A person of body, psyche, and spirit

The Korean essay begins with a simple contrast. Individual counseling leaves a person alone with a counselor, and much depends on that person’s will to stay. Group counseling offers company and a shared purpose, at the cost of privacy. From there the writer turns to what the assignment actually asked for: Viktor Frankl’s view of the person in logotherapy, and the sources of meaning, applied to a life.

A human being, in this account, is an existential being who holds freedom and responsibility together, and who must have a meaning for his or her own existence. Frankl calls his way of understanding the person a dimensional ontology. The human being is made of body, psyche, and spirit, and yet is one. Of those three, logotherapy places the spiritual dimension at the center, because that is where a person becomes fully human. Unity, the essay says, cannot be found by analyzing body and psyche alone; it has to be seen in the noetic dimension in which a person is projected.

Freedom, responsibility, and a will that is not pleasure or power

Frankl, as the essay reads him, did not treat the three dimensions as separable parts. When one and the same phenomenon is seen from a lower dimension, the views can contradict one another; when different phenomena are seen from a lower dimension, they can look merely vague. The ranking is not a moral score, but a more inclusive height. Instinctive motives may run toward pleasure, power, and fame; the motive of spiritual action is meaning. Logos, in this use, is not first of all a religious word. It names what is human in the human being.

Freedom, for Frankl, belongs to a thinking being, and the essay names three faces of it: a person is not bound utterly by instinct, or by hereditary disposition, or by environment. Education, in this view, is a way of growing the capacity to decide. Responsibility is the other side of that freedom: a responsibility toward a meaning still to be filled, and toward one’s own life. A person has to see for what, or toward whom, they are responsible, and to set that task before conscience and before society. Logotherapy, the essay says, rests on three bases: freedom of the will, the will to meaning, and the meaning of life. The will to power and the will to pleasure, which the writer links to Adler and to Freud, are treated as reductions. The human will is limited, and still it is a will that seeks meaning.

Five sources of meaning, and a restless graduate student

The essay then lists five sources of meaning: the meaning of work, the meaning of love, the meaning of suffering, meaning drawn from the past, and a supreme meaning. Work, love, and suffering are close to the classic triad of creative, experiential, and attitudinal avenues; the last two are the essay’s own emphasis, and are kept as the writer named them.

The writer is 32, in graduate school, and anxious about a career that will not sit still. Frankl, the essay recalls, wondered why drink and drugs can be so tempting when a person cannot find, in the objective world around them, a reason to be happy, and yet longs for one. The application is modest. Meaning is not invented to soothe a résumé; it is sought in work, in relation, in how one bears what cannot be fixed, in what a life has already held, and in something higher than the immediate worry. That is the view of the person the essay wants to keep. You can read a longer Korean version on CampusDown.

Sources

1. A student account of Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy, following his dimensional view of the person and five sources of meaning.

Last updated 15 November 2026