The teaching of Viktor Frankl on human spirituality in the light of Orthodox anthropology
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51216/Keywords:
Viktor Frankl, human personality, psychotherapy, God, spirituality, morality, freedom, responsibility, meaning, religion.Abstract
The article provides a comparative analysis of the doctrine of man by the Austrian psychotherapist, psychologist and philosopher Viktor Frankl from the standpoint of Orthodox anthropology. Frankl identifies three spheres of being in a person: spiritual (noological), mental and bodily, and also adheres to a personality-natural anthropological model. The teachings of the Austrian scientist are colored by polemics with psychoanalytic and humanistic theories of personality, which are still relevant today. Frankl claims that it is the highest, spiritual aspirations that are truly human, and not physiological instincts, as Sigmund Freud wrote. Frankl’s teaching on the spirituality can be compared with the moral manifestations of personality in the understanding of Christian anthropology. A person’s striving for self-sacrifice for the sake of another, an orientation towards the meanings that a person draws from the realm of the transcendent - all this is consonant with the Christian teaching about sacrificial love and the Providence of God. The article also discusses the issue of comparing religion and psychotherapy by an Austrian psychiatrist, and in this issue Frankl gives a fairly balanced position: the task of religion is to save, and the task of psychotherapy is to heal. Refuting Freud’s idea that religion is a collective neurosis, Frankl argues that religious life is a vital need for a person.
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