Logotherapy belongs to the so-called humanistic and existential streams of psychotherapy. This strand of psychotherapy deals with the physical, psychological and spiritual aspects of man. Logotherapeutic treatment is based on the assumption that man's greatest psychological suffering is caused by the absence of meaning. If we translate this reasoning into practice, we can give one very simplistic example. If we suffer from muscle pain when exercising, it is not psychologically demanding for us because we are pursuing a certain meaning. Here it is probably to shape the physique and improve physical fitness. We would be in a completely different situation if we were experiencing similar pain, for example, as a result of an accident, and we would not see the purpose of this inconvenience

There is a strong will for meaning ingrained in all of us, and if we don't find it, we suffer feelings of emptiness or frustration, which are breeding grounds for anxiety or depression. It is not easy to find meaning at different stages of life, which would be the real driving force for us. In this search, the psychotherapist becomes the client's guide and supporter. In doing so, he or she uses subtle and sophisticated logotherapeutic techniques.

The founder of logotherapy is the famous psychiatrist and psychotherapist Victor Emanuel Frankl. He was imprisoned in concentration camps for three years during the Second World War, and this experience greatly influenced his later direction and thinking, and thus the whole psychotherapeutic movement we call logotherapy.

Logos is the ancient Greek term for "word", but it is to be understood in a much broader sense. We understand it to mean "a reasonable word", "speech that has a message" or, in short, "meaning".

Everyone's life has meaning. This is the conviction Frankl came to through several years of frustrating experience in a concentration camp. Numerous testimonies have shown that Frankl was able to use logotherapy, the active search for meaning, to give spiritual encouragement to his fellow prisoners in the most traumatic situations in life. In very simplified terms, then, we could formulate the main idea of logotherapy as follows: We have only limited freedom to change events in the external world, but we have complete freedom in the attitudes we take toward those events.

Frankl metaphorically refers to all these disorders as a "transient loss of life's meaning". People who suffer from depression or anxiety, for example, are often plagued by feelings of uselessness or inferiority. With the help of logotherapy, they can gain insight into what gives their lives meaning or what their values are. This then has a great impact on their coping with everyday life with all its difficulties.

Logotherapy can be very effectively combined with cognitive behavioural therapy to achieve rapid progress in the treatment of depression, anxiety and addiction. However, which type of psychotherapy is appropriate does not only depend on the type of problem, but also on the individual personality traits of each person.