Definition
Responsibility, in logotherapy, is the core of what it means to be human. Frankl built the word from its root: to be responsible is to be able to respond — to answer the concrete demand that a particular situation places on a particular person. Meaning is not a general idea to be contemplated; it is a specific call, addressed to one person, in one moment, that asks for a reply.
Frankl placed responsibility alongside freedom and refused to separate them. Freedom without responsibility, he warned, degenerates into mere arbitrariness. The two are the same human capacity seen from two sides.
Why it matters
How it works
Frankl summed up the logotherapeutic stance in a sharp imperative: live as if you were living for the second time, and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now. The image forces the present moment into the weight of a decision already answerable for its outcome.
In practice, the logotherapist does not hand the patient a meaning. The task is to widen the patient's field of vision until they can see the meanings available to them — and then to make them conscious that the response is theirs to give. The therapist clarifies; the patient answers. Responsibility, for Frankl, is the point at which freedom stops being abstract and becomes a deed.