Dereflection

Table of Contents

 Introduction

 Dereflection as Radical Reorientation

 Frankl’s Dereflection

 Iris Murdoch’s Example of Dereflection

 Examples from the Sexual Neuroses

 ‘Positive’ and ‘Negative’ Dereflection

 Insomnia

 Some Clinical Examples

 Sigmund Freud’s Example of Dereflection

 Three Logotherapeutic Techniques

 Dereflection or Paradoxical Intention?

 Four Options

 Dereflection and Self-Transcendence

 Assignment
Introduction

Dr Viktor Emil Frankl (1905-1997) was a world-famous Austrian psychiatrist, philosopher,

Holocaust survivor, founder of ‘logotherapy and existential analysis’ and author of

internationally acclaimed bestseller, Man’s Search for Meaning, which was voted one of the ten

most influential books ever written. His main emphasis is upon our will-to-meaning as the basis

of mental health and flourishing. His empirical and evidence-based therapeutic techniques are

revolutionary, practical, easy to implement, and have been hugely successful clinically.

Dereflection is one of the logotherapeutic techniques devised by Professor Frankl and first

described by him as early as 1946 that engages the human capacity for self-transcendence (the

ability to go beyond ourselves). So, self-transcendence is the basis of dereflection.

Dereflection as Radical Reorientation

The human person is not a closed system but one open to the world and to meanings to fulfil.

Dereflection is the attitudinal decision to turn (much like the prisoners did in Plato’s Allegory of

the Cave in the Republic) from negative or obsessive or excessive self-preoccupations,

psychological conflicts, complexes and concerns, and neurotic symptoms toward positive and

meaningful feelings, thoughts and actions. Plato’s word is periagoge (the turning). Christian

theology talks of a metanoia (conversion). Dereflection is not a denial or a distraction – it is a

radical reorientation. Clinically, dereflection is employed when a problem is caused for the

patient by too much reflection or thinking (‘hyperreflection’) or by paying too much attention to

solving a problem (‘hyperintention’). Dereflection puts a stop – applies the brake – to

pathological hyperintention. Sometimes either paradoxical intention or dereflection can be used,

for example, in a sexual neurosis where there is a fight for or fear of sexual performance. We

shall draw on some concrete cases later. Suffice at this stage to give one example: a person on a

plane begins to get anxious and upset. One could always engage in a ‘Socratic’ dialogue (more

about this anon) with this person in the attempt to put their mind on positive dimensions of their

holiday, for example, asking what they intend to do the minute they land in Malaga airport, what

their plans are for their holiday etc. This type of simple dereflection can provide real relief and

reassurance. In the best cases of dereflection, for example, an absorbed activity of any kind

(where one is said to be in in a state of ‘flow’), one’s entire being is engaged and taken up with

something powerfully meaningful which draws the person into the activity and they begin to

forget themselves.

Frankl’s Dereflection

In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl gives an example of what I think we could describe as a

dereflection:

‘A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song
by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that
love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the
meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to
impart: The salvation of man is though love and in love. I understood how a man who has
nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the
contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express
himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his
sufferings in the right way – an honourable way – in such a position can, through loving
contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfilment. For the first
time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, “The angels are lost in
perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory”’ (Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, pp.
30-1).
Notice in the passage above words like ‘transfixed’, ‘grasped’, ‘perpetual contemplation’. This is

the draw ‘upwards’ which engages our being on ‘higher things’; the energy associated with this

noetic (spiritual – in a non-religious sense) dimension of the self is altogether different from that

pertaining to the somatic-psychical (the bodily instincts for example). Later Frankl says, ‘My

mind still clung to the image of my wife’. His inner life was being intensified and nothing could

distract him. Frankl speaks of ‘the contemplation of her image’ and his ‘mental conversation’

with his wife. So, a process of visualisation and inner spiritual dialogue is occurring. A few

pages later he writes this:

‘I was again conversing silently with my wife, or perhaps I was struggling to find the
reason for my sufferings, my slow dying. In a last violent protest against the hopelessness
of imminent death, I sense my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it
transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious
“Yes” in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose. At that moment a
light was lit in a distant farmhouse which stood on the horizon as if painted there, in the
midst of the miserable grey of a dawning morning in Bavaria. “Et lux in tenebris lucet” –
and the light shineth in the darkness’ (Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning p. 33).

Again, we find Frankl conversing inwardly, perhaps in prayer. The light that draws him from the

mud and misery, the barbed wire and brutality of Auschwitz, is the light of the Logos (the

meaning-dimension of life).

Iris Murdoch’s Example of Dereflection

Another powerful and practical example of dereflection comes from The Sovereignty of Good by

the Dublin-born British moral philosopher and novelist, Iris Murdoch, who writes:
 ‘I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of
my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly
I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its
hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to
thinking of the other matter it seems less important. And, of course, this is something
which we may also do deliberately: give attention to nature in order to clear our minds of
selfish care’ (Murdoch, 1970, p. 84).

Let us cite another example which highlights a slightly different point: it is the famous Zen story

of the two monks, which is illustrative of our attachments and detachments and the problems we

have in letting go (‘dis-identification’).

Two monks were making a pilgrimage to venerate the relics of a great saint. During the
course of their journey they came to a river where they met a beautiful young woman – an
apparently worldly creature, dressed in expensive finery and with her hair done up in the
latest fashion. She was afraid of the current and afraid of ruining her lovely clothing, so she
asked the brothers if they would carry her across the river.

The younger and more exacting of the brothers was offended at the very idea and turned
away with an attitude of disgust. The older brother didn’t hesitate and quickly put the
woman upon his shoulders, carried her across the river and set her down on the other side.
She thanked him and went on her way, and the brother waded back through the waters.

The monks resumed their walk, the older one in perfect equanimity and enjoying the
beautiful countryside while the younger one grew more and more brooding and distracted,
so much so that he could keep silence no longer and suddenly burst out: ‘Brother, we are
taught to avoid contact with women and there you were not just touching a woman but
carrying her on your shoulders!’. The older monk looked at the younger one with a loving,
pitiful smile and said: ‘Brother, I set her down on the other side of the river; you are still
carrying her.

The younger monk was unable to dereflect; he was tormented and preoccupied by his own ego-

projections. Let us repeat: through dereflection the spiritual resources of self-transcendence are

deployed. Dereflection, within the logotherapy clinic, is the therapeutic application of our will-

to-meaning and this capacity of self-transcendence. A patient is ‘dereflected’ from his

disturbances; dereflection it is intended to counter his/ her compulsive inclination to self-

observation (excessive self-scrutiny).

Examples from the Sexual Neuroses

If we take an example of sexual neurosis (impotence or frigidity): the sexual neurotic (unlike the

obsessive-compulsive) doesn’t fight against his obsessions or compulsions, but for his/her sexual

pleasure. This direct intent on procuring pleasure prevents the person from finding it. Frankl is

always cautioning us not to pursue happiness directly: ‘The more people run after happiness, the

more happiness is running away from them’. If a direct aim is strived for, to such an extent, then

hyperintention can ensue. Dereflection is less specific than paradoxical intention (another

logotherapeutic technique which we will meet with shortly). Dereflection always involves the

refocusing of attention; it helps us break out of the cycle of unnecessary (avoidable) suffering.

Three questions:

1. Ask (yourself or someone you’re trying to help): what is the person hyperintending?

2. Then seek to direct the person’s awareness towards more meaningful aspects and areas of

their lives. (What interests them or excites them? What are their passions?)

3. This may be done through Socratic questioning (which we will deal with in a later

section) and eliciting examples of meaningful pursuits, goals, mission or vocation.

4. A list can be generated of such meaningful activities which enrich and engage the person.

In this way the person is confronted by the logos of his existence; he discovers what feeds him,

fulfils him, and fills him with hope and happiness, as new meanings begin to emerge or old ones

from childhood, once forgotten, begin to come to the surface. So, clinically, for example, when a
person is thinking endlessly of pain or age or death they begin to focus more on their interests

and aspirations instead.

In a section on sport in The Unheard Cry for Meaning, Frankl urges the athlete to focus away

from winning the race and toward swimming his own race. ‘The athlete will swim best if he

attempts to be his own best rival’ (Frankl, The Unheard Cry for Meaning, p. 100). Logotherapy

can be a powerful coaching tool in sports psychology as much as in business consulting or

therapeutic counselling. The real athlete only competes against himself.

According to Frankl, there are three pathogenic patterns:

1. The phobic pattern (flight from fear)

2. The obsessive-compulsive pattern (fight against obsessions and compulsions)

3. The sexual neurotic pattern (the patient is not fighting against something but for

something such as sexual pleasure)

The more one aims at pleasure the more one misses it. When you make potency and orgasm the

target of intention they are also made the target of attention so hyperintention and hyperreflection

reinforce each other so that a feedback mechanism is established. In order to secure potency, the

person pays attention only to himself – to his own performance and experience. As a

consequence, potency and orgasm are in fact diminished. This in turn enhances the patient’s

hyperintention and the vicious circle is completed and repeated. To break the circle, centrifugal

forces must come into being. Instead of striving for potency and orgasm the patient should be

himself and give himself. Instead of observing himself, he should forget himself. In the case of a
husband who strives desperately for sexual perfection, we can say that his hyperintention causes

his impotence. In such a case the logotherapist can instruct him to give his wife himself. Then

her pleasure would be the consequence of his attitude and not the aim itself. In short, the fight for

pleasure is self-defeating. The patient can be instructed: ‘no intercourse for a period of time’.

This instruction relieves the patient’s anticipatory anxiety. The problem with hyperintention is

that it imposes an imperative: you should – a ‘demand quality’. This can be accentuated by peer

pressure or by a society preoccupied with achievement. The prevailing culture of pornography,

sex education, and the mass media are all hidden persuaders that foster a cultural climate of

sexual expectation and demand. Dereflection removes the demand.

Frankl sometimes instructs his male patients to tell their partners that coitus is absolutely

forbidden; they are therefore released and once freed it is possible for their sexuality to be

expressed again, unblocked form the demand/pressure/expectation. This 1946 technique of

Frankl’s has been paralleled in the 1970’s by Masters’ and Johnson and their research into

human sexuality. Frankl gives a number of clinical examples concerning impotence and frigidity

throughout the corpus of his writings. In all cases dereflection (a refocusing of attention) was

applied with success.

