“What I term the existential vacuum constitutes a challenge to psychiatry today. Ever more patients complain of a feeling of emptiness and meaninglessness, which seems to derive from two facts. Unlike an animal, man is not told by instincts what he must do. And unlike man in former times, he is no longer told by traditions what he should do. Often he does not even know what he basically wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism), or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism).”
In a nutshell
The conscious acceptance of suffering or fate can be transformed into one of our greatest achievements.
In a similar vein
Nathaniel Branden The Psychology of Self-Esteem (p 42)
Frankl’s most famous work is Man’s Search for Meaning (see the commentary in 50 Self-Help Classics), a gripping account of his time in a Nazi concentration camp and of fellow prisoners who either developed a survival mindset or gave up on life. Many readers treasure it as an antidote to the boredom and meaninglessness of modern life.
While that book includes some explanation of Frankl’s psychology of meaning—logotherapy (from the Greek logos, or meaning)—The Will to Meaning: Foundations and Applications of Logotherapy is fully devoted to explaining its tenets and philosophical basis. This makes it a more challenging read, but a highly rewarding one.
Frankl’s brand of therapy is sometimes considered, after Freud’s psychoanalysis and Adler’s individual psychology, to be the third school of Viennese psychotherapy, and The Will to Meaning clearly points out the differences between his ideas and those of his compatriots. It also refutes the behaviorist school of psychology and its attempts to reduce human beings to complex products of their environment.
What psychology failed to appreciate, Frankl believed, is the multidimensional nature of human beings. He did not deny that biology or conditioning shapes us, but he also insisted that there is room for free will—to choose to develop certain values or a particular course in life, or to retain our dignity in difficult situations.
Frankl denied that things like love and conscience can be reduced to “conditioned responses” or the result of biological programming. As a neurologist, he actually agreed that substantial aspects of the human can be compared to a computer. However, his point was that we cannot be boiled down to the workings of such a machine. We may have problems relating to the balance of chemicals in our body or mental issues such as agoraphobia, but we have another group of complaints (which he called noogenic) that relate to moral or spiritual conflicts. These cannot by treated by conventional psychiatrists, who may completely miss the point of why a person has come to see them—the patient may get more out of visiting a priest or a rabbi. Could the same profession that would have dismissed Joan of Arc as a schizophrenic, Frankl wondered, be trusted to make judgments on issues such as guilt, conscience, death, and dignity?
Frankl considered his psychology to be existential, but unlike the existentialism of Albert Camus or Jean-Paul Sartre, which is associated with the meaninglessness of life, logotherapy is basically optimistic. Its aim is to convince people that life always has meaning, even if it is not yet clear what that is. We may not discern a meaning in difficult or painful situations until later, when we have grown as a result of what happened.
The greatest human achievement is not success, Frankl said, but facing an unchangeable fate with great courage. A dying woman whom Frankl attended to in hospital, petrified at what was to come, came to realize that her courage in death might be her finest hour. Instead of a “meaningless” early death, she found great meaning in the way she chose to die.
Frankl argued that the “existential vacuum” that people feel is not a neurosis. It is rather something very human, signaling that our will to meaning is alive and well. He quoted the novelist Franz Werfel, “Thirst is the surest proof for the existence of water.”
Frankl once gave a talk in the notorious San Quentin prison. The prisoners loved him because he did not pretend they were all wonderful people or say they were victims of society or their genes. Instead, he recognized them as free and responsible people who had taken decisions that had led them to where they were. He acknowledged the reality of guilt.
Frankl was fond of saying that a Statue of Responsibility should be erected on the West Coast of America, to complement the Statue of Liberty on the East. We live in an age of relativism, which waters down real values and meaning that exists independent of our judgments. But by choosing to be free of such universals, over time we paradoxically hem in our own freedoms.
If you have read Man’s Search for Meaning you may be surprised to discover that Frankl had an opportunity to avoid the concentration camps. While living in Vienna, because he was a neurologist he was offered a visa to live in America—but it was only for him, not his parents. Knowing the fate that lay in store for them, he could not bring himself to leave.
Each person, he wrote, comes into life with a unique set of potential meanings to fulfill. It is up to us whether we decide to grasp these meanings and accept them, or try to avoid them. There is no ultimate “meaning of life,” only individual meanings of the lives of individual people. To ask “What is the meaning of life?” makes no sense unless we ask it of our own life and our own set of issues and challenges. This uniqueness of meaning is called conscience.
At the end of The Will to Meaning, Frankl asked the obvious question: If logotherapy is all about meaning, what distinguishes it from religion? His answer was that religion is by nature about salvation, whereas logotherapy is about mental health.
Notwithstanding this distinction, a spiritual faith in ultimate meaning underlay his form of psychology, which instantly marked it as suspect in many people’s eyes. Yet Frankl was a doctor of neurology and of psychiatry, and had survived two concentration camps. He was not a mystic or a dreamer. That human beings have a will to meaning cannot be denied, even if we doubt that life itself has some ultimate meaning.
While Freud wrote of the drive toward pleasure or sex, and Adler of a drive toward power, Frankl believed that the human will to meaning was at least as strong a force in making us into who we are. While we are pushed by drives, we are pulled by meaning, and though he did not deny that biology or conditioning shaped us, he also insisted that there was room for free will—to choose to develop certain values or a particular course in life, or to retain our dignity in difficult situations. For Frankl, if psychology was to achieve anything, it had to take account of this will to meaning as much as it did the pleasure or power instinct.
Born in Vienna in 1905, Frankl studied medicine at the University of Vienna, where he received his MD and PhD. During the 1930s he worked in the suicide department of the General Hospital in Vienna, and built up a private psychiatry practice. From 1940–42 he was head of neurology at the Rothschild Hospital.
In 1942, Frankl, his parents, and his wife Tilly were sent to a concentration camp, initially Theresienstadt. The rest of the family did not survive, but Frankl was freed from Dachau in 1945 by the advancing US Army.
Returning to Vienna after the war, Frankl wrote Man’s Search for Meaning and was appointed to head the Vienna Neurological Policlinic, a post he held until 1971. He received 29 honorary doctorates, and was a visiting professor at Harvard and other US universities and at the University of Vienna Medical School.
His other books include The Doctor and Soul (1965), The Unheard Cry for Meaning (1985), and The Unconscious God (1985). Frankl died in 1997, in the same week as Mother Teresa and Princess Diana.