Hello, I'm Dr. Pat Stark, Dean of the School of Nursing at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, and we're very pleased to have Dr. Vi Frankel as our guest today. Dr. F Frankel, would you start off by defining logotherapy? Tell us what it is and maybe a little bit about how you developed the ideas in the context of this word Logotherapy logos just means meaning and in fact, logotherapy could be defined as a psychotherapeutic approach which specifically focuses on meaning and regards man as a being who is in search for meaning in the sense of his or her most fundamental motivational force.
So health professionals who use logotherapy would assist clients to find meaning in their lives.
In a way, logotherapy also is developed a certain psychotherapeutic techniques in a rather traditional sense that is to say strategies against phobic or obsessive compulsive conditions or techniques to overcome sexual neurotic conditions. But the specifically logo therapeutic approaches are marked by the focus on meaning and or on the lack of meaning as it has become so topical in the present situation, psychological situation, not only within certain populations, but also regarding mankind as a whole.
I know that this is called the Third School of Viennese psychiatry, and Freud's theory was the will to pleasure and Adlers was the will to power and logotherapy the third school is the will to meaning. Would you explain that?
Yes. First, let me say that of course this is an oversimplification for the sake of college students who have to learn something and to remember something they have learned. But by and large it is correct because in fact, Freud came up with the notion of the pleasure principle as the basic motivation apparent in man, and if any adherent of Freud in psychoanalysis would argue that after all the pleasure principle is not the only principle, but there's also the reality principle. I would have to retort that the reality principle according to Freud's explicit statements is nothing but an extension of the pleasure principally as much as it also leads man to finding, to seeking and finding, gaining pleasure, but in a delayed way, pleasure is just postponed for the sake of being more securely obtained. But actually the pleasure principle itself serves another purpose. It is much as it is to restore or maintain the inner equilibrium. A state and inner condition without tensions by the tensions are removed by satisfying derives and instincts and setting up compromises between the ego, super ego, and society. And as a young man, you studied these theories and did you begin to question some of them? At first I was of course enthusiastically impressed, and I remember when I was about 16, it went without saying that I had to give an address to my class, me and the subject was a psychoanalytic aian subject and even more as a junior high school student, I was in continuing correspondence with Sigmund Freud and he replied to each single letter within about 48 hours and one day I ventured just to incur a two pages manuscript, and when I received his reply to that letter, I was very astonished because no more or less happened than that. Sigmund Freud asked me the permission to forward the manuscript to the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and two years later it was published there in 1924.
And then in 1925 you published something with Alfred Adler?
Yes, upon the invitation by Alfred Aler. So in physicalist terms, I'm a fast breeder as it were, but there are also once met for it personally, and I was so deeply impressed because of his memory when I introduced myself. My name is Victor f Frank. He said Victor Fran Chenga number six, apartment number 25, second District of Vienna. Right. And I had just to add correctly exactly, very good memory vrom the correspondence. From the correspondence, retained the address and knew it by heart.
Well, interesting. I know that you were in the concentration camp from 1942 to 1945, right?
Yeah.
And you already a psychiatrist at that time?
Yes, I had established my private practice and was before I had for several years been on various mental state hospitals and neurological hospitals of the university, of course mainly and so on, so I was a specialist in the field of both neurology and psychiatry at the time, one year before Hitler tubes invaded Austria.
Could you tell us some of the observations you made about human behavior when you were in the concentration camp that maybe helped to refine your theory of man's behavior and motivations? It is rather a myth that has been spread by some of my publishers without my knowledge of course, and without any explicit permission to do so that I came out from Auschwitz with a brand new psychotherapeutic school or emphasis or approach. I had a full length book manuscript hidden in my overcoat when I entered Auschwitz, but certainly what I had to experience the experiences I had to go through there and in three other camps was in a way a validation of my main basic theories and existential validation. I may say not just experiments in laboratory, but an experiment crude is a decisive experiment, a decisive test because if anyone observe certain types of behavior, their dangers and or their benefits in extreme situations, in such a setting, this has some additional weight. It weighs more than just the outcome of experimentation in laboratory. And if I may add the main bulk, the essential lesson I could learn and everybody could learn not only in Auschwitz but as well in Stalingrad as well in North Korean prison of war camps, in Japanese prison of war camps in North Vietnamese prison of war camps.
