ABSTRACT
Viktor Emil Frankl has been largely relegated to theology courses where he can lend some scientific objectivity to the ‘self-transcendent’ quality of human experience. Frankl positioned himself against some of Freud’s most cherished notions: retrospective analysis, the pleasure principle and pan-sexualism. Frankl favoured a far less retrospective approach, to the almost total exclusion of both personal and collective history. Despite the weight of the ‘tragic tirade’ of pain, guilt and death, Frankl counsels an optimism in the face of insurmountable odds. If Good’s distinction between the Care and Patient Chronotopes expands on Frankl’s description of deformed time, the analytical concept of ‘precarity’ serves as an improvement on Frankl’s ‘provisional existence’. Contemporary logotherapy treats a reasonably challenging range of mental health issues, utilises various individualistic and group modes of delivery and is generating new techniques based on Frankl’s original philosophical assumptions.