‘Positive’ and ‘Negative’ Dereflection

Where paradoxical intention (PI) ridicules the problem humourously, in dereflection the problem

is ignored. PI counteracts anticipatory anxiety; dereflection is intended to counteract the

compulsive inclination to self-observation. So-called ‘negative’ dereflection is from anticipatory

anxiety, ‘positive’ dereflection is to something else. The focus shifts. It is now for something. By
so doing, the patient discovers the concrete meaning of his personal existence. Dereflection

ushers in ‘right activity’, where the focus is away from the person themselves, from what Iris

Murdoch calls ‘the fat, lying, illusion-making, deceitful ego’. Dereflection enables one to

become aware of the full spectrum of his/her existence in the world.

Insomnia

Let’s give another concrete example: Insomniacs watch themselves with highly strung attention;

sleeplessness is anxiously anticipated; the act of sleep is scrutinised and thereby rendered

impossible. The vigorous desire for sleep is precisely the very thing that drives sleep away. Fear

of some (pathological) event can, ironically, precipitate that event. In the aetiology (cause) of a

neurosis one finds excess of attention and intention. With insomnia the forced intention to sleep

is accompanied by the forced attention to observe whether the intention is becoming effective or

not. The attention of insomniacs inhibits the sleeping process and perpetuates the waking state.

The hyperintention to sleep incapacitates the patient. Sleep is like a dove which has landed in

one’s hand. It stays there only as long as one does not pay any attention to it. If one attempts to

grab it, it flies away. So, the logotherapeutic advice is: not to try to force sleep. To draw on

paradoxical intention: the patient might be instructed to punch a time clock every quarter of an

hour in order to stay awake. If one awakes with noise in the neighbourhood and one becomes

angry at one’s inability to get back to sleep, Frankl advises that they imagine that they are urged

to leave their beds to do something disagreeable, for example, shovelling snow or coal at five in

the morning. If they yield to this fantasy, they feel so tired that they fall back to sleep again. So,

don’t say, ‘don’t think of sleep’ but rather invite the person to face into his everyday problems.

Forcing the patient to direct his attention in negative terms is like saying ‘don’t think of a
chameleon’. Now you’re thinking of one! When the philosopher Kant had to discharge a servant

by the name of Lampe for thieving, which really hurt Kant after having lived with him for so

long, he put a large sign above his desk saying: ‘Lampe must be forgotten’. Of course, this only

ensured he would be thinking of him constantly. In Dostoyevsky’s novel The Double a man is

not invited to a party, so he goes along to the restaurant and walks up and down outside it ‘to

show with all my might that I could do without them’. Finally, there is the story of the centipede

who ran very well until one day it decided to observe just how it was that he ran with all his legs.

The more he became conscious of how he ran, the more difficult it was for him to function until

finally all he could do was lie down in a ditch in despair. He died of hyperreflection.

Some More Clinical Examples

In The Doctor and the Soul, Frankl gives a number of clinical examples: Miss B compulsively

observed the act of swallowing: having become uncertain she anxiously expected that the food

would go down the wrong way or that she would choke. Frankl writes: ‘Anticipatory anxiety and

compulsive self-observation disturbed her eating to the extent that she became very thin’ (Frankl,

The Doctor and the Soul, p. 234). She was taught to trust her own organism and its automatically

regulated functioning. She was therapeutically dereflected by the following formula: ‘I don’t

need to watch my swallowing because I don’t really need to swallow. In fact, I don’t swallow. It

does’. She was thus able to leave to the it the unconscious and unintentional act of swallowing.

A Gerhardt B who was 19 years-old suffered from a speech disturbance since he was six which

began in a storm when a bold of lightning struck near him. For eight days he couldn’t speak at

all. He was given psychoanalytic treatment for five months followed by four months of speech
and breathing exercises. It was explained to him that he would have to give up all attempts to be

a good orator; indeed, only as he resigned to being a poor speaker would he improve his speech,

for then he would pay less attention to the ‘how’ and more to the ‘what’ of his speech.

A 38-year-old man came to a Dr Kaczanowski because he had stopped working eight years

earlier. Each year he paid his dues to his professional organisation and so remained in good

standing but for the last two years his name was not listed in the register of his profession. He

lived alone and had a modest income from his investments. For ten years he had been troubled

with unexpected bouts of diarrhoea. At times he soiled his pants; this had happened twice at a

dance. He now avoided company and stayed home. He was treated by two psychiatrists and had

even had part of his intestine removed. He consulted with Dr Kaczanowski who told him it was

as if he didn’t exist anymore – not on the professional register, and worse, he had submitted to

his bowels. They were his master dictating his every move. For a while the patient was suicidal,

but he finally started to realise that he had potentialities, that he had freedom and was

responsible, that he could rebel against the tyranny of his bowel movements. Within a year he

could make decisions and go against his bowels.

As Frankl observes: ‘…dereflection can only be attained to the degree to which the patient’s

awareness is directed towards positive aspects. The patient must be dereflected from his

disturbance to the task at hand or the partner involved. He must be reoriented towards his

specific vocation and mission in life. In other words, he must be confronted with the logos of his

existence! It Is not the neurotic’s self-concern, whether pity or contempt, which breaks the

vicious circle: the cue to cure is self-commitment’ (Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul, p. 236).
Sigmund Freud’s Example of Dereflection

Once when Bruno Walter, the German conductor and composer, complained to Sigmund Freud

of pains in his arms, Freud advised him to go to Sicily and visit the art treasures there. What he

needed was not analysis but dereflection from his troubles (albeit with an artistic content).

Similarly, with a violinist Frankl mentions in Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning who tried to

play as consciously as possible with full self-reflection paying attention to every trifling detail

which led to a complete artistic breakdown. Therapy began by eliminating this tendency to

hyperreflection. Treatment was through dereflection and the patient was urged to trust in his

unconscious and he began to realise how much more musical his unconscious was than his

conscious. As Frankl informs us: ‘…this treatment oriented toward the patient’s reliance on his

unconscious brought about the release of the artistic “creative powers” of his unconscious.

Dereflection liberated the creative process from the inhibiting effects of any unnecessary

reflection’ (Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul, p. 43).

Three Logotherapeutic Techniques

Frankl offers a sustained treatment of dereflection in his 1956 publication, On the Theory and

Therapy of Mental Disorders, especially chapter twelve entitled ‘Paradoxical Intention and

Dereflection’, translated into English as late as 2004. Frankl begins by reminding us that there

are three distinctive logotherapeutic techniques:

1. Paradoxical Intention

2. Dereflection

3. Socratic Questioning (modification of attitudes)

Dereflection or Paradoxical Intention?

Dereflection mobilises and promotes self-transcendence by helping the patient practise ‘self-

forgetting’ in order to allow the natural processes to produce the desired state. It should be noted

that the same disorder – say insomnia or impotence – can be treated with paradoxical intention in

one case and with deflection in another. The reason being is that the aetiology of one and the

same disorder can be understood in different ways. For example, insomnia can be understood as

resulting from a hyperintention of sleep (in which case dereflection is indicated) or from an

anxious fear of sleeplessness (in which case paradoxical intention is indicated); or impotence

may arise from an undue focus on getting erect rather than on the partner (calling for

dereflection) or from an anxious anticipation of impotence (calling for paradoxical intention).

One must understand the psychological dynamics (and not just the diagnosis) behind the

disorder. Dereflection is, in short, a redirecting (Umstellung). Frankl notes:

‘Self-transcendence marks the fundamental anthropological fact that human existence is

always directed toward something that is not itself – toward something or someone,
namely, either a meaning to be fulfilled or an interpersonal existence that it encounters.
Human beings become genuinely human and are entirely themselves only when, rising in
devotion to a task in service to a cause or out of love for another person, they go beyond
themselves and forget themselves’ (Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul, p. 4).

Both dereflection and paradoxical intention work very quickly without needing to identify the

underlying causes of the neurotic behaviour. Even if they both constitute nonspecific therapy

they attack neurosis at its root. Paradoxical intention is good for anticipatory anxiety, but

compulsive self-observation calls for dereflection. Paradoxical intention enables patients to mock

their symptoms, dereflection enables them to ignore their symptoms.

Four Options

There is:

1. ‘Improper passivity’: running away from anxiety attacks

2. ‘Improper activity’: a) fighting against obsessions or compulsions; or b) forced intending

of sexual pleasure with a forced reflection on the sexual act

3. ‘Proper passivity’: dereflection (ignoring the symptoms through a reorientation and

refocusing) or paradoxical intention (a mocking or ridiculing of symptoms)

4. ‘Proper activity’: acting-past-the-symptoms or existing-toward-something

Frankl: ‘For the symptomatology of many neuroses ultimately shows itself to be a sort of mental

debris that fills a spiritual vacuum’ (Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul, p. 209), which Frankl calls

the existential vacuum – this void of inner emptiness (‘ev’).

Dereflection and Self-Transcendence

Analogously, the human eye sees the world only to the extent that it can’t see itself. The eye sees

itself only when it is ill (when it has a cataract or glaucoma). In logotherapy we counter

hyperreflection with a dereflection so don’t think about success or happiness or the orgasm. The

less you care, the sooner it will come about by itself. Abstain, in order to obtain.