I happened to know the literature in the field is absolutely in agreement to the, in as much as I'm used to formulate it, survival dependent decisively on whether or not the respective individual had a was directed, taught a future, taught a task waiting for him in the future, taught a work to complete in the future or for that matter, taught, taught being reunited with a loved person. In the future, you may say this is hope, but it's more than hope because there was also the automatic awareness implied and included that there's not at all any certainty, even not real hope to survive, but you have to give your best. You have to use this opportunity to turn it into something meaningful at the risk that everything will be in vain. I once came up with a statement and it's through, its the core summing up of my experiences in Auschwitz, dau and so forth, that while my ADEs understandably were concerned with will we survive or will we not survive, and the chances were very small statistically it may be evidence that my personal chance to survive the second of my concentration camps Auschwitz was one to 29.
Now, anyway, the chances it was a virtually hopeless situation and all my ADEs asked themselves, will we survive? Because if not everything is meaningless and my question addressed to myself was just the country. The opposite is everything meaningful has even dying, suffering, death and so forth. All this tragic environment and circumstances has everything in unconditional meaning before because if not survival would be meaningless. I wouldn't give a damn for a life whose worth and value or meaning depends on whether one survives or not. In other words, right on this spot, there has be a meaning even to our suffering, even the risk that we will not survive and each day has to be turned into something meaningful. That was our challenge. That was what counted most. And you were able to help prisoners. Were you practicing your psychiatry and logotherapy among prisoners, would you Say? In a certain sense, of course I had to. It was unavoidably, inescapable, but the question is to which degree I was capable. I was motivated enough, I was decent enough, I manifested enough ship to do so. But again and again there were, as far as I remember, opportunities to carry this out and to instill some of my convictions into others and thereby to help them. But I will remember also the contrary that others helped me in decisively in certain situations.
Yes. You're talking about mobilizing the human spirit, the dynamic qualities of the human spirit, and I know that some people get this confused with religion, the spiritual dimension. Could you explain the difference in those two? Yes. The problem is that in German there are two different words for spiritual, either geist Lee, this is a religious word or ge. And GE is something that has been differentiated by evermore philosophers throughout the recent times, last 100 years or so, because by GE stick and spiritual in this second sense, what is meant is as I would put it, define it, the specifically human phenomena and capacities. For instance, a specifically human phenomenon in contrast, in counter distinction say to sex is love. No other animal is capable of developing an experience, something such as love. It is driven by sex drives and between those periods an animal socializing, but it is not loving because simply because love means centering on this uniqueness of another person, this goes so far that really ultimately only a loving person is capable to get hold to grasp the uniqueness of another of the loved person.
Anyway, love over against sex or for that matter conscience. In contrast to the super ego, the super ego is just reflecting or mirroring the perceptions you obtain throughout your educational, your education, your youth, from the parents, from your peers, from your comrade, from society. But conscience is something different. Conscience is not dictated by society, but by yourself, your own, your personal conscience. Conscience is a phenomenon profoundly personalized. You have to listen to your conscience carefully to listen to it and should go on and carry out what conscience commands you to do. And this is important particularly today, where people in a competitive society, such as use here in the United States particularly, are out to compete with others rather than with themselves and to be successful. They're striving, they're hunting, they're chasing happiness and success on the other side. And this exerts a certain pressure, particularly on young people and is deforming, degenerating, distorting the normal, the basic human attitude to find a meaning and to carry out a meaning.
If you allow me a short digression, I once answered a pertinent question from the students from at Stanford University several years ago about a book of mine Man's Search for Meaning and told me, Dr. Franklin, this book has seen only in this country 73 printings and two and a half million copies have been sold and how do you feel about it? And I told them, it's interesting. The only remarkable thing in this context seems to me to be the fact that this very book among 27 books that I've ordered, this one book that had become such a success was written with the 100% conviction that it never could build up any reputation for me of mine as an author because I had decided to publish this book anonymously. So I knew while I was writing it up to the last word, it will not do anything for myself, but I did it.
