Ora et Labora

Several years have passed since the Second Great War. A Viennese woman, an artist, visits Dr. Frankl. Her life is unraveling before her eyes. She suffers from an enduring “lack of contact with life.”* She has come to experience her life as a fraud. On her therapy intake form she writes, “My painting (the only activity I really am interested in) scares me stiff- like any other deep experience! As soon as I want something very much, it goes wrong. Whatever I love I destroy— every time. I no longer dare love anything. The next time this destruction takes place I’ll really hang myself.”

A discussion of personal freedom ensues. Dr. Frankl explains that it is typical for people in the woman’s condition to believe they are doomed to old results, that they lack the freedom to change because of their condition. He explains that in his experience with thousands of patients at the Rothschild Suicide Pavilion and elsewhere, this neurotic fatalism is a false belief. She is both free from and free to— free from the past and its influences, and free to “find her special, personal meaning of life in all its uniqueness.” After some discussion the woman becomes open to these insights, and therapy begins.

Dr. Frankl asks the woman about her artistic principles. She explains that she has little choice but to paint, that it is an obsession for her, one that she actually has come to fear. To this fear of her obsession the woman produces an additional complaint: “I often dream finished pictures which satisfy me in my dream but which I never am able to reproduce when I am awake.” She finds she is even unable to reconstruct certain color compositions from her dreams during waking hours. To her chagrin, she is estranged in her conscious life from her unconscious self. This severed relationship troubles her at the deepest levels. She is aware that she is unable to achieve her full self as she subsists in this alienated state.

The therapist begins his work. A modified form of systematic relaxing exercises called autogenic training (Developed by J.H. Schultz. See excellent website on the method here: http://www.guidetopsychology.com/autogen.htm) allows the woman enough space from her cycle of anxiety to begin having breakthroughs. The exercises bring her to a state where she begins to see again, a state characterized by “A feeling of great clarity. One is less conscious of oneself- but all objects are much more distinct. A feeling of freshness, as though a veil had been removed from my eyes. This is quite new. Now I am lying on the couch. Armchair, paper, basket, the shadow of the desk— everything is sharp… I am drawing…”

The woman begins remembering her dreams. The artistic compulsion flows through her automatically, a seamless admixture of her critical appraisal and conscious painting and unconscious ensuing. Days of progress turn to weeks of improvement. A relapse occurs here and there, despair returning, but the woman continues on the path. She repeats her relaxing exercises in the face of difficulty, and repeatedly encounters a space of reprieve. Weeks become months and the progress remains. And the content of her intentions? “That everything be released— that my most personal color and form experiences become conscious— and that I be able to put them on canvas.” In this way the therapy has restored her ability to work.

But the therapy is not complete. Frankl explains:

“Now that her ability to work had been restored, a second problem— so far latent in the patient— came to the surface. From this point on, logotherapy had to go beyond the stage it had reached so far; while up to this point the therapy had been something like a midwife to the artist, it now had to become the midwife to the patient’s spirit. For it now became the task of logotherapy to clarify, or perhaps to assist, our patient’s struggle with the religious problems which had developed quite spontaneously during this period. One might formulate the situation of the psychotherapy at this moment as follows: Of the well-known Benedictine motto, ora et labora, the second part had been realized, but what remained to be done was to realize the first.”

The tragedy of World War II had been a ravaging lion, swallowing up lives greedily from so many European homes. The woman’s own loss of her husband in the war had driven her to ask God for her own death in a church at that time. Since that time her faith in God has been interrupted by trauma. This begins to reveal itself in the course of therapy. A number of dreams composed of vivid imagery ensue: a dead soldier, a horse-drawn carriage departing, a wedge interrupting the appearance of a yearned-after form. Profound, deep pain infuses her report that the strange form is one “which I desperately want to be whole, but which keeps breaking into pieces.” She states that it is the death of her husband that has disturbed the wholeness of her life.

