Victor Frankl: What is the whole person

We publish "Ten of the identity thesis" Viktor Frankl, in which the famous Austrian psychiatrist tells the existential basis of human existence, and explains what the "whole person," why people do not determinirovanirovan drives, as the psychoanalysis, and is focused on the creation of meaning, and how attempt to rise in class, race, weight or actually lead to renunciation of personality.


© Adam Martinakis

The famous Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl managed on the basis of his military experience not easy to create a unique method of speech therapy, based on the search and analysis of the meaning of existence - in all aspects of life, even the most horrific. One of the main ideas of his method Frankl packs into a simple formula:

A person should not have to ask, what is the meaning of his life, but rather must recognize that he is the one to whom is addressed this issue.

In this article, we bring to your attention today, describes the arguments that underlie the theory of Frankl's personality, consisting of three parts:

the doctrine of the quest for meaning,
teaching about the meaning of life,
the doctrine of free will.

At the same time striving to realize the meaning of life, he finds an innate and that the motive for Frankl, is a leading force in the development of personality. Universal sense does not happen - they are unique for every person, and every second we create and implement these meanings, thus realizing itself

. Ten of the individual theses

When it comes to personality, in our minds involuntarily pops another concept, which intersects the concept of identity - the notion of "individual". The first point that we put forward, consists in the following:

I

Personality is an individual, a person is something indivisible - it can not be divided or split, since it is a single entity. Never in the so-called schizophrenia, or "splitting of consciousness" is not reached before the actual split personality. For other disease states in clinical psychiatry, we are not talking about splitting the individual, today it is no longer a "double consciousness", but rather about changing minds. And when Bleuler introduced the concept of schizophrenia, he hardly saw active splitting of the personality, rather splitting off from it a certain set of associations - a possibility to which his contemporaries believed, standing under the banner of the associative psychology of the time

. II

Personality is not only indivisible, but neslagaema; .. That is, it not only can not be decomposed into parts, but one can not be synthesized from the individual parts - as it is not only unity but also integrity. Therefore, a person can not be higher than in the structures of a higher order - for example, in mass, in the classroom or in the race: all these "unity" or "integrity", higher than the personality of the order, are not personal, and highly psevdolichnostny character. A person who expects them to rise, in fact they simply sinks; "Towering" in them, it is, in effect, denies himself both on the individual.

Unlike the individual organic matter just completely divisible and it is synthesized. At least, it proved to us known experiments Driesch with sea urchins. And what's more: divisibility and are joined by a condition and prerequisite of such an important phenomenon of life as reproduction. Hence no more and no less than the fact that a person as such can not reproduce. Propagated body, created parental organisms; the identity of the same, personal spirit, spiritual existential - of the person can not transfer to another

. III

Each individual personality is something completely new. Let's think: after copulation father weighs a few grams less, and the mother after birth - a couple of kilograms; but the spirit does not give in to any account. Do parents, when there is a new spirit at the birth of their child, become poorer in spirit? Or when a child, a new you - the new creature who can say of himself, "I" - is his parents may then say to himself, "I" one iota less? We see that every person who comes into the world, into being, in reality comes something completely new; because spiritual existential indescribably, the child does not inherit it from their parents. It inherited a building material - but not a builder

. IV

Personality is spiritual. So, the spiritual identity of heuristic oppose psychophysical organism. The organism is the set of organs, in other words, tools. The function of the body - a task he must perform for the person who is its carrier and carrier of which he is - first of all instrumental and expressive: the individual needs of her body, to be able to act and to express themselves. As a tool, in this sense, the body has a means to an end, and as such has a practical utility. The concept of utility is opposed to the concept of dignity; dignity as a person has only, regardless of whatever was vital or social utility.

Only those who do not understand this, and he who forgets about it, can be considered justified euthanasia. Those who know the dignity, the unconditional dignity of each individual, with a deep reverence for the human person are - including sick people, including the terminally ill and incurable mentally ill. It actually does not exist "spiritual" diseases. For "spirit", the very spiritual person, do not get sick, it is retained even in the case of psychosis, even virtually "invisible" to the psychiatrist.