Dereflection is understood along the lines that human beings are meant to know and love things

beyond themselves. Neurosis is incarceration in our ‘sweaty selves’ (as Gerard Manley Hopkins,

SJ puts it). Dereflection brings us outward to the Other and away from our fears, anxieties, and

symptoms. Dereflection works best when we discover a concrete meaning or purpose and, in this
way, ‘psychotherapy becomes logotherapy’ (Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul, p. 189). Frankl

observes: ‘In the final analysis, dereflection means ignoring one’s self. In Bernano’s Diary of a

Country Priest, we find the beautiful expression, “It is easier that one believes to hate oneself;

grace consists in forgetting the self”’ (Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul, p. 207). Dereflection is

possible only when we exist for something else (a concrete meaning). Frankl expands: ‘Persons

do not exist for the sake of observing themselves and contemplating their own egos; rather, they

exist in order to give themselves up, to give themselves away, to knowingly and lovingly devote

themselves’ (Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul, p. 208). All knowing and loving is directed to

something outward. The essence of the person is this ‘being-directed-toward’ – an outward

directedness. Only in so far as we are intentional (goal-directed) are we existential. Frankl calls

this the ‘fundamental law of human existence’ (Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul, p. 208), one

which is also therapeutically fruitful. Thus, it is that people with anxiety neurosis are drawn out

of the vicious circle of their own self-encircling thoughts as we:

A. Focus on removing attention away from the symptoms

B. Focus instead on a concrete task that is personally important

It is not by allowing our thoughts to circle around our anxiety that we are free of this anxiety, but

rather through a self-donating – a giving-up-of-oneself and a devoting of oneself to a worthy

object. ‘That is the secret of all self-formation’ (Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul, p. 209). We are

what we are through the things we give ourselves to. We may conclude this particular section

with three relevant quotes: Max Scheler: ‘…only those who want to lose themselves in some …

thing … will find their authentic self’. Schelling: ‘the most noble activity of the human person is
that activity which is not aware of itself’. Nietzsche: ‘all perfect doing is precisely unconscious,

and is no longer willed’.

Elisabeth Lukas, a Viennese logotherapist and close associate of Dr Frankl’s, best sums up

dereflection in her Meaningful Lines:

‘A problem becomes large when you pay attention to it,

becomes heavy when you place weight on it,
becomes gigantic when your thoughts circle around it,
becomes enormous when you see it as a tragedy.
A problem becomes small when you smile about it,
becomes light when you minimize it,
becomes tiny when you ignore it,
and vanishes when you accept it’.

Assignment

Write a short account giving an example from your own life or in your work with

patients/clients/friends where you drew on the spiritual resource of dereflection with some

success.

Paradoxical Intention
‘The way of paradoxes is the way of truth’, Oscar Wilde.
 Table of Contents

 Introduction

 The Human Person according to Logotherapy

 Dis-identification

 Paradoxical Intention and Self-Detachment

 Analysis of Anxiety

 Facing Fears

 The Importance of Humour

 The Capacity to Play

 The Question behind Paradoxical Intention

 Phobias and Obsessive Compulsions

 The Psychology of OCD

 Illustrations

 De-reflection

 Clinical Examples

 Causes vs Symptoms

 Individualisation and Improvisation

 Suggestion Therapy?

 Contraindications

 More Examples

 Rules

 Assignment
Introduction

‘Paradoxical Intention’ (PI) is a revolutionary and hugely clinically successful, evidence-based,

scientific technique developed by Dr Viktor E. Frankl Paradoxical Intention has an efficacy rate

of 77.8% (indeed some clinicians have reported an 88.2% success rate) in empirical studies and

has proven particularly effective in the treatment of phobias, insomnia, and OCD. It has also

been used in sports psychology to train athletes. Paradoxical Intention is an easy-to-understand

method, can be applied by anyone without necessitating a therapist or physician with practice,

and consists of a few key elements.

‘Paradoxical Intention is the oldest of Dr Viktor Frankl’s treatment techniques. Dr Elisabeth

Lukas – a world authority on Frankl’s logotherapy, said about PI that it’s like a magician’s trick!,

and that it is, in almost every case, successful. Lukas, after almost a life-time practising PI, says:

‘With paradoxical intention there are almost always no relapses’. It is not a panacea – but then

again nothing is in therapy.

Imagine this scenario: someone is taking a photograph of the family at Christmas. He looks

through the lens of his camera or I-phone and sees non-smiling faces. He decides to say the

following: ‘Now whatever you do, don’t smile. No, no smiling. Did I see someone smiling?’

Immediately, everyone relaxes and begin to smile naturally. This is the heart of PI.

What PI is not. PI is nothing to do with Magnum PI! Anyone over 45 years of age will remember

the 1980’s show set in Hawaii starring Tom Selleck as a private investigator who drove a red

Ferrari. However, PI was used to good effect in the Rocky movies, starring Sylvester Stallone,
who would regularly taunt his opponents in the boxing ring with: ‘is that all you got? You hit

like my mother’. By so doing, he threw his opponents off and made himself more relaxed – it

took the fear and sting out of the situation. PI is a superb technique for a wide variety of

‘neurotic’ conditions.

Viktor Frankl utilised paradox for the basis of his psychological technique to help people

suffering from a number of symptoms ranging from stuttering and sexual dysfunctions to

insomnia, phobias, anxiety and panic attacks. He speaks of ‘neuroses’, in other words, all those

things that are not physiological/biological. They have their origin (genesis) in our minds

(psyches). So, the first port of call is to rule out any underlying medical condition. Only when we

rule out the organic (as a cause) can we rule in the psychological. So, always get checked out

medically first.

The Human Person according to Logotherapy

Before detailing the dynamics of paradoxical intention, we need to understand how Frankl

construes the person. For Frankl, the human person is a unity in diversity. He or she is layered;

there are three such levels to our humanity: soma (body), psyche (soul: mind/feelings), and noös

(spirit – in the non-religious sense). The ‘body’ (and brain) is our biology consisting of organic

cell processes, physiological body functions and chemical processes. The ‘mind’ is our

psychological dimension consisting of emotional (character disposition) and cognitive

(intellectual abilities) processes. The noetic dimension is where we are able to take a stance

towards our conditioned situation (free will, humour, creativity, religiosity, conscience, values,

will to meaning, love). The core of personhood is the noetic dimension. Every human being
strives to answer to his personal calling and vocation in the singular situation. Recognising and

realising meaning enables the human being to free himself (sufficiently so) from his

psychophysical facticity (organism). Psyche and soma form a unity (psychosomatic) but the

integration of the noetic leads to wholeness. Paracelsus, the philosopher-physician, once said

that our illnesses come from nature, but the cure comes only from the spirit. The key to mental

health is meaning and meeting our multidimensional needs as human persons. We need to look

after our bodies through sleep, exercise and nutrition, our psyches in terms of keeping up some

intellectual interests and staying emotionally self-regulated, and our spirits in terms of

mindfulness practice or prayer, accessing nature, culture, and art, living a life of meaning and

purpose, and obeying the call of conscience, as well as loving. Daily disciplines soon become

habits of the heart.

Disidentification

At the outset you need to know that you need not be identified with the feelings dominating you

at the present moment. You are NOT your fears or your anxieties, or your depressions. They are

things that you have (or have you) but they are not who you are. It’s the difference between

having and being. You can choose your ATTITUDE towards those feelings; you can even defy

them by what Frankl calls ‘the defiant power of the human spirit’. You can’t choose your

emotions (what you’re feeling) but you can control and change them by your will. PI is applied

in this area of freedom. The first few times using PI patients can be sceptical or hesitant or

unsure or they can feel insecure and perhaps not even believe in the technique. Trust has to be

established and the technique explained and practised. Before we do this let me run you through

a short exercise taken from Assagioli’s school of psychosynthesis to help with self-detachment
so crucial for the effective workings of PI. It is an exercise in what he calls ‘dis-identification’

whereby we distinguish the ‘I’ (you) from its contents of consciousness, such as sensations,

emotions, desires, thoughts (what you’re feeling, thinking etc).

Exercise

Please find a comfortable chair. Close your eyes, relax and enter into yourself. Sink into silence.

Take a few deep breaths. Become still and quiet. Affirm to yourself:

‘I have a body but I am not my body’. I am not my body in the sense that I am more than just my

body. My body may find itself in different conditions of health or sickness. It may be rested or

tired, but it has nothing to do with who I really am – with my real self, my ‘I’. My body is my

instrument of experience and of expression, but it is only an instrument. I treat it well, keep it in

good health but it is not myself. I have a body, but I am not my body’.

‘I have emotions, but I am not my emotions. My emotions are countless, changeable,

contradictory, and yet I know that I always remain I, my-self in times of hope or despair, joy or

sorrow, irritation or calm. Since I can observe my emotions and increasingly dominate and direct

them it is evident that they are not myself. If I ‘see’ them, so to speak, I can’t be them. I have

emotions, but I am not my emotions’.

‘I have desires, but I am not my desires, aroused by the drives (physical or emotional), and by

outer influences. Desires too are changeable and contradictory, with alternations of attraction and

repulsion. I have desires, but they are not myself’.

‘I have an intellect, but I am not my intellect. My intellect is developed and active; it is

undisciplined but teachable; it is an organ of knowledge in regard to the inner and outer world,

but it is not myself. I have an intellect, but I am not my intellect’.

‘So, who am I? I recognise and affirm that I am a Centre of pure self-consciousness, and of Will,

capable of mastering, directing, and using all my psychological processes and my physical

body’.

W.B. Yeats penned a poem which runs thus: ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. Mere

anarchy is loosed upon the world’ (‘The Second Coming’). But the Centre – your core – must

hold. For we are One while yet being Many.

Paradoxical Intention and Self-Detachment

Paradoxical Intention makes use of this ability to dis-identify, to self-distance. It draws on the

specifically human capacity for self-detachment. Because in the noetic dimension we are free to

take a stand towards our condition, we can rise above the plane of somatic and psychic

determinants of behaviour – a new dimension opens up. This is where healing resides. When we

detach from ourselves, we leave the plane of the purely biological and psychological and pass

into the space of the noölogical (this specifically human dimension of humour, conscience, love

and the like, not accessible to the non-human animal). So, self-distancing is used in paradoxical

intention where we can take a free stand, involving humour, to mock our symptoms, and gain

distance from them. Because, as we said, we are not our symptoms. There are symptoms (which
we have) and there is the self (which we are). The ability to self-detach is an essential feature of

being human – it is an ability in every human being. Frankl writes: ‘With paradoxical intention

one enters the noetic dimension as the characteristic and constitutive dimension of human

existence’ (Frankl, Psychotherapy and Existentialism, p. 153).

Paradoxical Intention was practised by Frankl in 1929; it was described by Frankl in 1939; it

became a methodology in 1953; and incorporated into logotherapy in 1956. Examples and case-

histories given in the logo-literature include: stuttering, sexual dysfunctions, sleeplessness,

sweating, tremors, twitches, blushing, claustrophobia, washing compulsions, etc.

To understand the effects of PI one must understand the phenomenon of anticipatory anxiety, the

mechanisms of which are:

1. Something disagreeable happens in a certain situation

2. It upsets you

3. You develop an anticipatory anxiety that it might happen to you again

4. This anxiety causes you to think about it excessively and makes you insecure, expecting

things to repeat.

