Logotherapists tend to be warm, accepting individuals. They will often use humor. Yet they are trained to confront individuals: to push their clients to face their inner feelings of futility and despair, and then, out of their often overlooked and underestimated inner resources and moral strength, to will that their lives become meaningful. Logotherapists try to encourage clients to see more clearly what it is that gives them a sense of value in living and to use what they see to direct themselves toward more satisfying and personally fulfilling lives.
APPLICATIONS OF LOGOTHERAPY
As we have already observed, logotherapy has been used to treat a wide range of individual problems involving a loss of faith in the value of living, behavior that no longer is under voluntary control, or behavior that frustrates your desires.
Logotherapy is especially well-suited to helping individuals with noögenic neuroses, Frankl's term for personal problems that have their basis in conflicts between opposing values. Noögenic (from the Greek nous, meaning "spirit" or "mind") neuroses have their origin in personal moral or spiritual, but not necessarily religious, conflicts. They lead to a feeling of existential frustration: a person's will to find meaning is blocked. When sufficient pressure is built up, anxiety and depression can follow. You can imagine how pressure might build up in the inner lives of a business executive who wishes she had a family instead of a career identity, a university professor who yearns to be an independent artist, or a financially successful businessman who despises his own pretenses and opportunism.
I asked the poor creatures who listened to me attentively in the darkness of the hut to face up to the seriousness of our position. They must not lose hope but should keep their courage in the certainty that the hopelessness of our struggle did not detract from its dignity and meaning. I said that someone looks down on each of us in difficult hours—a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or a God—and he would not expect us to disappoint him. He would hope to find us suffering proudly—not miserably.[[3]]
[[3]] Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, p. 132.
REALITY THERAPY
For persons able to make a commitment to a
plan for life improvement, whether they have
emotional or behavioral problems or simply
want to develop a success-identity.
... [U]nhappiness is the result and not the cause of irresponsibility.
William Glasser, Reality Therapy
Reality therapy was developed in the 1950s by psychiatrist William Glasser (1925-2013). His approach to therapy evolved as a result of his work with delinquent teenage girls, with clients in private practice, and with severely troubled patients in a VA hospital.
Reality therapy, as the name implies, attempts to help by strengthening a person's practical understanding of reality and by encouraging concrete planning that will bring about an improved sense of personal adjustment to reality. It emphasizes a very practical, feet-on-the-ground focus on the present: a person's past experience cannot be rewritten. Reality therapists do not believe in the essential value of psychoanalytic interpretation, dream analysis, nondirective counseling, or intellectual insight. A reality therapist focuses on the present, specifically on attempts patients may now be making to become more successful from their own points of view. If a patient is not able to make definite plans of this kind and cannot sustain a commitment to them, the focus of reality therapy will be to encourage the patient to begin to do this. It is an approach that believes that a strong sense of personal identity can come only from doing: if an individual is able to develop a degree of self-responsibility that is solid and enterprising, a feeling of personal success and effectiveness will follow.