Once I put it as a psychiatric credo: to believe in the preservation of the spiritual personality including the obvious symptoms of a psychotic illness; because, if not, why the doctor to clean up or "fix" itself psychophysical organism? Indeed, the one who sees only the body and lose sight behind him a person has to be willing to euthanize the body that can not be mended, because of the loss of this organism practical utility, for he knows nothing about does not depend on this utility dignity of the person . Thinking in this way the doctor is his work as "medical equipment"; but this kind of thinking shows only that the patient is a mechanism for it.

Not only disease refers only to the psychophysical organism, not a spiritual person, but also treatment. It must be said in connection with the question of leucotomy. Even scalpel neurosurgeon - or, as we say today, psychosurgery - can not touch spiritual personality. The only thing that can reach (or do) leucotomy it affect the psycho-physical conditions in which there is a spiritual personality - in cases where the operation has been shown, these conditions are steadily improving. Thus, the feasibility of this interference depends, ultimately, on the careful weighing of the fact that in this case is greater and lesser evil; It should consider whether the damage will be, which can cause operation is lower than that which exists because of illness. In this case, only one surgery is justified. In the end, every doctor's action will inevitably tend to sacrifice something, t. E. To pay the lesser evil for ensuring that the conditions under which a person is no longer constrained and limited psychosis can be realized and implemented themselves.

One of our own patients suffering from severe and persistence for many years been subjected to not only the psychoanalytic and individual psychological treatment, but also insulin, kardiazolovoy and electroconvulsive therapy - and unsuccessfully. After unsuccessful attempts to psychotherapy, we recommended leucotomy, which led to a downright astounding success.

We give a word most painful: "I feel much, much better; I can work again as at the time when I was healthy; obsessive representations were, but I can deal with them; for example, before I'm unable to read because of them, I had to re-read all ten times; Now I no longer have anything to reread. »

But what about her aesthetic interests - the disappearance of many authors who say: "To the music I finally again felt great interest»

. And what about her ethical concerns? The patient expresses a living compassion and expresses only one, consequent compassion, a desire: that other suffering just as she had once been able to receive the same assistance

! Now ask her whether she feels that she somehow changed: "I live now in a different world; it can not really put into words; before me there was no place in the world, I used to just vegetate in the world, but did not live; I was too exhausted; Now it is gone; the little that still pops up, I will soon be overcome. »

(If you stay myself?) "I was different." (How?) "I have now again the real life." (When you were more or become "itself", before the operation or after?) "Now, after the operation; Now everything is much more natural than it was then; then it was intrusive; for me there is only the obsessive representation; Now all the more so, as it should be; I came back again; before the operation, I was not at all a man, and a burden for humanity and for me the most; Now other people tell me that I have become quite different. »

When asked if she had lost her I, she said: "I lost it before; After the operation, I came back to myself, to my personality again. " (On questioning we intentionally avoided the word!) Therefore, the woman soon became a man after surgery - was "itself»

. But not only physiology, it turns out, does not reach the person, but also the psychology of it is also not possible - at least when it flows into the psychology. To see a person, or at least approach it categorically adequately requires rather noologiya.

As you know, there once existed a "psychology without a soul". She had been overcome, but the psychology of today still can not escape the reproach that it is often the psychology without a soul. This no-spiritual psychology, as such, not only blind to the dignity of the individual, as well as to the individual himself, but he sees and values ​​- it is blind to the values ​​that are value-correlate personal life, to the world of meanings and values ​​as a space - blind to the logos.



Psychologism projects the value of the space on the spiritual peace of the plane, where they become multi-valued: on this plane, psychological or pathological, is no longer possible to distinguish between the visions of Bernadette and hallucinations some hysteric. The lectures I usually explain it so the students: I point out to them that for two-dimensional drawing a circle can not be restored if it is a projection of a three-dimensional sphere, cone or cylinder. In the psychological projection of the conscience becomes "super-ego" or "introjection" "father image", and God becomes a "projection" of the image - when in fact it is a psychoanalytic interpretation is a projection of itself, namely psychologizes
<. br> V

Personality is existential; this means that it is not factual, it does not belong to the actual. Man as a person - not the actual, as being optional; it exists as its own opportunity in whose favor or against which it may decide. The human being as Jaspers said, is being "decisive": a man always decides what it will be in the next moment. How crucial it is being diametrically opposite to the way it is understood in psychoanalysis: namely, being drawn by. The human being, as I repeatedly emphasize, in its deepest basis is being responsible. This means more than simply being free: in liability contains also the "why" of human freedom - something for which a person is free, for what or against what he decides

