Meaning-Oriented Counselling and Psychotherapy as an Ethics-Based Care Practice: Logotherapy and Existential Analysis with Cancer Patients

Experiencing illness, in its physical or mental expressions, raises radical questions concerning the sense or non-sense of a subject’s existence: Does life still have meaning and purpose when it is marked by suffering? How can feelings of meaninglessness and despair be avoided or prevented? These are questions that both those providing care and those receiving are compelled to face in their daily encounter with the vulnerability and precariousness of the human condition. Viktor Frankl’s existential analysis and logotherapy represents an attempt to restore the inner spiritual resources of the homo patiens, with a view to turning limit situations into challenges and opportunities for personal growth. This chapter focuses on the nature of Frankl’s meaning-oriented psychotherapy as a kind of ‘medical care of the soul’ (ärtzliche Seelsorge): an ethics-based practice originally developed as a ‘value-based psychotherapy’ (wertende Psychotherapie) which intentionally seeks to foster responsibility as an ‘ethical formal value’. A prime example of its application in clinical contexts is meaning-centred group therapy conducted with cancer patients; clinical experience and research proves that investing in meaning and values acts as a psychological protective factor and a therapeutic resource in coping with illness.