This, of course, makes recurrence likely. Fear brings about what is feared. And one gets anxious

about being anxious. In short, fear causes anticipatory anxiety and anticipatory anxiety causes

the fear. So, we need to explore, briefly, the subject of anxiety, as well as fear, since these affects

are precisely what PI tries to help with.

Analysis of Anxiety
Anxiety can manifest itself as nervousness, dry throat, shaky hands, unsteady voice, perspiring

forehead, butterflies in the stomach, and a whole host of physical concomitants and complaints.

Some people get anxious thinking of doing an exam, or having to make a speech, or going to the

doctor or dentist. Even mental or metaphysical anxiety about the emptiness or absurdity of life,

of the ‘unbearable lightness of being’, possesses a physical as much as a psychical component.

These two aspects (body and mind) are intertwined.

Anxiety is more than a mere nervous reaction to an unexpected or dangerous event which fills us

with fear and dread, however. It’s a broad term employed to describe anything from panic

attacks to post-traumatic stress disorder. Statistics available from the National Institutes of

Health suggest that almost 40 million American adults, that is about 18% of the population in the

United States, suffer from ‘anxiety disorder’. Such sufferers are usually put on anti-anxiety

medications or anti-depressants or beta-blockers such as Xanax or Prozac. Still others engage in

the ‘talking cure’ of therapy.

Aristotle recognised that any given emotional state is the result of three factors: the underlying

psychological condition, the events that precipitated or provoked the emotion, and the

intentional object of the emotion (what it’s directed at). If we take the example of anger,

Aristotle will say what state people are in when they are angry, with what people they are

accustomed to be angry at, and in what circumstances. So, try to apply this philosophical schema

to your own life. Try, in other words, to figure out: 1. What’s the psychologically process that is

happening to you; 2. What were the events that triggered this condition; and 3. Who or what are

you directing your anger/fear at?

Anxiety wasn’t really written about until the nineteenth-century, beginning with the work of the

Danish father of modern existentialism. In The Concept of Anxiety (1839) Soren Kierkegaard

wrote: ‘All existence, from the smallest fly to the mysteries of the Incarnation, makes me

anxious’. And, again: ‘Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the

possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked by the million and millions

in this enormous household’. This kind of ontological anxiety is part of the makeup of human

beings – we’re stuck with it. As Samuel Beckett said: ‘you’re on earth, you’re on earth; there’s

no cure for that’. Anxiety is directed towards the future and is an element in the constitution of

every human being.

Paul Tillich, the Protestant theologian, shows some parallels with Kierkegaard in his concept of

anxiety, when he describes it as ‘finitude in awareness’. We’re aware we have come into

existence and we will pass out of existence. Anxiety is ontological (it affects us in our very

being) rather than merely psychological. Anxiety relates to our fundamental finitude (the fact of

our mortality). Freedom and the possibilities that freedom brings produces anxiety.

Anxiety comes into the world with the asphyxia of birth. Anxiety is always present, though it

may be latent. Kierkegaard describes his anxiousness as ‘the eternal night brooding within me’.

Anxiety is a mood of our being-in-the-world. Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom; it reveals the

nothing to us, and dwells in the heart of all of us. If lack creates desire, the lack of a lack (too

much presence) causes anxiety.

Anxiety is free-floating – diffusive, less concrete than fear. Unlike fear, it lacks an object. It’s

indefinite. Fear, in contrast to anxiety, has an object, latches on to something specific. Let’s bring

out the differences by examining fear next before seeing exactly how PI works with both fear

and anxiety.

Facing Fears

Usually with our emotions, we engage in fight-flight, or freeze. Thus, these three main reactions

of fight (anger), flight (avoidance) or freeze (paralysis). Beyond this pattern is another ‘f’, and

that is facing into our fears and anxieties. Philip Larkin, the poet, sums up human existence thus:

‘Life is first boredom, then fear’. Over the centuries, fear hasn’t received as much philosophical

attention as anxiety. But the fear-factor, arguably, is ubiquitous especially in an age of global

terrorism. Fear underlies our fight-flight instinct. But fear is more than worry. In the Bible, fear

precedes shame. The world is full of danger but also delight. Francis Bacon, the philosopher,

wrote: ‘To suffering there is a limit, to fearing, none’. Fear emerged in the course of our

evolutionary history; a creature without the capacity to feel fear would have a slim chance of

survival. Fear is positive in that it protects us from predatory animals. It can, however, become

dysfunctional and pathological. A morbid fear is a phobia. This happens when a disparity occurs

between fear and its object (think of spiders as an example).

Fear, to some extent, is a culturally conditioned habit. But it is also innate and common to all

cultures. There is no consensus as to its genesis. But what we can say with scientific certainty is

that fear and anger have extremely similar biochemical components.

Two physical reactions are associated with fear: breathing and heartbeat. The amygdala (the

brain centre for emotions) is stimulated and sends signals to the hypothalamus and the pituitary

gland which then causes stress hormones to be released from the adrenal glands. So, fear

produces stress. Our brains and bodies react, producing cortisol (and adrenaline) discharging the

nervous system faster, dilating the pupils and the eyes. We become overwhelmed. The fearful

adult becomes like a child tottering and trembling on the brink of a precipice. We can define

fear as the expectation of evil. In other words, fear is the feeling of impending disaster – a hunch

or intuition or intimation that something horrible or terrible is going to happen. We can, of

course, fear almost anything, from clowns to cats. Epictetus, the Stoic, reminds us: ‘What

disturbs and alarms man are not the things, but his opinions and fancies about the things’. That

depends on the attitude we adopt toward the event, and how we interpret it.

Our human fears have bigger scope than the fear in animals; because we are symbolic creatures

there is breadth and depth to human fear. In On the Nature of Things, Lucretius puts it poetically

thus: ‘men drop dead from terror of the mind’. So, in the face of fear we flee or fight, as we have

said. But here’s the rub: the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre says that you don’t flee a

danger because you’re afraid, you’re afraid because you flee a danger. His example: a woman

goes to the doctor and cries, not because anything is wrong but so that nothing might be wrong.

Whatever about the truth of this, it does bring out an important factor or feature or facet and that

is: no emotion is independent of our interpretation of it. Our conceptions/ constructions are

crucial for the identification of our emotions. If an irrational fear is a phobia, this implies that

fear when it is not a phobia, is rational. There is a degree (only) of difference between a fear and

a phobia: a short step separates them. The ‘more’ of fear is the intentional object (which has
already been interpreted). After all, a stone can make a house but can also be a paper-weight or

weapon. We see stuff in terms of serviceability rather than substance, in other words, in terms of

the meanings we ascribe to them. I feel fear, but I can also feed fear by imbuing the intentional

object (for example, the spider) with power over me. One can fear something without being able

to name it. Such fear is properly speaking anxiety. They are close cousins. As the German

philosopher Immanuel Kant put it: ‘Fear of an object that threatens with some indefinite evil is

anxiety’. Fear can be uncertain, but it is not indefinite. When I said above that fear has an

intentional object, that doesn’t mean that it has a real object. Children, after all, are afraid of

monsters under their bed. This fear of the unknown is not an objectless fear; the object of fear is

indefinite, but it is still a fear of something. Our emotions tell us a story about reality. Fear, so, as

an instrument of perception. For all James Bond fans out there, remember M’s question at the

finale of Skyfall: ‘ask yourselves, what do you fear?’ Name three fears you have: spiders, flying,

creepy clowns.

1.___________________________________________________________________

2. ___________________________________________________________________

3. ___________________________________________________________________

Fear discombobulates us – it puts us out of balance. Fear robs reason of its power. We lose our

heads. For fear always contains a portention, an omen, a future projection. Fear is the assumption

of a future ‘evil’/misfortune, calamity/catastrophe. The core of fear is the assumption of a

negative future situation; a sense of foreboding envelops us. Is hope the opposite of fear? Is

courage? It is worthwhile to see what Aristotle says here: the brave man (person) feels fear. It’s
not that he doesn’t experience it, it’s just that he doesn’t express it. He feels the fear and does it

anyway, as the famous book on fear by Susan Jeffries states. Courage (fortitude), for Aristotle, is

a virtue (excellence of character); it is right-proportion. Courage (like all the other natural, moral

virtues) is the mid-point between an excess (too much) and a deficiency (too little). Thus, too

much fear (cowardice) is as bad as too little (rashness). Virtue is the golden mean between two

extremes. Furthermore, fear is always connected with some hope. One will only fear if there is

some possibility of a way out. (In theology, St. Thomas Aquinas maintained that those damned

to Hell will not know fear since all hope is gone). Those who fear always have some hope of a

happy ending. Fear implies hope. Fear relates to loss and therefore to love. Aquinas: ‘All fear

comes from our loving something’. What incites and arouses fear is some perceived threat to our

life-plan. A wish is thus central to all fear. Indeed, desire stands at the heart of fear. You can fear

X only if you wish for more X. So perhaps the opposite of fear (phobos) is love (eros)? Because

fear is futural, it is also closely associated with uncertainty. Flight is a substitution for a fear.

Fear seeks to conserve. There is fear of immediately understandable things like food that might

poison and less immediately understandable things like the fear of freedom, about which Erich

Fromm wrote (conformism is safer than decision-making and risk-taking). Unlike boredom, fear

is an intense experience. Perhaps fear is one cure for boredom so?! - or, at least its alleviation

even if that is not fear’s primary function. Fear can break boredom. But a culture of fear can

undermine trust. Mistrust can lead to paranoia; trust is a kind of social glue – an adhesive. Fear’s

function is that we usually avoid what we fear. When that proves to be impossible to sustain it

becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Trust is a risk. In a culture of fear, trust doesn’t do so well. In

fact, fear undermines trust. When trust diminishes, the scope of fear increases. Politically

speaking, fear is the oldest tool of power. Fear fuels casino capitalism, for example. Of course,
perverted trust can be grounded in fear. Fear can be an effective tool for maintaining order in a

society. Ask any totalitarian dictator on the Right (fascism) or the Left (Communism). Few

emotions make people less likely to break the law than fear. Fear so, as a tool for social control

and power. Fear spreads panic. We see this geo-politically but also personally and intra-

psychically. Usually we fear what we can’t control (fate) and over which we have no personal

power (freedom). The British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, said: ‘To conquer fear is the

beginning of wisdom’. To conquer it in oneself one must first understand it and its subtle

dynamics, and that is what I have been attempting above. Fear is not an objective reflection of

reality. There is much truth in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speech at the height of the Great

Depression: ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself’. Fear is fluid and can leave us feeling

vulnerable. As the philosopher Lars Svendsen puts it in his beautiful book, A Philosophy of Fear:

‘The man who fears suffering, is already suffering from fear’ (Svendsen, A Philosophy of Fear,

p. 128). We can’t destroy fear or make it disappear, but we can dissipate and diminish its

potency, its hold over us. In essence, that is what paradoxical intention does. The beyond of fear

is facing into it. To name fear is already to tame it. And to learn to hope, because hope drives out

fear. Hope, which is another way of saying faith in the future, lifts us up, just as fear drags us

down. And, therefore, the former is what is most needed. Let’s hope for hope.