You won't believe it. I did it while contemplating that if someone lies in a sanatorium in a bed knowing that it's going to die within short period suffering from a fatal disease, say an inoperable cancer, actually nothing can be done about this fatal situation. He's approaching death and then in such a disparate situation, he takes up that book of an unknown order. Then he might think if this guy over there in Auschwitz did not lose the conviction, that up to the last breath as Jerry Long formally expressed it so beautifully up to the last breath, under any conditions, even the worst ones, the most miserable ones, life retains a meaning up to its last moment, up to our last breath. And this man, this unknown man, this anonymous has shown this, and there must be something to it, and I wonder if not myself also could change my attitude towards something that per se in itself is unchangeable and thanks to have I lived up to an age of 80 where evermore I could see that in fact, it's exactly what happened around the world. You see in hospitals, I become letters from patients and so forth from the relatives of patients and this in fact or just think of or those personalities you introduced to me to whom you introduced me yesterday, you see, yes, the handicap and I have used the book as therapy with patients, spinal cord engine patients. I don't wish to say this in order to aggrandize the book or even let the order, but just to show what a book, any book that has been written earnestly for others can do as a multiplier of something. See, and this was what I wound up with when I replied to the respective questions of the Stanford students. I said, I wrote this book incidentally within nine successive days, the whole book in 1945, and I wrote this book imagining that a man in despair or a woman in despair might take up reading it for them. I did, and there's a proof that I did so because the first edition in the original German did not carry the name of the author on the cover at all and precisely this book also successful and told him, do not hunt for success. Do not care for success.
Just do what your conscience commands you to do, and if you are responsible human beings, you will follow and obey your conscience in the long run, then success will come to you precisely because you have not cared for it precisely. This was the reason by just doing a thing for the causes sake or for other sake, but not for your own sake. And then success comes by itself, comes automatically, and this is the real success, but this is evidence in this case, I say it just because it is in the widest sense of the word an empirical evidence and young students are again and again, I could notice it impressed by this fact and one or the other might follow the example of an anonymous order and that is the self-transcendence concept. Exactly, Exactly. You become yourself. You become a truly human being. You actualize yourself precisely to the amount to which you don't concentrate on self-actualization, but you give yourself, you forget yourself. You give yourself to the task at hand to the challenge of a situation, listening to what a situation means to you. Meaning is what is meant by a given situation, and you have to address yourself and giving yourself, this is what is forted, and it's like you might know from one or the other of my books, I used to compare the situation with the function of the eye, the possibility, the capacity of the eye properly to function in order to perceive visually surrounding world. Most ironically depends on its incapacity to perceive anything of itself. When does my eye perceive anything of myself? If I am afflicted by a cataract, I might see some crowds. If I'm afflicted by a glaucoma, I might see rainbow halos around the light. Then my eye perceives the heightened tension in a certain part of the eye bulb. But the normal eye, the normally functioning eye doesn't perceive anything, notice anything of itself and to the extent that it does or it would do it is impaired in its function,
Right? Health professionals who are practicing therapy or who are using your philosophy and ideas to try to help patients find meaning often ask about techniques, and in many therapies there are certain techniques that are taught. How do you feel about techniques?
Techniques are not the nucleus, the core of a therapy or should not be. Particularly today we are in the field of medicine in general. We are passing an over technological era, but one should not disparagingly dismiss techniques. Either techniques are needed, particularly in when we have to instruct people, when we have to train people, but one should not stick absolutely truth faithfully to any technique. Each technique has to be modified according to the exigencies of the patient and his or her specific individuality or the exigencies on the part of the therapist himself. In other words, not each therapist can use each and every technique with the same skill, nor can each patient in the case of each patient, a given technique be applied with the same success, therapeutic success. So we have to modify anyway, we have to improvise from one situation from one hour to the next, and we have to individualize in each therapeutic situation.
But there are two techniques that have been widely used. The one is the so-called paradoxical intention technique, particularly in obsessive compulsive and phobic conditions in which the so-called mechanism of anticipatory anxiety or performance anxiety as it has recently been called into your country is implied. And then there's the dear reflection technique drawing away helping the patient to draw away his attention from being centered around his own pathology or certain function, normal functions. If a normal function is observed and watched too much, if an excessive attention or as we call it logotherapy, hyper reflection is paid to give normal function, then there may pathology emerge. For instance, this is I believe 95% of the etiology underlying male impotence and female fragility that people are watching and observing their normal functions on the way leading up to orgasm and is precisely by so doing. They are handicapped and they're laying, they're paralyzed.
