Not all suffering is born from trauma. It was this intuition that led Viktor Frankl to coin his own term for a different origin of disorder: noogenesis.
A spiritual origin, not an unconscious conflict
Freud explained psychic suffering through psychogenesis, its origin in unconscious conflict, repressed instincts, and past traumas. Frankl proposes another possible origin: noogenesis, the disorder that arises not from an internal conflict between desire and repression, but from a spiritual void, the absence of meaning.
The emptiness that corrodes inside
An inner emptiness corrodes the soul like a plant without light: it grows, but withers until it finds its purpose. It is not the body or the mind that falls ill first in this situation, it is the spirit that wastes away for lack of what only it seeks, a why. From this root comes a specific symptom, which Frankl named noogenic neurosis, the disease of the void of meaning.
Why the distinction matters
Recognizing noogenesis changes the treatment: there is no point in treating something that arises from a lack of purpose as a repressed conflict. It is necessary to reconnect the person with what is above themselves, with what is transcendent, with what really matters, the same movement that Frankl calls self-transcendence.
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What is noogenesis?
It is the term created by Viktor Frankl for the spiritual origin of human disorders, in contrast to Freud's psychogenesis, which explains suffering through unconscious conflict.
What is the difference between noogenesis and psychogenesis?
Freudian psychogenesis seeks the origin of suffering in unconscious traumas and conflicts. Noogenesis seeks its origins in a spiritual void, a lack of meaning, a void that classical psychoanalysis had no vocabulary to name.
Continue: Existential tension: why it is not neurosis · The Triple Dimension of the Human Being · What is Logotherapy
Home class (Community NousCast): Em Busca de Sentido, de Viktor Frankl