V.E. Frankl, Psychotherapy, Psychiatry and Religion

1) Title of application: V. E. Frankl, vol. 5: Psychotherapy, psychiatry, and religion 2) Content of publication: Volume 5 of the edition of the Collected Works of Viktor E. Frankl brings together his writings on the relationship between psychology, psychotherapy, and psychiatry on the one hand, and religion and spirituality on the other. The texts assembled in this volume were originally published in different places and are here grouped into five categories, each forming one part of the book. The tome opens with the works where Frankl directs his principal attention to the psychological and existential foundations of the question for meaning. The second group of texts deals with the relation between pastoral and medical ministry and the third category is exclusively dedicated to the work solely devoted to the actual question at hand, Der unbewusste Gott. Here Frankl systematically elaborates on his anthropological theory of an "unconscious religious tendency." In the fourth category, the texts include discussions and partly personal confessions of Frankl where he moves to test the border regions between religion and psychology. The 1984 dialogue with Pinchas Lapide, published in German under the title Gottsuche und Sinnfrage, is seminal in this context. The fifth part concludes the volume with texts, where religion and religiosity sensu stricto are analyzed and discussed. 3) What is new/unique about this volume? The texts of this volume prove again that Viktor E. Frankl remained a psychiatrist and neurologist throughout his entire professional life. In the context of his meaning-centred psychotherapy, he often moves in the border regions between medicine and world view. Supposed crossings of the border only happen, if he takes, as a private individual, a position in the view of questions of worldview. Thus, we encounter less the crossing of a border in the proper sense of the word, but a personal statement, opening up a window into the world of ideas of Viktor Frankl. The writings collected in this volume are of crucial importance for the reception of the work of Viktor E. Frankl, going beyond research in psychology and science of psychotherapy. They are a testimony to the history of ideas of European, in particular also Austrian, currents of the 20th century.