I asked earlier: what are you afraid of, and why? Fear of failing, public speaking, being alone,

making decisions? Fear can paralyse us, putting us in a place of pain. In her book, Feel the Fear

and Do It Anyway, Susan Jeffries (whom I cited earlier) seeks to bring us from this place of pain

to a position of personal power: from fate to freedom, to put it in Franklian terms. The ‘trick’ is

to face our fears rather than to flee or fight them. According to Jeffries, there are three levels of
fear: 1. The surface story consisting of a. those things that happen such as ageing, war, illness,

loss of loved ones etc.. and b. those that require action such as making a decision, changing a

career, ending a relationship etc); 2. Situation-oriented fears such as success, disapproval, failure

etc (involving the ego) – these are to do with inner states of mind rather than external situations;

3. Level three fears: ‘I can’t handle it’. Jeffries argues that at the bottom of every single fear is

this one: the belief that one can’t handle what life brings. So, level one fears translate to: ‘I can’t

handle illness or making a mistake or getting old’, etc. Level two fears translate to: ‘I can’t

handle failure, success, being rejected, responsibility’, etc. Level three fear is simply: ‘I can’t

handle it’. If we knew we could ‘handle’ (her word) everything we would have nothing to fear.

All we have to do to diminish our fear is to develop more trust in our coping-capabilities, as

feeling afraid is really feeling not good enough about oneself. To the question: can you not just

make fear go away?, she answers, ‘I’m afraid not!’

Truth one is that fear will never go away as long as I continue to grow as a person. The fear isn’t

going anywhere; we need to ‘face facts’. Therefore, truth two: the only way to get rid of the fear

of doing something is to do it. The ‘doing it’ comes before the fear goes away. Frequently, we

play the ‘when-then’ game with fear. ‘When I feel better then I’ll lose some weight’, instead of

losing some weight then we will feel better. We procrastinate (Hamlet’s hesitancy becomes ours)

which is really a nice way of saying ‘paralysis by analysis’ (too much thinking – what Frankl

calls ‘hyper-reflecting’). Truth three is: the only way to feel better about myself is to go out and

do it. Truth four: not only am I going to experience fear whenever I am in unfamiliar territory but

so is everyone else. Truth five: pushing through fear is less frightening than living with the

underlying fear that comes from a feeling of helplessness. The paradox here is: the people who
refuse to take risks live with a feeling of dread that is far more severe than if they took the risk to

make them less helpless. Her summary: if everyone feels fear when approaching something new

and yet so many are out there doing it despite the fear then we must conclude that fear is not the

problem, we are! She wants to move us from pain to power and form the language of pain (I

can’t, I should, It’s not my fault, It’s a problem, I hope, It’s an obstacle) to the language of power

(I won’t, I could, I’m responsible, It’s an opportunity, I know etc).

We need to guard our inner chattering – the stories we subconsciously tell ourselves – the

language we use, because the unconscious believes only what it hears not what is true. We need

to expand our comfort zone: from awareness to action. For, we are the cause not of what happens

to us but of our responses to everything that happens to us. We can become prisoners of our

thoughts. To take an example: your friend doesn’t text you back and you feel anger. You can get

angry or you can take some time to explore possible reasons he might have for not texting you

back, for example, he might be busy working, presently indisposed, perhaps he’s waiting for a

later time to send you a proper response. In the absence of facts, your fantasies fill the space, but

fantasies aren’t facts; feelings aren’t facts! The good news is that you can play another game –

the ‘change your point of view’ game! For example, a friend always arrives late and now you’re

getting anxious or annoyed about meeting (‘anticipatory anxiety’). But what you can choose here

is to be late yourself, or not to meet inside where you can at least sit down, or to arrive with

something to do while you’re waiting like bringing a book to read, or to have a conversation with

him about being late. So, learn ABC: Avoid casting Blame on external factors outside

your Control.
Change what you can change (your thoughts and actions) not what you can’t (other people).

About 90% of what we worry about never happens. So, we have a 10% chance of being correct.

It’s about Attitude, then Behaviour, as we Create our own reality through the choices we make.

We can’t change the world, but we can change the world we’re in. We do that through our

thoughts/attitude. ‘As a man thinketh, so he will be’, Proverbs tells us. We can say ‘what if?’ and

‘if only’ and never get anywhere or do anything. We need to think about outcomes,

opportunities, and alternatives. Then ACT. Life is a beautiful risk. The opposite of a risk is

security, and as Jeffries says, security is not having things, it’s handling things. Geology or

geometry? Law or psychology? It doesn’t really matter. Not every choice is irredeemable or

irrevocable. Choices can be corrected. A student of mine is a pilot and he told me that when a

plane strays the system corrects it. But for most of the journey the plane is actually off-course!

The plane lands where it is supposed to land in spite of having been in error 90% of the time!

Flying a plane is a good metaphor for life: it’s about constant course correction. The following is

a law of psychological life:

What we resist, persists.

So, don’t resist! This is the heart of the psychology of fear and of the technique of paradoxical

intention.

The antidote to our fear resides in saying ‘yes to life in spite of everything’, as Frankl puts it,

which is the opposite of ‘give-up-itis’. It means becoming tragic optimists. The answer to fear

lies in acceptance and affirmative attitude and action. Saying yes involves getting up not giving

up. If all our giving is about getting our life will be full of fear. Jeffries’ brilliant answer to fear –
and it is the only answer – is learning how to give. Giving (generosity) comes ultimately from the

heart of thankfulness (gratitude).

The Importance of Humour

An integral element of PI, apart from facing into our fears and anxieties, is the deliberate

evocation of humour. What more powerful manner is there to minimise a complaint than to tell it

with a twinkle or endure it by laughing at it? It is by virtue of our self-detachment and humour

that we can ridicule as well as reduce our fears. ‘Paradoxical intention should always be

formulated in as humorous way a manner as possible’ (Frankl, The Will to Meaning, p. 108).

Paradoxical Intention works with humour and hyperbole (exaggeration). Every human being, by

virtue of his or her humanness, is capable of detaching himself from himself and laughing about

himself. For this unique technique to work you need to draw on your noetic resources of humour

and engage in caricature and exaggeration of the symptom in question. Humour is a paramount

way of putting distance between something and yourself. Frankl locates humour in the noetic

dimension. As Aristotle once observed: ‘no animal can laugh save man’. The basic mechanism

of PI can be illustrated by a joke. A boy who came to school late excused himself to the teacher

on the grounds that the roads were slippery and that whenever he moved one step forward he

slipped two steps back, upon which the teacher retorted, ‘I have caught you in a lie because if

this were true how did you ever manage to get to school?’ The boy replied, ‘I finally turned

around and went home’!

PI does not just move on the surface; it operates on a deep dimension bringing about deep

changes of attitude. What Frankl calls ‘noö-psychic detachment’ is this ability to rise above our
predicaments and problems. Humour is one way we do this. In PI the purpose is to enable the

patient (person) to develop a sense of detachment toward his neurosis by laughing at it. As

Gordon Allport, the famous Harvard psychologist, put it: ‘the neurotic who learns to laugh at

himself may be on the way to self-management, perhaps to cure’. Of course, the therapist is

laughing not at the patient but at his (ridiculous) fears. PI allows for a perspective, a distance.

Fun, mockery, humour, joking, exaggeration all can be used to wrap the fear up in ridicule. What

makes us smile cannot cause horror.

The term ‘humour’ derives from the humours of the ancient Greeks – the balance of fluids in the

body was seen to control health and emotion (humor = body fluid). Theories of humour go back

to Plato. Interestingly, humour and honesty are the two highest attributes looked for in a potential

partner. Humour significantly contributes to higher subjective well-being. Positive humour leads

to positive health. In the literature on the subject there are two types of humour, each with two

styles: 1. Adaptive (facilitative and self-enhancing) and 2. Maladaptive (aggressive and self-

defeating). Affiliative (facilitative) style humour occurs when jokes are used as a means of

facilitating relationships, amusing others, and reducing stress. Self-enhancing humour takes a

humorous perspective on life. Aggressive humour is racist and full of sarcasm; it disparages

others for amusement. The focus here is not on the consequences of the joke but on the

entertainment of listeners. Self-defeating humour is self-disparaging – jokes here are used as a

means of social acceptance. The philosopher Bernard Lonergan says that satire laughs at,

humour laughs with. High levels of adaptive type humour are associated with self-esteem,

anxiety control, self-competency etc. so humour has profoundly therapeutic properties – a fact

first recognised by Viktor Frankl. Humour makes light of stressful situations; it lightens and
brightens up the social atmosphere. There is a relationship between humour and a healthy

immune system. Humour can ease tension and relieve anxiety. In short, humour is a meaningful

aspect of human existence. Laughter and fun also provide a respite from boredom; they can act

as coping strategies. There is a connection and correlation between laughter and humour (there is

deadpan humour which doesn’t necessitate laughter). Humour provides a sense of satisfaction

and also improves the ageing process.

Three main theories of humour have been put forward:

1. The Relief theory: laughter as a homeostatic mechanism by which psychological tension

is reduced; laughter and mirth release nervous energy (the psychoanalytic view. Freud

says that the joke is made, whereas the comic is found).

2. The Superiority theory: a person laughs generally about the misfortunes of others because

these misfortunes assert the person’s superiority against the background of the

shortcomings of others (the view of Plato, Aristotle, and Hobbes).

