Frankl's dimensional ontology
The Will to Meaning opens its first part, "Foundations of Logotherapy", with a chapter called "Metaclinical Implications of Psychotherapy". Its argument is that every psychotherapy rests on some picture of the human being, whether it admits this or not. A few pages in, Frankl stops to set out his own picture. He calls it dimensional ontology. It comes down to two laws and a handful of drawings.
The rabbi and the cat
Frankl gets there by way of a complaint. He once came across a definition of man as nothing but a complex biochemical mechanism with vast storage capacity. As a neurologist, he has no quarrel with the model. Comparing the nervous system to a computer is fair. What he objects to is "nothing but".
He puts the problem in a footnote, with a joke. Two men bring a case to a rabbi. One says his neighbor's cat has eaten five pounds of butter. The cat's owner says the cat never cared for butter. The rabbi puts the cat on the scale: exactly five pounds. Now he has the butter. But where is the cat?
Frankl says the same thing happens when a person is studied only in the biological dimension. Before asking "What is man?", he suggests asking "Where is man?" In which dimension does the specifically human show up at all?
A cup seen from two sides
The first law says that one and the same thing, projected into lower dimensions, gives pictures that contradict each other.
Frankl's example is a cup. Project it onto a horizontal plane and you get a circle. Project it onto a vertical plane and you get a rectangle. The two drawings disagree. There is a second disagreement as well. Both drawings are closed figures, and the cup is open.
A person projected into biology comes out as an organism. Projected into psychology, the same person comes out as a psychological mechanism. Frankl does not try to reconcile the two pictures. He asks whether the contradiction between a circle and a rectangle cancels the cylinder.
The openness carries over too. Seen from a lower dimension, a person looks like a closed system of reflexes, or of responses to stimuli. For Frankl, this is where theories built on inner equilibrium go wrong. They leave out that a person is directed toward something outside himself.
"Dimensional ontology is far from solving the mind-body problem. But it does explain why the mind-body problem cannot be solved."
— Viktor E. Frankl, The Will to Meaning, expanded edition (New York: Meridian, 1988), p. 25
Three shadows
The second law runs the other way. Different things, projected into one lower dimension, give pictures that cannot be told apart.
A cylinder, a cone and a sphere can all cast the same round shadow on the table. From the shadow alone there is no telling which one stands above it.
Frankl's first application is clinical. The same symptom can have different sources. A neurosis may be psychogenic, in the usual sense. It may be somatogenic: Frankl mentions agoraphobia caused by an overactive thyroid. Or it may be what he calls noogenic, coming from a moral conflict or from the frustration of the will to meaning. On the level of symptoms, the three can look alike.
His second application is Joan of Arc. Within psychiatry, he writes, she would have to be diagnosed as a schizophrenic, and in that frame she is nothing but one. What she was beyond that does not appear in the psychiatric plane. It appears only when she is followed into the dimension where her place in history and theology can be seen.
Higher does not mean better
None of this is an attack on science. Frankl calls projection legitimate, and even obligatory: science has to treat reality as if it had one dimension. The scientist only needs to know that this is what he is doing.
Nor is the higher dimension a better one. Frankl recalls that Paul Tillich questioned him closely on this point at Harvard, and was satisfied only once the higher dimension was defined as the more inclusive one. A person who has become human, Frankl adds, has not stopped being an animal, any more than an airplane loses the ability to move along the ground.
Frankl calls this higher dimension spiritual, or noological. He uses the word for the place where the specifically human is found, with no religious claim attached. How he understood meaning there is on a separate page: logotherapy and the will to meaning.
The laws also leave a question that turns back on the reader. Which projection of myself do I take for the whole of me?
Epimelea is an app built around the existential school. The conversation carries over from one meeting to the next. The archive is encrypted on the device and belongs to the person who wrote it.
About the app: an AI therapist for long-term therapy
This page is about a school of psychotherapy. It is not medical advice and not emergency help. If you are in danger right now, contact your local emergency number, or find a helpline in your country at findahelpline.com.