A woman always asking herself, get a pro to the climax of sexual experience or peak experience. And the male, do I have an erection already or I'm still waiting or whatsoever? This is impairing any sexual normal function. In other words, self-observation to an excessive degree is pathogenic even with regard to normal functions. If a patient is induced very closely to observe what he feels in his heart's region, then he will, after a while, he will start with some observations of whatsoever. If he's concentrating on a part of his skin, he will notice various sensations. This also is normal, so with this man or this woman is not a psychopath, but on the contrary, they are sometimes the victims of other types of psychotherapy who compel a patient evermore and for five and more years each week, several times throughout 50 minutes to observe and watch themselves. And due to such a maximum of introspection and retrospection, digging out things from the earliest childhood, they sometimes may become their neuros, sometimes may well become reinforced to say the least.
I have found D reflection very helpful with the physically handicapped patients because you try to get them not to focus on the handicaps or what they cannot do, but rather to focus on what they can do.
But may I just add one sentence, but the reflection business can be carried out only to the extent that the attention of an individualist is shifted from something negative from his pathology to something positive, to something that is in weight for him in store, for him, a task to complete or a meaning to fulfill. And that is precisely the spot, the place where the merely psychotherapeutic technique of paradoxical intention and or the reflection passes on to the neurotic, to the spiritual, to the human dimension. Because you see even in the feet of the treatment of neurosis such as obsessive compulsive or phobic states or even sexual neurosis, you cannot do without the reorientation of man taught a meaning to fulfill or another human being to love the more a woman handicapped by hyper reflection and hyper intention forcibly striving to experience orgasm or equally forcibly observing herself, as long as her attention is not shifted to her partner whom after all she may love and caring for just giving her love, giving herself to the partner to the same extent she's de reflecting. So one must not reflect on reflection all too much.
Very good. I know that Socratic dialogue is another technique that we read about in the logo, therapeutic literature, and as you were saying, psychoanalysis gets a patient to talk about himself, to analyze and to dig back into early childhood, something that sometimes may be needed and necessary. Of course, in Socratic dialogue, the logo therapist does some talking too. Could you tell us something about how that works? I wonder if you subsume under the heading of talking also asking questions because the essence of the so dialogue lies the fact that by asking questions, we elicit something from the patient he had known all along, but he was no longer conscious of.
Thank you, Dr. Broel. At this time, let's stop and take a look at a clip we made with Jerry Long earlier. Good morning, Jerry. How are you today?
Good morning, Dr. Stark. I'm
Fine. Good. We're glad to have you with us today. Jerry, you have an injury, your spinal cord at level C four, is that correct?
That's correct,
Yes. Could you tell us a little bit about what your life was like before the injury?
Well, prior to the injury, I was a six foot tall, 160 pound, very athletically inclined young man. I worked outdoors on a horse ranch. I played baseball and therefore my primary source of meaning was physical prowess. And I took great pride in my work and I took great pride in playing baseball. So that's how I derived meaning prior to breaking my neck.
And you were 17 years old when the injury occurred?
Yes, I was 17 years old during the summer between my junior and senior year of high school.
And now you are a young man, 25 years old in the doctoral program, the University of Houston, studying psychology. Can you tell us us a little bit about what transpired and why your goals changed?
Well, even prior to the injury, I had the mental capacity and the intellectual ability to do things other than physical work, but I did not tap into that. And when I broke my neck, I realized that to have a productive life and to have a meaningful life, I would've to depend upon something other than my physical being because it was no longer there. I decided that I wouldn't let breaking my neck stop me from doing what I wanted to do in life. And I realized that education was a big part of this. So as I began my college education, I was soon leaning towards psychology because of the interest that developed in some introductory courses, and I pursued that path and got a bachelor's degree in psychology and entered a doctoral program in clinical psychology.