3. The Incongruous superiority theory: here humour is perceived at the moment of the

realisation of incongruity between a concept involved in a certain situation and the real

objects thought to be in some relation to the concept (the view of Schopenhauer, Hegel,

and Kant).

Listening to a joke is like listening to a dream – as we try and see if we get it. Joking is a game

with certain rules that people follow. We’ve all had the uncomfortable experience of our jokes

not being understood or being understood only too well and found to have been not funny. The

philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in Culture and Value writes: ‘What is it like for people not to
have the same sense of humour? They do not react properly to each other. It’s as though there

were a custom amongst certain people for one person to throw another a ball which he is

supposed to catch and throw back; but some people, instead of throwing it back, put it in their

pocket’. If joking is psychological, laughter is explosive. Kant speaks of ‘the oscillation of the

organs’. Homo sapiens is homo ludens and homo ridens – we are defined, in other words, by our

capacity to laugh and play. Humour is the return of the physical into the metaphysical. Humour

expresses profound truths about the human condition. You get to know someone by the jokes he

tells, by the humour he employs to the world and himself. Great humour, such as one finds in

Neil Simon, Oscar Wilde, Grouch Marx, and Woody Allen, contains wisdom as much as wit.

Gallows humour: a man is condemned to be hanged. The priest says to him, ‘have you any last

words before we spring the trap?’, to which he replies: ‘Yes, I don’t think the damn thing is

safe’. Humour self-detaches us from the ‘horror, the horror’. There is the ethnicity (cultural

context) of humour. Witness this: ‘The thing about German food is that no matter how much you

eat, an hour later you’re hungry for power’. We’ve all heard the joke beginning: ‘there was a

Frenchman, and Englishman and an Irishman’. Cultural stereotypes hold certain truths, show us

what is normally kept concealed. Jokes lower inhibitions and put us in touch with our

unconscious desire. They lift the bar of social repression. Jokes, so, free us up.

In the end, the joke is on all of us. Often, laughter and tears go together – mirth mingled with

moroseness. Nietzsche: ‘I know best why man alone laughs: he alone suffers so deeply that he

had to invent laughter. The unhappiest and most melancholy animal is, as is fitting, the most

cheerful’. We smile to cover up or camouflage our sadness. Joy and exaltation, as manic states,

depend on the same psychical energy as melancholia. But Freud felt that the melancholic had
reached a higher degree of self-knowledge than more ordinary men. Aristotle asserted that the

melancholic is a philosopher, and the philosopher a melancholic. Humour, so, functioning as an

anti-depressant. Humour helps us sublimate our sadness, and the sufferings of our soul. The

British philosopher, Simon Critchley, in his marvellous little book, On Humour, concludes by

mentioning the risus purus – the pure laugh, which ‘is the highest laugh, the laugh that laughs at

the laugh, that laughs at that which is unhappy, the mirthless laugh. Yet the smile does not bring

unhappiness, but rather elevation and liberation, the lucidity of consolation. This is why,

melancholy animals that we are, human beings are also the most cheerful. We smile and find

ourselves ridiculous. Our wretchedness is our greatness’. Let me include additionally the words

of Freud here who once said he could offer us no consolation and that he was angry at humanity:

‘Look! Here is the world, which seems so dangerous! It is nothing but a game for children, just

worth making a jest about’.

The Capacity to Play

Aside from the importance of humour, the capacity to play (and be playful) is also essential for

paradoxical intention. Play covers a range of voluntary, intrinsically motivated activities

normally associated with recreational pleasure and enjoyment. Play may be seen as something

frivolous but when focussed, players are in a state of flow. Play is not just a part-time activity but

an important ingredient in a purposeful life. Play promotes physical and cognitive development

as well as social skills. It is a free activity, outside ‘ordinary life’, that is absorbing, with no

material interest, with fixed rules, which promote social functioning. The emphasis on play being

a supportive and independent sphere of human activity is sometimes called the ‘magic circle’

notion of play. Play can take the form of pretence, performance, sports or games. Structured play
is a game with clearly defined goals. Play is conducive to human happiness. We can distinguish

seven play patterns:

1. Attunement play – here a connection is established, for example, between a mother and

child.

2. Body play – making funny noises/sounds.

3. Object play – playing with toys, banging pots and pans together etc.

4. Social play – tumbling, making faces, connection with other children.

5. Imaginative play – here the child interacts scenes and scenarios from his/her imagination

and acts them out such as doctors and nurses, princesses and pirates.

6. Storytelling play – the play of learning and language that develops intellect.

7. Creative play – one plays with one’s imagination to create a higher state such as new

ways of using a musical instrument, for example.

Separate from self-initiated play is play therapy which is used clinically to help children who are

suffering from some trauma etc. usually aged between 3 and 11. It is a way for them to express

their experiences, to work out their inner anxieties, like the rest of us. That is why play is

something we take seriously. Plato: ‘You can discover more about a person in an hour of play

than in a year of conversation’. The famous educator, Fröbel, said in relation to the symbolism of

play that it was the ‘free expression of what is in a child’s soul’. Play is full of meaning. Kleinian

analysts use toys to help their young patients, Jungians use sand-play, and Winnicottians use the

squiggle-game. All emphasise the importance of play and being playful for cognitive

development and socialisation. Play promotes flexibility of mind and helps people manage stress

and learn resiliency. Studies have shown that play and coping with daily stressors to be

positively correlated in children. Play is explicitly recognised in Article 31 of the Convention of

the Rights of the Child. Creativity and happiness can result from adult play. Playing games can

promote a persistent and optimistic motivational style and positive affect; enhancing experiences

and enjoyment, leading to aliveness, and more productivity. In short, play boosts well-being

across the lifespan.

Freud traced the origins of creativity and imagination to the play of children. In his 1908 article,

‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’, he writes: ‘every child at play behaves like a creative

writer’. The opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real. The child links his imaginal

world with the external world – there is a difference between (neurotic) fantasy and (psychotic)

delusions. The play of phantasy is an endless source of pleasure. When a child grows up and

ceases to play he becomes serious with work and responsibilities. It is important, though, to

maintain a youthful and playful attitude to life. Some adults can’t play with concepts at all.

In Playing and Reality, D.W. Winnicott, the paediatrician turned psychoanalyst who spent a life

time working with children, argued that playing is an intermediate area of experience, mediating

between inner reality and external life – a potential space. He places art, creativity, dreaming,

and religious feeling in this intermediate territory. For Winnicott, psychotherapy takes place in

the overlap of two areas of playing, that of the patient and that of the therapist. Therapy is two

people playing together. The child’s communication is essentially through play; play is a form of

communication. Play gives us access to unconscious phantasy. Playing is a transitional

phenomenon and the first stage in a human being’s capacity for cultural experience. Playing is

universal – it facilitates growth and health. Playing is natural and highly sophisticated. All play

begins in the magical playground between the mother and baby. Play is immensely exciting and
satisfying even when it leads to anxiety. The inability to play is a symptom that requires

attention. Playing together develops a sense of trust. Playing is itself a therapy. It’s a basic form

of living. Perhaps only in playing are we truly free to be creative. Only in playing is

communication possible just as it is only in being creative that we discover the self. It is this

playful and humorous approach to the word that makes paradoxical intention possible and human

life meaningful as well as worth living.

The Question Behind Paradoxical Intention

Having discussed the (philosophical) preliminaries, now let’s tackle the (practical) question head

on, which Frankl poses for us: what would happen if we wished to have happen the thing we fear

most? Because desire cancels out fear. Frankl writes: ‘Logotherapy asks: what would happen if

we prompted phobic patients to attempt to desire that which they fear? Or prompted obsessive

compulsive patients not to fight their compulsion but to act on it? Or prompted the sexual

neurotic to seek impotence or frigidity? In each instance such a ‘paradoxical intention’ takes the

wind out of the sails of anticipatory anxiety and effects “self-distancing”. The fact that there is

often humour involved only aids in this self-distancing process’ (Frankl, On the Theory and

Therapy of Mental Disorders, p, 189). One can’t wish and fear at the same time.

‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better’ (Samuel Beckett, Westword

Ho).

Example: a man who fears he will faint in the elevator is given the instruction to enter it with the

firm wish to collapse. The more he tries to faint the less he will be able to. Every obstacle is an
opportunity, every suffering can have a meaning, and every fear has its adversary which is

humour. So, with PI we get rid of exaggerated and confounded fears through fun and ridicule.

We laugh at our fears and obsessions. With growing confidence, the nightmare of neurosis is

conquered. Dr Lukas tells the story of a mediaeval robber knight who frightened everyone, and

no one tried to fight him until one day when his armour became loose while he was out riding his

horse he fell so clumsily that his armour got caught in the saddle. To prevent the horse from

dragging him he grabbed the horse’s tail and stumbled behind it. The onlookers laughed

hysterically at the sight and from that day on their fear of him vanished.

Another example: a woman came to Dr Lukas with a fear of elevators, spiral staircases, and long

echoing corridors. She was afraid she would get sick, not be able to speak and would faint. Dr

Lukas accompanied her into the elevator of a 20-storey building. Before they entered Lukas

asked her to faint at least once on every floor for a total of twenty times – ‘let’s experience at

least twenty fainting spells’. These humorous formulations defused her fear. Then Lukas said she

was disappointed that she was still standing. On the second floor Lukas shook her head; she

urged the woman in question to hurry up if she wanted to fill her quota of faints. On the fifth

floor Lukas told her ‘angrily’ that she had been promised at least one collapse and from the tenth

floor she implored her to use all her efforts to at least break out in a perspiration. Lukas’ patient

arrived laughing and ‘unfainted’ on the top floor. To repeat: Humour defuses fear. Trying hard to

faint makes fainting difficult/impossible.

To take another example: sleeplessness. Instead of intending hard to sleep (what Frankl calls

‘hyper-intention’), do the opposite (the inversion of the intention) and try to stay awake for as
long as possible. Paradoxically, this works. Analogously, the hunt for happiness, as Frankl says,

scares it away, just as the fight for pleasure drives it away. A forced desire makes impossible that

which it intends. The secret of PI: desire that which you fear (even if only for a moment).

