Psychotherapy is a very practical discipline. At its core, it is undoubtedly grounded in concepts from philosophy, anthropology, sociology, psychology, psychiatry, and physiology. But people don't come to a therapy session for concepts — they come with a very specific issue or problem they want to resolve.

In that sense, psychotherapy always rests on two things:

The first — and most important — is whether a real encounter between two people took place. Whether there was a shared understanding of what has truly happened.

The second is based on concepts and research: helping to activate specific inner resources that can meet the issue.

And this is where the story begins — of us, people living in our own time, with its particular resources and challenges. Because every era has its own neuroses.

The first psychotherapist, as we understand the term today, was Jean-Martin Charcot. He worked in the late nineteenth century, in a world that was, for many of his patients, materially stable and socially ordered. And yet people were suffering — suffering that had no clear cause, no physical explanation, no name. He called it hysteria.

In retrospect, we might understand this differently: it was the suffering of people whose inner life had no permitted form of expression. A world with clear structures and rigid roles — but little room to ask who you actually are, or what you actually feel.

Viktor Frankl worked in a very different world. After two world wars, life seemed neither peaceful nor prosperous — it appeared, in many ways, absurd and cruel. Frankl's answer was Logotherapy: a psychotherapeutic approach built on the idea that what human beings need most, especially in suffering, is a reason to endure. A meaning. Something to live for.

He described the collective wound of his era as an existential vacuum — an inner emptiness that follows when meaning collapses. Logotherapy gave people a path back through it.

Frankl's student and close collaborator Alfried Längle developed this work further — and arrived at something broader. He observed that our times are not without their own absurdities, but life has become, relatively speaking, calmer. Meaning remains essential — but it is not the only condition for a good life.

Längle identified four fundamental conditions that must be tended to for a person to have the inner resources to live a life they could genuinely consent to:

Each of these, when not met, produces its own form of suffering. And each era tends to wound people in a particular place.

What is the main neurosis of our generation? That question remains open.

Personally, I believe that what we struggle with most today is closeness.

Not the lack of contact — we have more contact than any previous generation. But real encounter, genuine closeness — the kind where you are truly seen by another person, and you allow yourself to be — that is becoming increasingly rare. Contemporary research on loneliness points in the same direction: not social isolation in the traditional sense, but an inner disconnection, even in the presence of others.

In the language of Längle's framework, this is a wound in the second condition — being with life. The experience that life is worth living tends to come, above all, through connection. Through warmth. Through the sense that you are not alone.

That, perhaps, is what this era is quietly asking of psychotherapy.