Viktor Frankl

Viktor Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist, founder of the School of Logotherapy, who explores the existential sense of the individual and the spiritual dimension of existence. Frankl's work is relatively little known in Portuguese-speaking countries and is commonly ignored by mainstream psychoanalysis (such as Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Jacques Lacan). In a practical and simple way, he distinguished Psychoanalysis from Logotherapy: In psychoanalysis, the patient has to lie down on a couch and tell things that are sometimes very unpleasant to be told. For in logotherapy the patient can sit normally, but he has to hear things that are sometimes very unpleasant to be heard. The founder of Logotherapy (also called the "Third Viennese School of Psychiatry"), adopted a certain distance from Freud regarding the sexual etiology of the neuroses and also about religion. Frankl considers that individual neurosis could in some cases be the expression of the refusal of spirituality.