[In the following unfavorable review of The Doctor and the Soul, the critic faults Frankl's notion of existentialism and charges that he neglects the contributions of Sigmund Freud and other psychoanalysts in the development of his logotherapeutic approach.]

The Doctor and the Soul purports to provide an account of a new kind of psychotherapy which is "to transcend the limits of all previous psychotherapy". It is Dr. Frankl's belief that psychotherapy has, to date, paid too little attention to "the spiritual reality of man". This defect he proposes to remedy by the employment of what he calls "logotherapy". From his account, logotherapy, appears to be the employment of an exhortative technique of treatment, in which the patient is argued with, cajoled, and finally instructed to adopt the quasi-religious beliefs professed by Dr. Frankl. He alleges that Adler's individual psychology goes deeper than Freud's psychoanalysis: a curious idea, since the chief weakness of Adler's approach is his neglect of the unconscious. He also asserts that the goal of psychoanalysis is to bring about a compromise between the demands of the unconscious and the requirements of reality. Without giving any indication that he understands the chief therapeutic tools of psychoanalysis—the interpretation of defences and the understanding and resolution of transference.

The word "existential" is rather freely employed: and Dr. Frankl is much preoccupied with the "meaning of life"; but this is about the sum of evidence indicating that he has any conception of what existentialism is all about. In particular, he shows very little understanding of those particular patients who complain that their life is meaningless, and appears to believe that those who do so complain are raising a valid philosophical problem rather than suffering from any form of neurosis or psychosis. He appears totally unaware of the work of Laing, Fairbairn and Guntrip on schizoid states, and, although he appreciates that schizophrenics feel themselves to be acted upon rather than active agents seems not to possess any concept of identification, ego-boundaries, or the relation of the ego to the body. In short, he claims to have gone beyond both Freud and Adler without giving any evidence that he has truly comprehended either.

As a practical therapist, Dr. Frankl has no doubt had some success. He describes one technique, "paradoxical intention", in which he persuades persons with phobias to entertain the ideas and to embrace the situations of which they are frightened. Thus obsessionals are encouraged to get dirty, people with tremors to show others how much they can tremble, persons with fears of behaving antisocially to "vomit into people's faces and create the greatest possible mess". It is not always clear from the text just how literally Dr. Frankl means his instructions to be taken. Thus, a man with a fear that he might "grab somebody's penis" is "instructed to seek every possible opportunity on the street, in restaurants, in the car, at work, to grab a man's penis". We are told that he soon "started to laugh at his obsessions and they completely disappeared" but we are not told whether he had to act upon his obsession before the symptom left him nor what the attitude of the police or the possible victims of his assaults might be supposed to be. We must assume that he was only grabbing in jest or in fantasy; but there are other sexual compulsions which do not so easily dissolve in gusts of laughter, and which are both more dangerous and more distressing. It is, of course, easy to gain some success in the field of psychotherapy if one is both arrogantly sure of oneself and inclined to didactic preaching. But such attitudes lead nowhere in terms of research or increased comprehension of the manifold complexities of neurosis.