And Dr. Frankel is the man whose ideas help to shape your goals. Is that Correct? In a very critical way, yes. The very first introduction to psychology course that I took, one of the books I read was Dr. Franco's Most Widely Circulated Man, search for Meaning. Immediately upon completing it, I identified with some of the things that you wrote about Dr. Franco in the book, and so I wrote him a letter and much to my amazement, he wrote me back very, very applauding and very meaningful letter. And therein began a relationship and a correspondence and a professional respect which has continued and mushroomed into today's events. Dr. F Frankel, would you comment on how logotherapy is helpful to people like Jerry?
His example, the example that he has set up by his being, by his living by the way in which he coped with his suffering and with his handicap speaks for itself in a way, but if you force me to put it into local therapeutic terminology, I could just add that he's has set an example of the incredible amount to which a human being is capable to carry out to live what we are used to calling the defiant power of the human spirit. The human spirit is capable to defy both outer and inner circumstances to an unbelievable degree.
Well, he certainly is an example of that. I know Dr. Franco, that you have written that there are three ways to find meaning. One being in adopting an attitude toward a fate which cannot be changed. And in Jerry's case, it seems to me that that's what logotherapy has done for you. You have a permanent disability, a severe disability. There's nothing much you can do about that, but what you do have control over is your attitude. Could you tell us how logo therapy helped to shape your attitude?
I think that it's important to remember my attitude adoption, and the logo therapy that I employed initially was without any knowledge of logotherapy. I had not read any books and I had no acquaintance with it, but intuitively, I modified my attitude toward the situation. In one particular line that Dr. Franco quotes fairly often, I broke my neck. It didn't break me. I had a physical constraint that I had to deal with over which I could not change. I had no ability to suddenly walk again. However, I did have the ability to choose to live and at least attempt a meaningful life in spite of that physical disability.
I think that substantiates your theory that within the human being is this innate searching for meaning. And it sounds like that's what you were doing, Jerry, and then when you read Dr. Frankl's work, it all fit together. This was exactly how you had been thinking. Did you have that feeling?
It began to fit together, and as I've written when I read his book, I was overcome with the sense of deja vu because several times, many times he spoke of reactions and the way he felt and the way he interpreted his experiences in the concentration camps and repeatedly were the times when I identified personally I felt the exact same way when I lay in that hospital bed as he did when he was in that concentration camp.
It's also a compliment what Jerry says, a compliment for lower therapy in a strange way, in as much as usually each one who comes up with the So-called new therapeutic or other scientific approach provides himself to offer something new as said right before. Whereas we are proud to just dig out to just making people more aware, more conscious of something that has been within themselves, built in as it were all along the wisdom of the heart, the Sia, it is called even referred to in the Psalms man, due to forgive my shifting to terminology from the Psalms to logotherapy, what I'm used to calling the pre reflective ontological self-understanding is just that the fact that man knows all along intuitively as he put it, Jerry put it intuitively what life is all about. That life is a chain of unique situations implying unique potentialities to be actualized in a meaningful way.
So the possibilities to invest meaning in our lives of that matter in each single life situation is virtually infinite. Because as you were hinting too before, right before there are various ways or avenues or leading up to meaningful fulfillment, and if one avenue is closed, then you have still others. And it's up to the intuition of a really alert spirit as that of Jerry's to find out if I cannot do that, he said physically over against mentally or spiritually or existentially for that matter, if I cannot use this avenue, I have to turn to another one. There are always possibilities and always alternatives, and he made use of this fact on the grounds of his intuitive, immense, intuitive capacity and that we are just verbalizing in logotherapy the more or less unconscious or better to say implicit wisdom of the man in the street. This is a compliment. This makes us proud. I wonder, so it's calling forth the potential, pardon me, calling forth the potential that is within the human, the awareness of the potentials inherent as potentialities waiting to be, become actualities. I think your quote in man's search for meaning is that we should not ask what we can expect from life, but rather what life expects from us, right?