. Thus, in contrast to psychoanalysis, the person in the existential analysis, as I have tried to outline it, is understood not as a deterministic drives, and how to navigate to the point. Under the existential-analytic point of view - in contrast to the psychoanalytic - it tends not to pleasure, and to values. The psychoanalytic concept of sexual desire (! Libido) and in the concept of social identity of individual psychology (! Sense of community), we see nothing but a state deficit more fundamental phenomenon - love. Love is always a relation between some and some I you. Because of this relationship in the psychoanalytic picture remains only "it", ie, sexuality, and the picture painted by individual psychology -.. Impersonal sociality, we can say, «das Man»

. If psychoanalysis considers the human being as subordinate to the desire for pleasure, and individual psychology - how to determine the "will to power", the existential analysis sees it as permeated by the desire for meaning. He knows not only the "struggle for existence" and, beyond that, if necessary, also the "mutual" (Peter Kropotkin), but also a battle for the meaning of life - and mutual support in this battle. In fact, just such a support is what we call psychotherapy: it is, in fact, the "individual medicine" (Paul Tournier). Hence it is clear that in psychotherapy it, ultimately is not about switching affects the dynamics and power drives, and an existential restructuring.

VI

Personality refers to I, and not with It; it is not under the dictates of It - dictate, which may, in a sense, Freud suffered, time he assured that I am not the master in his own house. Personality, I do not only dynamic, but also genetically no way derived from It, from the sphere of instincts: the concept of "ego drive" should be rejected as a very, very self-contradictory. But personality is also neosoznavaemo and spirituality in their origins, from where it originates, not only can be, but not necessarily neosoznavaemo. In its origins, basically defies the spirit of reflection and is therefore purely unconscious authority.

Thus, it is necessary to clearly distinguish between the instinctive unconscious, with whom one has to do psychoanalysis, the unconscious and the spiritual. By unconscious spirituality refers unconscious belief, religious unconscious - an unconscious, and often even the displaced, human communication with the transcendent

. The discovery of this unconscious religiosity is a credit to KG Young, but his mistake was that he localized the unconscious religiosity where sexuality is the unconscious - in the field of unconscious drives Ono. However, to believe in God and to God himself I have no desire, I have to make his own decision "for" or "against". Religiosity is connected with the I - or it is not quite

. VII

Personality, not only is the unity and integrity, it also creates the unity and integrity: it creates a body-soul-spiritual unity and integrity, which is the people. It creates unity and integrity based and provided only person - it only builds a personality, he holds to itself and ensures

. We, the people, the spiritual identity is known only in general in a single existence, with its psychophysical organism. Thus, man is the point of intersection, the intersection of the three levels of existence:

corporal,
peace,
spiritual.

These levels of being can not be separated from each other clearly enough (see .: Jaspers, Hartmann). It would therefore be wrong to say that a person "includes" physical, mental and spiritual principles: it is precisely the unity or integrity, but within this unity or spirit in man "is opposed to" the integrity of the bodily and spiritual in it. This is what I once called noopsihicheskim antagonism. If psychophysical parallelism is inevitable, then noopsihichesky antagonism is optional: it is always the possibility of a simple potentiality - true potentiality, to which we can always appeal (and to a doctor and should appeal)

. Against such a powerful enemy as psychophysics, it is always important to call for help what I once called "stubborn spirit." Психотерапия не может обойтись без обращения к нему, и я назвал это вторым — психотерапевтическим — кредо: вера в способность человеческого духа при всех условиях и при всех обстоятельствах каким-то образом отстраиваться и отодвигаться на плодотворную дистанцию от психофизического начала.

Если бы — в соответствии с первым, психиатрическим кредо — речь не шла о том, чтобы «починить» психофизический организм, чего с нетерпением ждет целостная, несмотря на все заболевания, духовная личность, то мы были бы совершенно не в состоянии призывать (в соответствии со вторым кредо) духовное в человеке к упрямому противостоянию телесно-душевному в нем, поскольку тогда не было бы ноопсихического антагонизма.

