Viktor Frankl: Man's Search for Meaning

Let me start this review of Victor Frankl’s classic book Man’s Search for Meaning, a work that is deeply existential, with a short introduction on Humanistic Therapy because Logotherapy fits well within the parameters of this general approach to helping clients or patients come to grips with their problems and in getting to develop the best possible version of themselves.  Also known as the humanistic approach, Humanistic Therapy is an umbrella term that covers several types of therapy, including  (i) Person-Centered Therapy as comprehensively studied and practised by Carl Rogers, (ii) Gestalt as postulated and practised by Fritz and Laura Perls, (iii) Focusing  as explained and practised by Dr Eugene Gendlin and (iv) Existential Therapy as found in the works and practices of Viktor Frankl, Rollo May and Irvin Yalom.

The human animal is a complex entity.  She or he is a complex interaction and integration (one hopes, as this is the ideal) of the faculties of Thinking (Reasoning, Analysis, Synthesis), Feeling (Emotions) and Willing (Values, Morals, Ethics and Evaluation). The will in theology and philosophy is traditionally seen as the part of the mind that exercises choice and makes decisions. which go to make up the human mystery.  It simply is not enough to engage any one of the above while ignoring the others when confronted with complex and disturbing occurrences.  From the Romantic movement onwards, there was a return to human experience after the dry and cold reasoning suggested and practised by the Enlightenment. Hence, Humanistic Therapy was a predictable outcome of this turn towards experience, of taking a more comprehensive and wholistic view of the human entity.

Rollo May trenchantly criticised Rogers’ approach to Psychotherapy as being far too positive, that is, that he nowhere in his written work dealt with the mystery or problem of evil and its experiential manifestation in suffering.  We even have the term “toxic positivity” today to emphasise our propensity to dismiss a balanced approach to reality as we experience it, and in the end, we over-emphasise the positive.  (Now, don’t get me wrong, I love the PCT approach of Carl Rogers, as it was he who democratised the whole world of psychotherapy as counselling and substituted the term “client” for “patient” in his writings and teachings.) Indeed, the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber launched the same criticism at Rogers in his famous debate with the therapist.  This is where the Existentialists and the existential therapists come in as they tackle the human encounter with evil in all its dimensions and factor it in to their approach to therapy. Humanistic Psychotherapy, then, broadens the scope of traditional Freudian Psychoanalysis by proposing a philosophy and implementing a practice that sought to embrace the human being as a whole and not just as a sum of individual parts. In short, it broadens the issues. Furthermore, Existential Psychotherapy takes seriously the existence of evil in the world and in the lives of both therapist and client.  It is essentially in the correction of this major lack that the Existential School of Therapy shows its strength.  In short, Existential Psychotherapy deepens as well as broadens the issues.  Victor Frankl enters the fray substantially on the point of innocent suffering as the result of evil. He deals with the mystery of evil existentially, as he had suffered greatly in several concentration camps before spearheading his approach to therapy called logotherapy.

Viktor Frankl was born and educated in Vienna.  He received his doctorate in medicine in 1930 (MD) and a PhD in philosophy in 1949. (University of Vienna). He was a professor of psychiatry in Vienna for all his life and was a visiting lecturer at Harvard, Stanford and the University of San Diego in his later years. He founded his own school of psychotherapy called LOGOTHERAPY, the dynamics of which he describes in detail in the second half of this book.  His ideas, based firmly on his lived experiences as an inmate in several concentration camps, led to his deep belief in every human being’s desire for meaning, no matter how horrific the circumstances were.

Man’s Search for Meaning can be divided into two sections, the first of which (pp. 17 – 100) deals with his experiences in the concentration camps and how he survived them, and the second section, which describes his Logotherapy in detail.  The method of “the will to meaning” is based existentially on his prior experience of suffering in Hitler’s death camps. “Logotherapy regards its assignment as that of assisting the patient to find meaning in his life…. There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: ‘he who has a why to live for can bear almost any how’ …. In the Nazi concentration camps, one could have witnessed that those who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfil were most apt to survive…” (pp. 108 – 109)

Frankl observed and personally experienced in the concentration camps all the truths I outlined above about the main existentialist philosophers and writers. He noted two things in particular:

(i) Love is the highest goal to which humans can aspire, and that our survival comes through love, (p. 49 & 88) and

(ii) The desire for meaning lurks deeply in our hearts and souls, no matter how miserable and despairing our conditions in life. (p. 41, passim)

Frankl had read and met Freud, but disagreed on the latter’s rigidity and dogmatism.  He went on to describe Freud as a depth psychologist, while he called himself a height psychologist.  In using this language, he was clearly indicating a spiritual dimension to the human entity.  Freud was a self-declared atheist, while Frankl was a believing and practising Jew. Like Jung and Adler, he did not accept Freud’s over-concentration on the sex drive as being fundamental to a philosophical anthropology – they each felt that this was a reduction of the complexity that the human being existentially was.