This is a Copernican switch turning the great, the greatest question on the lips or in the hearts of any human being, albeit more often than not on an unconscious level. Turning this into the reverse, actually there is implied the fact that actually it's not up to us to ask the question what is the meaning of life? But upon closer, we might become aware in the final analysis that we are those who are asked that life is asking questions to us, questions we can answer, have to answer, but can answer only not by verbal replies, but by action. By doing something, each situation confronting us implies a question, but this question can only be answered by our deeds, by our acting, by our not to say our behavior. And if, if the situation necessitates just to shoulder it, because we cannot do anything about it, for instance, a more or less permanent handicap. In such a case, what we can change is ourselves changing the sense of rising above the situation growing beyond ourselves. Jerry, I'm sure that you've enjoyed studying this and since your injury, I would imagine that it makes a lot more sense to you. What do you plan to do after you get your doctorate in psychology? It makes a lot more sense to me now because not only have I experienced it intuitively as a patient, but now as a doctoral student, I can see the implications that it holds for me as a health service professional to be. And once I obtain the PhD, I plan to continue counseling, teaching and writing articles. Very good. I wanted to ask you, Jerry, there must have been a time when it was pretty tough for you to accept all of this. Can you tell us what nurses can do or health professionals can do to help clients when they're in that state of despair? Was there anything that you remember that a nurse or a health professional did to help steer you in the right direction, shape your attitude?
One of the things that they helped me do was not to help me. They allowed me to fumble through and to do it for myself and to learn that I could do it for myself. And I think that what is incredibly important to remember is that as Dr. Frankel has maintained the human being and especially the human being in a critical situation like that composed of three fundamental parts, the physical, the mental, and the uniquely human, the spiritual. And unless nurses and psychologists and doctors and other health service professionals begin to tap into that spiritual component of human existence that all which separates them from veterinarians is a clientele. That's a very good thought. So you're saying that a good nurse would help you to help yourself and that sometimes means standing back and watching you struggle as you're Yes a good nurse would assist only when assistance was absolutely required and through allowing the patient at the time to fumble through to learn to see some role models as it were, to see someone who has traveled that road, let them learn it their way. Yes. What do you think nurses can do to show patients and clients that they care? We usually think of doing physical things. Are there other ways that nurses can show they care while they stand back and let you try to do as much as you can for yourself with support, that emotional support, the emotional support and the feeling of backing the fact that they're with you and your concerns and your interests and your welfare are paramount to theirs. That's good advice for our students. What have you found to be the most difficult thing to deal with? There are a lot of difficulties to deal with when one is paralyzed, but then again, there are a lot of difficulties to deal with in everyday world for anybody. I don't know if I could particularly narrow it down to one thing that is tough to deal with. One learns very rapidly to live the meaningful life and to continue to pursue the goals that you have chosen. For me personally, it's been a professional career. You learn ways to circumvent your problems, be they architectural problems merely getting in a building because of the wheelchair, whether they are are discriminatory problems by the negative attitudes other people have toward the handicapped. You rapidly learn how to circumvent these problems and they are no longer problems. So you take them as a challenge rather than as a problem.
I think one of the most satisfying things I saw was the invitation to the fourth World Congress of logotherapy and every invitation that I had seen to every congress and meeting of any organization before that had a box to check if you were physically disabled. The thing that stood out about this invitation was it had a box to check if you were physically challenged. That's a big difference. That was the Fourth World Congress in Reagans burg? No, that was the fourth World Congress in California. In California. San Francisco. In San Francisco. Yes. Jerry, is there anything else you would like to tell us? I think that the thing that's most important is I'm up here with an interview with you and with Dr. Frankel today and thereby am an example. But I would like anyone and everyone, whoever sees this tape, whoever comes into contact with me, with you or with Dr. Frankel to realize that no matter what happens, the potential to find a meaning is always there up to and including the very last moment. And a person's life can be retrospectively flooded with meaning up to and including that last moment. And I'm not by any means atypical in the sense that what I have accomplished and what I have done can only be done by a strong or a super person. It can be accomplished by everyone. They merely need to tap into that.
Dr. Frankl, do you have any comment? One should carve into marble each word that he has at that because it's the best conceivable Circumscription definition of the tenets of all the main tenets of logotherapy. I agree. Thank you, Dr. Frankel. Part of the role of nursing is to give care and comfort to patients who are suffering. What can logotherapy offer? The task of lower therapy in such cases would mainly consist in showing that life doesn't cease to have a meaning up to the last moment. And this means including the last period of life, which unfortunately more often than not is connected with some sort of suffering that way or another. But as I have found in my practice, the best way to show this would be to use examples, the examples given by others, the examples to given by other patients who have shown that the capacity of the human person to mold hopeless suffering is as the helpless victim of such situations into a human achievement and accomplishment. This capacity is incredibly high and blatantly given in each and every human beings.
