Man’s Search for Meaning

Logotherapy is a technique in psychotherapy that combats everyday difficulties

We’ve had brief mentions of logotherapy in contrast to psychotherapy, but here we’ll go a little deeper into the details of the technique and what it aims to achieve.

Logotherapy has developed a special technique to help individuals face everyday difficulties like fear. It finds a starting point common in neurotic patients — anticipatory anxiety — that makes the sufferer fear something that may happen in the future. This is termed hyper-intention and has a similar condition known as hyper-attention, which can lead to sickness; a patient pays undue attention to a condition, and its symptoms get inflicted by it.

⚡️The fear that something might happen can cause it to happen.

The technique, “paradoxical intention,” helps fix such a condition. It aims to rid one of the anticipatory fears by engaging a patient in thoughts that can cause the intended effects. For example, if you are scared of sweating in public, you should think: “I should sweat even more this time.” The logic is that you reverse your attitude toward the problem perceiving it as a challenge.

⚡️Reverse psychology can force the body to negate the anxiety prompts in your head.

As logotherapy seeks to combat neurosis, it first approaches it in relation to the age of the sufferers. For most, a neurosis is a form of nihilism — the belief that man is “nothing” but the result of biological, psychological, and sociological conditions or the product of heredity and environment. This feeling of nothingness isn’t any different from the existential vacuum from earlier. Logotherapy states with certainty that man indeed is nothing but a finite being that isn’t just a product of an environment but the one in charge of what the environment makes o fhim.