PI begins with the mind (our attitude) and what goes on there, and behaviour follows. Frankl

writes: ‘What matters is our attitude towards facts rather than facts themselves’ (Frankl,

Psychotherapy and Existentialism, p. 32). The very attention paid to trying to sleep inhibits the

natural sleeping process. Excessive attention and excessive intention are pathogenic factors

responsible for the aetiology of many neuroses. Together they can cause anticipatory anxiety. So,

the insomniac is now getting anxious (perhaps unconsciously) about being anxious! The fear of

sleeplessness increases sleep disturbance because anticipatory anxiety completes and perpetuates

the vicious cycle. Sleep is like a bid which alights on your hand. It stays there just as long as one

doesn’t pay attention to it – if one attempts to grab it, it flies away. Just as happiness is like a cat;

only when one is not paying attention to it does it jump up on one’s knees and begin to purr. So,

how do we remove the anticipatory anxiety which is the pathogenic basis of forced intention

(fearful expectation?). We advise the person in question not to try to force sleep (the right

amount will be secured by the organism anyway). For Frankl, ‘the forced intention to fall asleep,

arising from the anticipatory anxiety of not being able to fall asleep, should be replaced by the

paradoxical intention of not falling asleep’ (Frankl, Psychotherapy and Existentialism, p. 154),

which will be followed very rapidly by sleep. A compulsion to self-observation accompanies

anticipatory anxiety. So, in our case of insomnia we have the intention (to sleep) and the

attention (to observe if the intention is effective!). They join in perpetuating the waking state. So,

try and stay awake, instead.

Let’s highlight the process involved: A symptom evokes a phobia and the phobia provokes the

symptom. The recurrence of the symptom reinforces the phobia. A feedback mechanism is

established, and the patient is caught in a cocoon. So, encouraging the patient to wish to have

happen the very thing he fears engenders an inversion of intention. The pathogenic fear is

replaced by a paradoxical wish. Flight from fear is a pathogenic pattern – a phobic one. Phobic

people flee from fear. ‘But the development of a phobia can be obviated by confronting one with

the situations he begins to fear’ (Frankl, The Will to Meaning, p. 104). The three diagrams below

illustrate the dynamics at play:

Phobias & Obsessive Compulsions

In phobias we get the flight from fear. In the sexual neuroses we get the fight for pleasure. PI

was devised precisely to counteract hyper-intention – this neurotic habit of making something

the target of both intention and attention. In obsessions and compulsions, we get the fight against

them (this underlies OCD). Obsessive compulsives also display fear but theirs is not a fear of

fear but rather fear of themselves and their responses to it is to fight against the obsessions and

compulsions. ‘But the more the patients fight, the stronger the symptoms become’ (Frankl, The

Will to Meaning, p. 105). Pressure induces counter-pressure which increases the pressure. With

PI symptoms soon atrophy. Let us repeat: Fear brings about that which it fears – fear makes real

that which it fears. If the wish is father to the thought, so is fear mother to the event (the event of

an illness). Anticipatory anxiety triggers what is expected, and a self-sustaining vicious circle is

thus established, which we mentioned above:

  a symptom evokes a phobia

 the phobia provokes the symptom

 the recurrence of the symptom reinforces the phobia

The fear of fear increases fear. The typical reaction to fear of fear is flight from fear and the

person avoids situations that arouse his/her anxiety. Running away from fear is the starting point

of anxiety neuroses. ‘Phobias are partially due to the endeavour to avoid the situation in which

the anxiety arises’ (Frankl, The Unheard Cry for Meaning, p. 116). So, the phobia is maintained

by the anxiety-reducing mechanism of avoidance. Three pathogenic patterns are set up:

1. the phobic is in flight from fear

2. the obsessive-compulsive is in fear of himself

3. the sexual neurotic fights for sexual pleasure

Flight from fear is a reaction to fear of fear (the phobic pattern). Flight from fear is a reaction to

fear of himself (in OCD). It is a fight against. With PI, the phobic stops fleeing from his fears

and the obsessive-compulsive stops fighting his obsessions and compulsions. The pathogenic

fear is replaced by a paradoxical wish. The fight against the compulsive ideas only strengthens

them. The ‘patient dashes his head against the wall of his obsessional ideas’ (Frankl, The Doctor

and the Soul, p. 177); there is a perpetual struggle against impulses. ‘When the patient stops

fighting them, the impulses may very well cease to obsess him’ (Frankl, The Doctor and the

Soul, p. 178).

The Psychology of OCD

‘Fate’ is our constitutional core (our character structure) whereas ‘Freedom’ resides in our

attitude, in the stance we adopt to our symptoms. The person is not responsible for his
obsessional ideas but is responsible for his attitude toward them. The obsessional is plagued by

doubts just as he is engaged in repetitive behaviour (compulsions). Over-conscientiousness is a

typical character trait of the obsessive-compulsive. The person with OCD is seeking certainty by

way of compensation for all his doubting and indecision. ‘The obsessional neurotic mails a letter

or locks his door with the same gravity and care that a ‘normal man’ might employ in choosing

his profession or his wife’ (Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul, p. 181). Excessive awareness and

intensified self-observation as well as a rigid morality characterise the obsessive-compulsive.

He lacks a fluent style. ‘He strives for hundred-per-centness. He always wants the absolute, the

totality’ (Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul, p. 182). He suffers from the limitations of all human

thought and the dubiousness of all human decisions. Moreover, he is characterised by intense

impatience and intolerance (of the tension between what one is and what one ought to be). In his

will to absolutism, striving for 100% ness, and totalitarian demands the obsessional is like a

‘frustrated Faust’ (Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul, p. 182). His anxiety is condensed in the

phobic symptom, and he restricts himself to a definite sector of existence. In his striving for

security he shapes the world after his own image and likeness. He is subjectivistic, and his guilty

conscience is the product of his flight from the world. He wants to know the roots of everything.

Unlike Socratic scepticism, the obsessional seeks to find an Archimedean point, an absolutely

solid basis from which to build his logical consistency and uncompromising truthfulness. His is

an ultimate philosophy, an exaggerated rationalism. He is a boy in a bubble, marooned in a

cocoon in which he is enclosed, motivated by fear of fear; his typical response being avoidance

(a flight from fear).

Illustrations
We have been saying that PI takes the wind out of the sails of anticipatory anxiety. Anticipatory

anxiety produces the feared situation. For example, the erythrophobic individual who is afraid of

blushing when he enters the room will actually blush. The mantra we have been incessantly

repeating is: Fear makes real that which it fears. Anticipatory anxiety is precisely the fear of

some pathogenic event and this (ironically) precipitates it. To take another example: the man

approaching the sexual act anticipating not getting an erection (or having a premature

ejaculation) does not get erect as he is too focused on the pleasure principle, which he is taking

all too literally. Pleasure can’t be brought about by direct intention (paradoxically) but only by a

side-effect or by-product. If the person of pleasure in the example above would only forget about

himself and direct his attention outward and away from his ego (what Frankl calls ‘dereflection’)

and onto his partner he would have a far higher and better chance of becoming erect himself. We

find ourselves by losing ourselves. As Frankl writes: ‘The more one strives for pleasure, the less

one is able to attain it’ (Frankl, Psychotherapy and Existentialism, p. 142). So, when the phobic

patient is afraid that something will happen to him, the logotherapist will encourage him/her to

intend or wish for, precisely what he/she fears. This results in a reversal of attitude as avoidance

is replaced by an intentional (paradoxical/inverted) effort. PI leads to a reversal (of attitude) and

replacement (of symptom). This change of attitude to the symptom is what Frankl means by self-

distancing/detachment which is the basis of PI. Frankl observes that ‘the pathogenesis in phobias

and obsessive-compulsive neuroses is partially due to the increase of anxieties and compulsions

caused by the endeavour to avoid or fight them’ (Frankl, Psychotherapy and Existentialism, p.

143). Beyond fight (anger), flight (avoidance) or freeze (atrophy) is facing into our symptoms

and sufferings (which doesn’t mean, of course, dwelling on them). Another example: a man who

fears sweating (hidrophobia) will perspire even more profusely (because he is concentrating on it
– not sweating – unduly). A vicious circle/cycle is set up. So, the patient in question would be

encouraged to say to himself ‘now I am going to sweat buckets – litres of the stuff. I will show

them all what real sweating is’. A phobic person, that is to say, somebody with an irrational fear,

usually avoids the situation, whereas the obsessive-compulsive person (someone with OCD)

usually fights with his ideas. In both cases, the symptoms are strengthened. By contrast, when

the patient (person) can exaggerate his symptoms they diminish and he or she is no longer

haunted by them.

The phobic experiences what he fears (they panic, blush, sweat, stutter); the obsessive-

compulsive person doesn’t experience the feared event. They suffer from their fears but don’t see

that their fears are groundless. They think their avoidance behaviour is sufficient to prevent the

feared event. The obsessive-compulsive person never does what he fears – only he never knows

it. He must be exposed to the anxiety-provoking situation. The obsessive compulsive who fears

he has not locked his door securely enough is told to let the door stand wide open so all the

robbers in the neighbourhood can help themselves. Far too many things have been accumulated

anyway. Patients with handwashing compulsions invite all the germs to a giant party on their

hands.

Dereflection

We discussed ‘dereflection’ earlier; this is a logo-devise – a therapeutic technique, which is

based not on denial or distraction but on a conscious turning of the mind away from problematic

areas and towards purposeful and more meaningful potentials. Imagine, to take an example from

the philosopher Iris Murdoch, that you are in your study brooding and bored, anxious about an
exam and you suddenly become aware of a kestrel – a magnificent kite – a beautiful, huge,

majestic bird – hovering outside your window. You turn your attention away from your concerns

and out, onto a non-self object and at that moment, all is kestrel. When you return to your books

the energy has changed; it has been charged by something numinous. Let’s remind ourselves: the

ability to bring our attention outward to a world of meaning, purpose and positivity is

dereflection. If paradoxical intention is designed to counter anticipatory anxiety, dereflection is

designed to counteract the compulsive inclination to self-observation (excessive self-scrutiny). If

paradoxical intention is based on the capacity to self-distance, dereflection is made possible by

the human capacity for self-transcendence. If paradoxical intention ridicules the symptoms in

question with a humorous formulation, dereflection chooses to make little/light of them. PI

ridicules; dereflection minimises.

