Viktor Frankl and the Human Search for Meaning

Viktor Emil Frankl (1905-1977) was an Austrian psychiatrist and worked in the Steinhof and Rothschild Hospitals in Vienna from 1933 to 1937 before becoming a prisoner in concentration camps from 1942 to 1945. He survived the holocaust, taught at Vienna, Harvard, Southern Methodist and Stanford Universities and wrote a number of books. Viktor Frankl and the Human Search for Meaning Louis C. de Figueiredo Viktor Frankl was interned in Nazi concentration camps from 1942 to 1945. He believed that the inmates who “were oriented toward the future, toward a meaning to be fulfilled” were likely to survive, which was what lead to his conviction that life holds a potential meaning under any conditions, with each person carving his own meaning of life. As one who helped the prisoners in dealing with both medical and emotional needs he knew best. It would become the basis of his somewhat new and original approach to psychotherapy that would come to be known as Logotherapy. The German term dasein (literally “being there” and translated as “existence”), used earlier by Heidegger, signified something else for Jaspers, and was employed by the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, the pioneer in the field of existential psychology, to coin the term daseinanalyse to designate his non-reductionist approach to human suffering and distress. In terms of significance, it did not differ greatly from existenzanalyse or existential analysis. Frankl therefore introduced “Logotherapy” as a means to avoid conceptual confusion arising from the highly ambiguous expression “existential analysis.” The rationale behind logotherapy and its applications was expounded in the book The Will to Meaning: Foundations and Applications of Logotherapy. Frankl was also influenced by Heidegger, Jaspers and Scheler and noted that there was a “meaning-centered existential need for meaningful goals,” an insight he made use of in logotherapy. The new clinical approach, aimed at helping patients discover meaning in their lives, therefore came from philosophical and psychological concepts from which it could be deduced that there is Freedom of Will, Will to Meaning, and Meaning in Life. Besides illnesses of a somatic and psychical origin, Frankl thought, an ethical conflict or existential crisis could also lie at the root of a disorder, detected in twenty percent of the cases he handled. These were called “noögenic neuroses,” providing him with reason to judge that technique in psychotherapy could not be overestimated, humans not being just living organisms. The personal and existential encounter between patient and psychotherapist was more important. Logotherapy, considered to be the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy, employing a personalistic method, was a development after Freud’s Psychoanalysis and Alfred Adler’s Individual Psychology. Freud had told his friend Marie Bonaparte that anyone who asked about the meaning of life was sick. He did in fact mention this contention in his philosophical writings. This question ---and answer --- had to be in keeping with what he had written about psychoanalysis, making him a sort of determinist, and consequently a pessimist. For Frankl, however, he had erroneously interpreted existential vacuum as a pathological phenomenon by projecting the noölogical spatial dimension to the psychological level. Moreover, an authentic conscience could contradict the super-ego. He had not failed to speak about some of the issues raised by psychoanalysis in a positive way, also mentioning deficiencies in Freud’s conceptual framework. Thus the need arose for him to say that, in his view, Freud had concentrated on the basement and had, as a consequence, overlooked the “upper stories”. The father of psychoanalysis, although properly concerned to relieve certain kinds of misery and unhappiness, had made it clear that the idea of life having a purpose stood and fell within the religious system. This was not so for Frankl, insisting, as he did, not only on man’s capacity for self-transcendence but also on the conviction that he is ultimately selfdetermining. It was an important part of the reflective confrontation with the nature of human existence. It did not take long for logotherapy to become the target of criticism. It was evident that Frankl had read Nietzsche --- unlike Freud, he at least admitted it --- for he had pointed out that it was the German philosopher and not Adler who had coined the expression “Will to power”. But was he himself that original? Historian Timothy Pytell argued that he also had taken up an idea advanced by Nietzsche, because, in his words, “on a pragmatic level Frankl claimed to maintain a sense of the future by affirming Nietzsche’s perception that ‘He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how’.” Frankl had written that other than denoting “meaning” logos signified “spirit”, but with no primary religious connotation. It was a reference to the humanity of the human being and the meaning of being. Yet, for Pytell, that meant extending religious conviction to the realm of psychological health; it would be dwelling on “super-meaning”, whether as a metaphysical concept or in the religious sense of Providence. So, given what he had proposed, Frankl appeared to have had no choice but to admit the possibility of someone bringing religion into the picture. He was reluctant to be considered religious but was forced to admit that a religious person could identify Super-meaning as something paralleling Super-being and call this Super-being God. If, as Joseph Fabry argued, the human being was not biologically determined as he was to Darwin, not a sociologically determined being as he was to Marx, and not a psychologically determined being as he was to Freud, the implication was that he was free to take a stand. But Dasein, as Heidegger understood it, was a dilemma of living in relationship with other humans while ultimately being alone with oneself. An appeal to a Super-being called God could make sense. Such considerations impelled the Protestant theologians Karl Barth and Paul Tillich to stress a theology of ultimate being. Before them, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, giants in their field but with no room for God in their respective philosophies, were buried as Catholics. Shortly before his death Heidegger called a Catholic priest to his home for a private conversation and asked for a Catholic burial in his Will. As for the agnostic Wittgenstein, of ¾ Jewish descent but baptised together with his brothers as Catholics, he thought of becoming a monk during his entire life, spending a year meditating in the Augustinian Fathers’ Klosterneuberg monastery as a young man. He specifically asked his Catholic friends --- Elizabeth Anscombe and Yorik Smythies among them --- to pray for him as he lay dying. In Frankl’s case his wife Eleonore Katharine Schwindt was a devout Catholic and both are said to have respected each other’s religious traditions by going to church and synagogue. “Man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer and the Shema Yisrael on his lips,” he wrote in his most famous book that was to become very influential. He was buried in the Jewish section of the Zentralfriedhof cemetery in Vienna. There are some small contradictions and a bit of prejudice in this particular book by Frankl. Whatever the private beliefs he kept to himself, his exposition did have success and Father Karl Rahner, one of the most influential theologians of the 20th century considered Logotherapy important in revealing the existential references of the transcendental knowledge of God. This was the room left by Frankl, who had maintained that the search for divinity was mainly the side effect, not the primary goal of his therapy. From that point of view it can fit in with in religious pedagogy and pastoral psychology. Evidently, the advances in the natural sciences, particularly when it comes to animal welfare, as well as ecology, would also have to be taken into account.