, however, I think of this idea in its negative punchline (which is what I am primarily concerned with here) is not just a theological one. I think that regardless of the religious or ideological confession, theists and atheists alike can agree that the place of God must either be taken by God himself or kept free by a placeholder, that in any case no human knowledge and no human construct may be provided with a divine claim to absoluteness. In any case, this would amount to some form of tyranny and oppression of man.
Postmodernism makes it harder for us to think of our relative truth as an absolute, our insights and theories as something that would be literally dictated by God, so to speak. Personally, I consider this a blessing. In this way, postmodernism once again underlines what we have known since Immanuel Kant at the latest, namely, that we all cannot help but see reality through our subjective glasses, that we—whether we like it or not—are also involved in constructing our own perceptions.
Of course, taking this subjective side seriously does not mean considering it to be the absolute and literally the only truth. It does not mean saying, "Truth, values or meaning are nothing but subjective constructs, objectively they do not exist, and therefore it is idle to ask and search for them and relate to them." Especially for logotherapists, it can't and doesn't have to mean that.
There is an element of logotherapy in which both sides (the empirically accessible subjective and the objective postulated [by practical reason]) can come into their own. By this element I mean the already mentioned "Socratic dialogue". In doing so, I would like to understand this element not only as a method of applying logotherapeutic knowledge, but as an element of the theory itself.
Socratic dialogue means asking questions and not dictating answers. It also means asking for the truth, with passion. But it doesn't mean dictating to others or yourself what the truth is. It means taking the subjective side seriously. And it means taking seriously that I don't have the truth at my disposal. As with the midwife, she may well have her own personal preferences about whether the child to be born will be a boy or a girl. But she has no control over it.
If "Socratic dialogue" is understood not only as a method of conducting conversations, but also as a basic logotherapeutic attitude, then the question also arises: “To what extent am I a Socratic dialogue partner to myself? Or to what extent am I instead like a pope to myself, who with the claim to infallibility, commands me to believe, think, and perhaps also feel this and who forbids me to do that?” I sometimes think that if a fundamentalist (of whatever stripe) could be a Socratic dialogue partner to himself, he would no longer be a fundamentalist.
In the history of the DGLE, paradoxical intention has occasionally been discussed, especially the question of whether it is not a method that is in principle alien to logotherapy, which only coincidentally occupies a comparatively large place in the repertoire of logotherapists, or whether it belongs to the essence of logotherapy. And especially in the vicinity of the South German Institute, the latter has been emphatically emphasized. I would like to see such a discussion on the Socratic Dialogue. And I would like to argue that he should be seen as a model from which the understanding approach to various philosophical questions can be opened up to the logotherapist. In other words, Socratic dialogue as a hermeneutic key and at the same time as a touchstone to correct any unsocratic tendencies in ourselves or in others. I hope that postmodernism will succeed in challenging us to do so.
Thank you for your attention!