Psychotherapy and belief
The journey of the Institute for Judaism and Civilization in exploring a the conditions of psychotherapy compatible with Judaism goes back more than ten years. It was driven by a question of values. In healing the disturbed person, every psychotherapist necessarily works with a model of the human being. In view of the passivity and susceptibility of the patient in the therapeutic situation - the treatment under which we might want to place ourselves or others – it has been necessary to consider the possibility of a therapy indifferent or even antagonistic to the spiritual dimension of the person. Our initial response to this was the organization of a conference on Judaism and Psychotherapy, to which 200 participants came, many of them practitioners.

After the conference we held a series of seminars focused on what we called the "therapeutic triad", namely of the relationships of the patient, the therapist and the patient's religious mentor or personally held spiritual values. What was intended here was to explore the distinct, but complementary roles of therapist and spiritual mentor, for whilst spirituality was clearly of importance, the technical and clinical skills of the therapist also possessed an integral role.

Not long after this Dr Mat Gelman informed us that the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, had thought very well of a therapist, broadly known but who had found little entrée into the world of professional psychotherapy, Viktor Frankl. In fact he had heard from the prominent, religious American therapist, Dr Abraham Twersky, that the Rebbe wanted a biography of Frankl written.

ABOVE Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson encouraged the dissemination of the work of Viktor Frankl

So began for the Institute for Judaism and Civilization a new focus on the writings of Viktor Frankl. Frankl's work proved to have this remarkable quality, that whilst even, with qualification, it admitted a variety of therapies, Freudian psychoanalysis, it at the same time preserved the sovereign domain of the spiritual or higher meaning-seeking faculty of the person, intact. Parenthetically, the Institute held a seminar on documentation of an encounter between the fifth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Sholom DovBer Schneersohn and Freud in the European winter of 1902-3, in which (from the point of view of Judaism) redeemable elements of Freud's thought, otherwise generally hostile to human spirituality, were presented.

A printed letter of the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, gave us a specific challenge.
In that letter he wrote:
…the dynamics of [mental] health … demonstrate (if we need a demonstration for this), how powerful faith, particularly that [faith] which is connected with and expressed through concrete deed, communal involvement, fulfillment of the mitzvos [Divine commandments] and so forth, is in regard to the basis of the mental wellbeing of the human, [and] to the reduction and sometimes the elimination of inner conflicts, so also the "complaints" against one's environment.... This is notwithstanding the [psychological] approach […] that belief and religious doctrine require a submission [kabolas ol] to bridle and crush the instincts and impulses, and are therefore not desirable in general, and particularly in the case of a personality requiring psychological treatment and the like. I have interested myself particularly in the writings of Dr Frankl (of Vienna) in this matter. To my astonishment, his approach has not been as widely disseminated and accepted as it should. And even though one would find a number of reasons for this phenomenon that his approach has not been so widely accepted, including also that this is connected with the living example of the treating doctor, nevertheless the question
remains a question… (Rabbi M.M. Schneerson,Igros Kodesh, NY:Kehos, Vol. 25, pp. 301-302)

The challenge was not only to explore the writings of Viktor Frankl in relation to Jewish thought, but also to help rectify the fact that his work, notwithstanding the vast popularity and resonance at a grass roots level his Man's Search for Meaning, had made little headway into mainstream psychotherapy.