Frankl based his theory and practice on a concept based on the premise that the primary motivational force of an individual is to find meaning in life.  The first four letters “logo” come from the Greek word “logos”, which translates as word or meaning.  Frankl describes his approach as "the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy" (The First School was Freud's Psychoanalysis, and the Second was Adler's individual psychology.) Logotherapy is based on an existential analysis that derives from Kierkegaard's will to meaning.

What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die. (Kierkegaard)

Freud saw the life of the mind in terms of instincts, and the central instinct was the will to pleasure (Id). Friedrich Nietzsche had spoken and written about the will to power, as did Alfred Adler, but more constructively and positively. Frankl, we can say, following Kierkegaard, speaks about the will to meaning which we are tasked to make in our lives through good and bad experiences.  Underlying our will to meaning are the following principles, which I have italicised below:

·   Life has meaning under all circumstances, even the most miserable ones.  Frankl recounts how one night he heard a fellow inmate groaning in his sleep.  He was about to wake the man when he realised that “no dream, no matter how horrible, could be as bad as the reality of the camp that surrounded us, and to which I was about to recall him.” (p. 41)

·    Our main motivation for living is our will to find meaning in life. In this respect, he recalls how he avoided attacks of delirium due to typhus: “For hours at night I composed speeches in my mind.  Eventually I began to reconstruct the manuscript which I had lost in the disinfectant chamber of Auschwitz….” (p. 46)

·      We have inalienable freedom to find meaning. “This intensification of inner life helped the prisoner find a refuge from the emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty of his existence by letting him escape…if only momentarily.” (p. 50)

·       I make my meaning by creating a work or doing a deed. Find a reason to keep going: “The prisoner who has lost faith in the future – his future – was doomed.  With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay….” (p. 82)

·      I make meaning by experiencing something or encountering someone. On going to his appalling slave-like work every morning, Frankl summons up the image of his beloved wife in his mind as “love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire…. The salvation of man is through love and in love.” (p. 49) “A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life.  He knows the ‘why’ of his existence, and will be able to bear almost any ‘how’.” (p. 88)

·      I make meaning by the attitude I take towards unavoidable suffering in my life.  “The last of human freedoms remains, the ability to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances,” no matter how desperate or cruel.  This is the ultimate freedom. (p. 9, 117)

Frankl asserted that human beings are made up of body (soma), mind (psyche) and spirit (noos). He held that while we have a body and a mind, the spirit is who we are, our identity and essence.  While Frankl insisted that his theory was not derived from theology, his assumptions made by adding noos suggest a religious influence.  In any event, we can conclude that his philosophical anthropology departs radically from an atheistic materialism as shown in Sigmund Freud and indeed in the research and practice of the great contemporary psychiatrist and therapist Irvin Yalom (born 1931).

Frankl makes the assumption that Life Has Meaning Even in the Most Miserable Circumstances. This assumption represents an acknowledgement of a higher order in the world: an order that transcends mere human laws. Consequently, even an objectively terrible situation can offer meaning. "If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death, human life cannot be complete" (p. 88).

Frankl believed that suffering is a part of life, and that man’s ultimate freedom is his ability to choose how to respond to any set of given circumstances, even the most painful ones.   No one can take that freedom from us: we get to choose how we respond to the suffering in our lives: We can choose to be a victim or to make some meaning.  Example: Fr Tony Coote, R.I.P., when dying from Motor Neurone Disease, decided to (i) raise money for research into MND by going on a long awareness-making walk around Ireland and (ii) to write his autobiography entailing how he dealt with his devastating illness.

The three main techniques of logotherapy are:

(i) De-reflection is used when a person is overly self-absorbed on an issue or attainment of a goal. By redirecting the attention, or de-reflecting the attention away from the self, the person can become whole by thinking about others rather than themselves.  OTHER-CENTRED

(ii) Paradoxical Intention involves asking for the thing we fear the most. For people who experience anxiety or phobias, fear can paralyse them. But by using humour and ridicule, they can wish for the thing they fear the most, thus removing the fear from their intention and relieving the anxious symptoms associated with it. Paradoxical Intention (PI) for sleep is a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) technique where insomniacs are instructed to try to stay awake instead of trying to fall asleep. The goal is to reduce performance anxiety, which is the worry about not sleeping, by removing the pressure to fall asleep and allowing sleep to come naturally. This counterintuitive approach, adapted from Viktor Frankl's work, helps alleviate the fear of sleeplessness, ultimately leading to easier sleep onset. 

(iii) Socratic dialogue: is a technique in which the logotherapist uses the person's own words as a method of self-discovery. By listening intently to what the person says, the therapist can point out specific patterns of words or word solutions to the client and let the client see new meaning in them. This process allows a person to realise that the answer lies within and is just waiting to be discovered.

Let me finish this rather long review by summarising how we discover the meaning of life according to Logotherapy.  While the meaning of our lives always changes as we grow through it, we can discover our significance in three different ways: (i) by creating a work or doing a deed, (ii) by experiencing something or loving someone and (iii) by the attitude we take to unavoidable suffering.  When we are no longer able to change our situation, we are at last challenged to change ourselves. (See p. 115 – 116)