Man's Search For Meaning - Viktor E. Frankl

LOGOTHERAPY IN A NUTSHELL
to whom paradoxical intention was administered more
than twenty years ago; the therapeutic effect proved to
be, nevertheless, a permanent one.
One of the most remarkable facts is that paradoxical
intention is effective regardless of the etiological basis
of the case concerned. This confirms a statement once
made by Edith Weisskopf-Joelson: "Although traditional
psychotherapy has insisted that therapeutic
practices have to be based on findings on etiology, it is
possible that certain factors might cause neuroses
during early childhood and that entirely different factors
might relieve neuroses during adulthood." 14
As for the actual causation of neuroses, apart from
constitutional elements, whether somatic or psychic in
nature, such feedback mechanisms as anticipatory
anxiety seem to be a major pathogenic factor. A given
symptom is responded to by a phobia, the phobia
triggers the symptom, and the symptom, in turn, reinforces
the phobia. A similar chain of events, however,
can be observed in obsessive-compulsive cases in
which the patient fights the ideas which haunt him. 15
Thereby, however, he increases their power to disturb
him, since pressure precipitates counterpressure.
Again the symptom is reinforced! On the other hand,
as soon as the patient stops fighting his obsessions and
instead tries to ridicule them by dealing with them in
l4 "Some Comments on a Viennese School of Psychiatry," The
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 51 (1955), pp. 701-3.
"This is often motivated by the patient's fear that his obsessions
indicate an imminent or even actual psychosis; the patient is not
aware of the empirical fact that an obsessive-compulsive neurosis is
immunizing him against a formal psychosis rather than endangering
him in this direction.
151