VIII

Личность динамична: как раз благодаря тому, что она может дистанцироваться и отстраиваться от психофизического начала, духовное вообще проявляет себя. Мы не должны гипостазировать духовную личность как динамичную и поэтому не можем квалифицировать ее как субстанцию — по крайней мере, как субстанцию в преобладающем смысле этого слова. Существовать, экзистировать — значит выходить за свои пределы и вступать в отношение к самому себе, а в отношение к самому себе человек вступает постольку, поскольку он как духовная личность относится к себе как к психофизическому организму. Это самодистанцирование от себя как психофизического организма как раз конституирует духовную личность как таковую. Только когда человек сталкивается с самим с собой, выделяются впервые его духовное и телесно-душевное начала.

IX

Животное не является личностью уже потому, что оно не в состоянии подняться над самим собой и отнестись к себе самому. Поэтому у животного нет мира как коррелята личности, а есть лишь среда. Если мы попытаемся экстраполировать отношение «животное — человек» или «среда — мир», то придем к «сверх-миру».

Для того, чтобы определить соотношение (узкой) среды животного к (более широкому) миру человека и этого последнего к (всеохватывающему) сверх-миру, напрашивается сравнение с золотым сечением. В соответствии с ним меньшая часть относится к большей так же, как большая часть к целому.

Возьмем в качестве примера обезьяну, которой сделали болезненный укол для того, чтобы получить сыворотку. Способна ли обезьяна когда-либо понять, почему ей приходится страдать? Из своей среды она не в состоянии прислушаться к соображениям человека, который включает ее в свой эксперимент; ведь человеческий мир, мир смысла и ценности, для нее недоступен. Она не дотягивается до него, в его измерение она не может войти.

Но не следует ли нам предположить, что над человеческим миром, в свою очередь, расположен превосходящий его и недоступный человеку мир, смысл, точнее, «сверх-смысл» которого только и может придать смысл всему человеческому страданию? Человек может постичь сверх-мир не больше, чем животное из своей среды может понять более широкий человеческий мир. Он, однако, может уловить его в предчувствии — в вере. Прирученному животному неведома цель, для которой человек его запрягает. Откуда же тогда человек может знать сверх-смысл мира как целого?

X

Личность постигает саму себя не иначе как через трансцендентное. Более того: человек также является человеком лишь в той мере, в которой он понимает себя через трансцендентное — он личность лишь в той мере, в какой он из личности исходит («персонирует»), отзываясь на зов трансцендентного и наполняясь им. Этот зов трансцендентного он слышит и в голосе совести.

Для логотерапии религия является и может быть лишь предметом — но не основанием. Логотерапия должна действовать по эту сторону веры в откровение и отвечать на вопрос о смысле по эту сторону развилки теистического и атеистического мировоззрений. И если она, таким образом, рассматривает феномен веры не как веру в Бога, но как более широкую веру в смысл, то она имеет полное право затрагивать феномен веры и заниматься им. В этом понимании она сходится с Альбертом Эйнштейном, по мнению которого, ставить вопрос о смысле жизни значит быть религиозным.

Смысл является той каменной оградой, за которую мы не можем выйти, которую мы должны, скорее, принять: этот последний смысл мы должны принять, потому что мы не можем спрашивать дальше — потому что попытка ответить на вопрос о смысле бытия всегда предполагает бытие смысла.

Короче говоря, человеческая вера в смысл является трансцендентальной категорией в смысле Канта. Со времен Канта нам известно, что некоторым образом бессмысленно задавать вопрос о категориях пространства и времени — просто потому, что мы не можем мыслить, а следовательно, и задавать вопрос, не предполагая существования времени и пространства. Точно так же человеческое бытие всегда есть бытие, направляемое смыслом, даже если самому человеку об этом неведомо: всегда есть определенное пред-знание смысла, и предчувствие смысла лежит в основе того, что в логотерапии называется «стремлением к смыслу».

Хочет он того или нет, признает он это или нет, но человек, пока он дышит, всегда верит в смысл. Даже самоубийца верит в смысл, если не в смысл жизни, ее продолжения, то в смысл смерти. Если бы он действительно не верил ни в какой смысл, абсолютно ни в какой — он не смог бы пошевелить и пальцем и тем самым покончить с собой.