So professionals can help patients to find meaning even in suffering. Unavoidable suffering, Yes. By pointing to such examples that not in the way of a teacher or in the way of someone who is indoctrinating a certain ideology, but just humbly and very relaxedly pointing, remembering such cases. And after all, this not only holds for turning suffering into an achievement, but also for other techniques such as paradoxical intention. I recently on a German television station had to deal with a given case I had never seen before, a phobia. And I introduced paradoxical intention, not by having her doing anything, but just by behaving as if at that moment came to my mind a story in which I had applied many years ago, paradoxical intention to someone else. She could then apply it by herself. And this heightens her self-esteem because she had not to buy anything from the hands of any one other, but she could be herself and it was she herself who then mastered her fate. So that's the art of a logotherapist is guiding a patient toward finding that meaning, at least this is the way in which I'm used to handle it, but others might do it differently. I have offered only this skeleton, the conceptual skeleton of this method and approach. Now others may add the flesh, but for their sake and particularly for the sake of their future or present patients, I would wish that they do not neglect the skeleton. They should take up reading my books again and again. I've seen that this serves their activities very much. You see very much. And the more often they take up one or the other chapter, they tell me they notice that there was something hidden they didn't notice at first sight, but it was still important to apply. And beyond that, what is needed, very important is a offering an empirical base by tests as you for instance, have developed one test, one very original test, and by statistical research and also by experimental research as for instance, professor Michael Asher in Philadelphia has turned out the author lasted about 10 years again and again. He turns out a paper showing on strictly experimental methodology as a basis that for instance, paradoxical intention is works successfully and it's a good behavior modification technique, but in some areas, even superior Therapy with long lasting results superior to their own behavioristic oriented techniques. Our students tell us that probably the most challenging thing for them to deal with as students is caring for the terminally ill. How can logotherapy be used effectively with the dying patient?
It is about 20 years ago at least, that professor Petri Lovich of the University of Mines in West Germany has published a book on psychotherapy with age people. And therein, he says, actually, the only psychotherapy that may be successful in such cases is logotherapy because it offers the patient, the tranquility as it were to have found a meaning in his life, have fulfilled a meaning in his life and even finding a meaning in the terminal face of his life. And what is most important, and I may confess to you that I saw it best in concentration camps when I was confronted with dying comrade, not patients but comrade, and I noticed what it meant to them when I applied the tenet of logotherapy that in the past nothing has been recoverable loss, but everything is stored and treasured. What we have done cannot be done away.
What we have experienced has been safely deposited in the past and delivered there. And the harvest of our lives, the deeds we have done, the works we have created, the loves we have, loved the sufferings we have gone through courageously and with dignity. This is not lost. The human value called human dignity rests on this basis of what we have done and what we have seen in the past. It's indelible, and I've noticed often, often again, I had an opportunity even in such extreme situations as concentration camps, the opportunity to see that this means a lot to patients who are not only dying, but also know that they're going to die.
In closing, I'd like to ask you what you would advise us logo therapists to work on what should be the future direction of logo therapy. They should shy away from selling logotherapy cheaply. You see from being out just to please and to be understood at any expense by the greatest number of readers. They should put everything on an academically acceptable basis in a scientific terminology, on the grounds of experimentation, offering empirical evidence by means of statistics and tests so that it be not only used for self-help, but also by all the helping professionals because otherwise the great professionals, the eminent professionals, those who are multipliers of any teaching because they are teachers themselves, they will shy away because they see everything has, even what Franca has put in appropriate terms is being watered down and distorted for the sole sake of attracting the greatest number of people interested in buying books. This is not our main concern. Our concern must be safe transcendent. Our concern must be others rather than ourselves.
Dr. Frankl, it's been a real pleasure having you here today. I thoroughly enjoyed this.
Thank you. To me, it was an honor. Thank you.
From the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. This is Dr. Pat Stark. We are very glad that you joined us.