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Saturday, October 10, 1998

Yugoslavian doctor searches for a spiritual cure

By LORETTA FULTON

Senior Staff Writer

Dr. Emina Karamanovski knows what her warring Yugoslavian countrymen need more than anything, and she came to Abilene to learn how to dispense it.

The medicine does not come in a bottle, and it is not one that Karamanovski, 33, learned about while getting her medical degree at the University of Belgrade.

It's a form of psychotherapy known as logotherapy, and although not a religion, logotherapy might be decribed as "religion in disguise."

"It clearly parallels the tenets of the major religions of the world," said Dr. Robert C. Barnes, chairman of the department of counseling and human development at Hardin-Simmons University and president of the international Viktor Frankl Institute of Logotherapy.

It was because of Barnes that Karamanovski, through an unrelenting search for a cure for the spiritual illness she sees in her homeland, came to Abilene in August.

Logotherapy, Karamanovski believes, will be easier for her countrymen to swallow than a pill coated with religion.

"It's not easy to teach religion when people are trying to survive every day," Karamanovski said.

Her sister in Belgrade is an example. Suffering from a physical illness and also sickened by the war around her, Karamanovski's sister insists that "God does not exist," Karamanovski said. "We are suffering," her sister says, questioning where God could be in the midst of that suffering.

But logotherapy, which means "health through meaning," teaches that even in the most dire of circumstances, the human spirit can transcend evil and lift the person out of the squalor he finds himself in through finding a meaning for existence.

"We can change the attitudes when we cannot change the circumstances," Karamanovski said.

The developer of logotherapy, Dr. Viktor Frankl of Vienna who died last year at age 92, practiced on himself to survive four concentration camps during World War II.

Karamanovski read Frankl's book Man's Search For Meaning, which has sold 10 million copies in 24 languages since publication in 1946. In it Frankl describes how he used logotherapy to survive his darkest hours and help others to do the same.

Karamanovski believes that with the seven-month-old fighting between Yugoslavian Serb forces and people in the Serbian province of Kosovo, logotherapy is the cure for what is ailing her countrymen. She just didn't know what it was called until she read Frankl's book and began studying under Barnes.

"I didn't know the words -- I didn't know how to put it together," Karamanovski said, but she understood the theory behind logotherapy and knew it would help her people survive yet another round of fighting.

Karamanovski's arrival in August marked the end of a circuitous journey, both literally and metaphorically. Karamanovski left her homeland in 1991, two days before the borders were closed as war raged. If she had stayed in Yugoslavia and practiced medicine on the battlefield, she would have had to go against her beliefs.

"If you were working for the Serbs, they would ask you to just treat the Serbs," Karamanovski said.

So the attractive, slightly built young lady left for Canada to live with a brother. She could not practice medicine there and instead got involved with homeopathy or alternative medicine, which led her to Chicago to work at a hair transplant clinic.

It was there that she read Frankl's book and through a series of phone calls she discovered that the master of logotherapy was none other than Hardin-Simmons' own Dr. Barnes.

Karamanovski was interested enough to fly from Chicago to San Antonio where Barnes was giving a workshop on logotherapy. Barnes was so taken with Karamanovski that he convinced her to enroll in graduate school at Hardin-Simmons.

"He suggested I come and study counseling here," Karamanovski said.

Unfortunately, her dream of getting her degree fell through when she suddenly had to leave to go back to Canada, where she has a work visa, to earn enough money to help her ailing sister in Belgrade.

"I feel bad, but I don't feel peaceful to stay here," Karamanovski said, knowing her family needs her help.

But that doesn't mean she will give up on learning as much as possible about logotherapy and "preaching" it to her countrymen when she eventually returns home.

Logotherapy would work, Karamanovski believes, where religion wouldn't, among people with either differing religious backgrounds or none at all.

"Logotherapy teaches that every human being is a spiritual being -- we're all the same in the spirit," Karamanovski said.

Karamanovski's own religious beliefs came from her mother, who died when Karamanovski was 14.

"She taught me about faith and trust in God," Karamanovski said. "She gave me the shoes that I can walk through life."

And in a sense it was Karamanovski's mother who first introduced her to the healing powers of logotherapy, even though her mother had no name for it.

"My mother taught me about logotherapy and didn't know it," she said.

Karamanovski's insatiable search for spiritual truths also led her to First Baptist Church after being befriended by member Dr. Virginia Boyd Connally.

"She was someone like my mother," Karamanovski said. "If my mother was alive I would be sharing like this with her."

Connally immediately understood Karamanovski's journey when the two first met and shares her view of the spiritual void in Karamanovski's homeland.

"The people don't know the Lord, and consequently all they know is fighting," Connally said.

Karamanovski holds no visions of stopping the fighting back home, but she knows that everyone there is tired of the battle, and some may be ready for a new message.

"If I can help someone find strength inside of themselves then I will be happy," she said.

The people who have befriended Karamanovski here have no doubt she will succeed. In the short time he worked with her, Barnes saw a strong, courageous young woman determined to help her fellow citizens.

As Karamanovski said farewell to Barnes this week in his office, she clasped his hands and said what Barnes knows to the be true: "And now I am ready."

Loretta Fulton can be reached at 676-6778 or fultonl@abinews.com