Guilt also lurks. The woman reports that in her teens she abandoned the Catholic Church at the teaching that the flesh is sinful. She converted to Protestantism as an expletive act towards authority, with the result that she ceased her prayer life. Her relationship with God has waned over the years. Additionally, she feels unworthy of the memory of her husband by her conduct since his passing, and she confesses that she has been unable to love anyone since that time, despite her need for relationship. Pain and guilt swirl around in her subconscious, blocking her conscious contact with God.

A breakthrough experiment is proposed by Dr. Frankl. The woman reports: “Tonight I will dream why I feel hostile toward Christianity— what it was that scared me away. And then I will wake up immediately and write it down.” The woman dreams thusly: She is in Waldegg (her childhood home) waiting for a train to Vienna. She wishes to visit a psychotherapist friend in town. She is told he lives near the church. She believes she will find the church, but the city appears differently from her prior experience of it. She gets lost and begins to doubt, but a little girl appears and says, “To the church? You have gone in the wrong direction. You must go back.” Her past guilt manifests in physical thirst, followed by clean water delivered in a dirty pitcher. She turns to follow the child’s direction, but poplar trees have collapsed blocking the way (symbolizing therapeutic challenges and relapses). The road opens up again, and in the distance a beautiful milky-white Cathedral stands before her. She awakens.

The woman had gone to Normandy once to visit Église St-Etienne in Caen. She had arrived at night in heavy fog and never was able to actually see the church. Frankl explains: “The appearance of the never-seen but admired cathedral in her dream signified the transformation which occurred in the patient during her analysis: a transformation of her religious experience from a God hidden by fog and darkness to a revealed God.”

The woman begins experiencing God. She dreams of an icy black abyss behind her, yet she is full of love and joy and a sense of being protected as God’s light warms her face. She dreams of being dirty after a long, difficult journey, and of rest and cleansing. At first her experiences of God are disquieting, but she gains acceptance. She writes, “It’s like a painful attack. I feel I’ll die, right then and there, but it doesn’t frighten me; on the contrary, it would be beautiful. Extremely strong, unspeakably beautiful experiences… Long hours of a state of Light, like being absorbed by God… united with God. Being at-one with all things and with God. Everything I see, I am; everything I touch, I am… On the same wavelength with all lines and colors… Contact with things… Through me all earthly existence flows toward God; I am now a piece of conducting wire.”

She struggles a bit more with these mystical experiences, until finally, acceptance. She summarizes the change: “This is my first springtime in God. Up to now I was deaf and blind. Now all things are illuminated by God… It is as if another sense had been added to the five: experiencing God, like hearing or seeing. There is no name for it. It was the therapy that led me to God. There is no longer an abyss, this being-in-God carries me and I cannot fall. Life again is wonderful, rich, and full of possibilities. When related to God, everything is bearable and filled with meaning. I think I know what I have to do: bring my daily life in order for the love of God.”

Questions for Reflection:

·         Herbert Spencer wrote: “There is principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance— that principle is contempt prior to investigation.” When considering the existence of God, the possibility or validity of mystical experiences, etc., have I been guilty of "contempt prior to investigation"?

·         What traumas in my own past have disturbed my ability to work creatively, to experience God, and to move forward from the icy abyss of loss? Do I have an adequate community around me to help me deal with these traumas?

·         What road am I currently on in life? Have a chosen a path that will help me become the full self that lies dormant within me? If not, what concrete actions can I enact to change my direction? To whom can I turn for help?

·         Am I helping others around me on their journeys, or am I simply self-concerned, vying for my own piece of the pie? Is there greater potential meaning in the world around me than I usually recognize on a daily basis?

* All quotes and story from the article “Psychotherapy, Art, and Religion,” in Frankl, V. E., Psychotherapy and Existentialism: Selected Papers on Logotherapy. 165-181. (Simon & Schuster: New York, 1967).