Clinical Examples

Let’s take a number of clinical examples: first from Frankl: a suicidal book-keeper with a

writer’s cramp (Frankl, Psychotherapy and Existentialism, pp. 19-20). The patient was this book-

keeper who had been treated by many different therapists but without success. He was in despair

and near to suicide when he sought logotherapeutic help. For many years he had suffered from

writer’s cramp which had recently become so severe that he was in danger of losing his job. So,

he needed short-term, solution-focused therapy. Dr Frankl’s associate recommended that the

patient do the opposite from what he had usually done. Instead of trying to write as neatly and

legibly as possible he was to write with the worst possible scrawl. He was advised to say to

himself: ‘I will show people what a good scribbler I am’. When he tried to scribble he was
unable to do so. The next day he said, ‘when I tried to scrawl I couldn’t do it’. Within 48 hours

he was freed from his writer’s cramp and remained free from his once debilitating symptom.

Another clinical example: the fear of trembling in a medical student. The fear of trembling while

she was in the Institute of Anatomy when the instructor entered the room actually did cause a

tremor. She recalled what Dr Frankl had told her and said to herself, ‘Here comes the instructor. I

will show him what a good trembler I am’. When she deliberately tried to tremble, she couldn’t

do it.

Another example: a person reported that his stomach used to growl in the company of others.

The more he tried to keep it from happening, the more it growled. The minute he accepted and

laughed at it, it disappeared.

Frankl gives an example of the most severe case of stuttering he ever encountered. Frankl met a

man who had stuttered all his life except once when he was 12 years old and caught by a

conductor on a street car for not paying for the ride. He thought the only way he could escape

was to show him that he was just a ‘poor, stuttering boy’. When he tried to stutter he was unable

to do so! Without meaning to he had practised paradoxical intention, though not for therapeutic

purposes, Frankl wryly remarks.

Another example: Mrs H. R. who had been suffering for 14 years after which she was

hospitalised. She was handicapped in life by a severe compulsion to count and to check whether

her dresser drawers were in order and locked. She did this by continually checking the contents
of the drawers, closing them by a sharp rapping of her knuckles, and finally by attempting to turn

the key in the lock several times. This condition became so chronic that her knuckles were often

bruised and bleeding and the keys and locks on the bureau were ruined. A logotherapeutically-

trained doctor demonstrated how to use PI. She was shown how to throw things carelessly into

her dresser and to create as much disorder as possible. She was to say to herself, ‘These drawers

should be as messy as possible’. The result was that two days after her admission her counting

compulsion had ceased and by the fourth day she had no need to recheck her dresser. Once she

even forgot to lock it. 16 days after hospitalisation she felt free of any complaints or symptoms

and was able to do her chores without compulsive repetition. She admitted that obsessive-

compulsive ideas occasionally recurred but that she was able to ignore them or make light of

them. She overcame her compulsion not by frantically fighting it (which only strengthens it) but

by making a joke of it (that is to say, by applying Paradoxical Intention). I recall my GP saying

to me once: ‘Life is too serious to be taken seriously’. G.K. Chesterton once remarked that the

angels take themselves lightly and that’s why they can move around the universe at such vast

speed!

Causes vs Symptoms

Sometimes it is just not necessary to find the underlying cause, assuming one even exists, for

healing to take place. A change of attitude and the removal of a symptom may be all that is

required, all that is therapeutically effective. In many cases the trauma does not cause the

neurosis but rather the neurosis makes the trauma reappear. As Frankl puts it: ‘A reef that

appears at low tide is not the cause of the low tide; rather it is the low tide that causes the reef to

appear’ (Frankl, Psychotherapy and Existentialism, p. 148). PI is effective irrespective of the

underlying aetiology (cause). It is possible to alleviate suffering and symptoms without removing

the cause. If a house is on fire run out of the house and water it down; you can ask what caused

the fire at a later stage. Therapy can be palliative without being causal. That said, PI is not as

much concerned with the symptoms than with the person’s attitude (his stance) toward them. PI

is not a miracle method; much depends on the person in question. The percentage of cures that

have improved to a degree that has made further treatment unnecessary stands at above 75.7%. It

has also proved useful in cases more complex than mono-symptomatic neurosis. PI is

particularly useful in short-term therapy and especially in phobic cases. It should be noted that

short-term therapy does not just bring short-lived results. One of the illusions of Freudian

orthodoxy is that the length of treatment is synonymous with the depth of therapy – that the

results of the treatment are proportionate to its length. PI ‘is not as superficial as it may first

appear to be’ (Frankl, Psychotherapy and Existentialism, p. 152). Something, as we noted earlier,

is happening at a deeper level. Successful PI results in behavioural change yes but more

significantly also in an existential reorientation. ‘It is in this respect that paradoxical intention

represents a truly “logo”-therapeutic procedure in the truest sense of the word’ (Frankl,

Psychotherapy and Existentialism, p. 153).

Individualisation and Improvisation

PI depends on another two elements: individualisation and improvisation. The former

concentrates on the uniqueness of each individual person while the latter respects the uniqueness

of the specific life-situation of the individual. Of course, clinically speaking, we must also take

into account the personality of the therapist. So, the therapeutic method (one factor) = x (the

individuality of the patient) + y (the individuality of the therapist); depends, therefore, on two
unknowns. The relationship between patient and therapist constitutes an existential encounter.

The relationship (rapport) will always be more important than the therapeutic school or even the

technique. This relationship occupies the polar field of tension between human closeness and

scientific detachment.

Suggestion Therapy?

Is paradoxical intention based on suggestion? No, it is not suggested that the patient suppress his

fears but rather overcome them by exaggerating them. Thus, ‘paradoxical intention is the exact

opposite of persuasion’ (Frankl, Psychotherapy and Existentialism, p. 154). The remarkable

results gained from PI can’t be explained in terms of suggestion. Most people actually believed it

couldn’t work and set out to disprove it. However, PI succeeded despite suggestion. One

psychoanalyst maintained that PI does not resolve the underlying conflict, but this doesn’t detract

from it. As Frankl observes: ‘It is no insult to surgery that it does not cure the diseased

gallbladder it removes. The patient is better off’ (Frankl, The Will to Meaning, p. 112).

(Psychoanalytically speaking, PI tells the patient to discharge the forbidden impulse – he is given

‘permission’). However, in a number of cases Frankl does examine and describe the underlying

psychodynamics; in one case describing ‘narcissistic immaturity, repressed hostility towards her

domineering mother, contempt for her deceased father’ etc but PI was still applied with total

success in this case’ (Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul, p. 217). Short-term therapy can bring

long-lived results and cases have been reported as remaining symptom-free for decades.
With PI the person tries to produce the (neurotic) symptom in question but finds himself unable

to do so; his attitude changes. The removal of the fear strangles the neurotic symptoms. What a

logotherapist would do in a session is:

1) take the case-history

2) record the symptomatology

3) explain to the patient the basic principles of PI

4) discuss some clinical case-histories by way of example

The patient will learn to understand what Frankl (the logotherapist) is trying to do, and gain

confidence that this therapy is effective. In therapy we can: treat/remove the symptom(s) and

understand the patient’s history and life-situation. Reports in the logo-literature on the subject

indicate that patients who have had symptoms for more than 20 years become symptom free. The

PI technique reconditions a conditioned reflex and breaks the vicious cycle formed by

anticipatory anxiety. PI musters and mobilises self-detachment generally and specifically

through humour. The human potential for self-detachment is instrumental in the therapy of

‘psychogenic neuroses’ (OCD and phobias).

Contraindications

PI can achieve success fast. Some patients are well suited for it, others who are more of the ‘yes-

but’ variety need some work. Is there anyone, though, for whom PI is not applicable? Frankl

answers: ‘Paradoxical intention is strictly contraindicated in psychotic depressions’ (Frankl, The

Will to Meaning, p. 114). This is due to the fact that it would increase feelings of guilt that may

lead to suicide. So, PI is not suitable for those patients who are severely and/or

biologically/biochemically depressed.
More Examples

A severe case of obsessive-compulsive character neurosis: a 65-year-old woman who had

suffered for sixty years from a washing compulsion of such severity that she had been admitted

for a lobotomy. She was afraid of being infected by people with skin diseases, would never touch

a doorknob, and made her husband rinse the cloth that she would scrub things with up to three

hundred times or more a day. ‘Life was hell, for me’, she confessed. Dr Eva Niebauer started

logotherapeutic treatment by means of paradoxical intention. Nine days after admission, the

patient was mending the stockings of her fellow patients, assisting the nurses cleaning tables,

washing syringes, and even emptying pails of bloody and putrid waste materials. Two months

later she was able to lead a totally normal life. Occasionally obsessive-compulsive thoughts

return but she now uses PI and is ironical about them; she no longer fights them. She still keeps

in contact with the outpatient clinic. The lobotomy which had previously been thought of as

being unavoidable became unnecessary (Frankl, Psychotherapy and Existentialism, pp. 150-1;

please note the date of this publication: 1967).

Mrs Rosa L had an obsession about locking the door. For 20 years she had gone back again and

again to check the door was locked. ‘Life became unbearable’, she said. But then everything

changed after seeing Dr Becker. She now says to herself: ‘What if the door is open? Let them

steal everything in the apartment’. She is then able to ignore the impulse and walk calmly away.

Three months later she reported this: ‘I feel wonderful. I can’t even imagine how I could have

had all those thoughts ... For twenty years I was tormented by them, but now they’re gone and

I’m very happy’ (Frankl, Psychotherapy and Existentialism, p. 153).

A woman wanted to break a store window and reported that there was not one minute of the day

when she was not thinking this until Dr Frankl told her to go right up to the window with the

intention of smashing it. ‘When I did this, the fear disappeared completely, and I knew that I

wouldn’t go through with it. It all seems like a dream now; the fears and impulses to do these

things have all vanished’ (Frankl, Psychotherapy and Existentialism, p. 152).

A father (W.S.) aged 35 with three children was afraid he would die of a heart attack particularly

in relation to sexual intercourse. Physically, he was an excellent health – facts which a check-up

had revealed. He was anxious, depressed and worried incessantly. Dr Frankl asked him about his

family. In the patient’s anamnesis his sister died of rheumatic disease at the age of 24, and his

mother died of heart disease at the age of 50. One night after sexual intercourse the patient went

to the bathroom to wash himself and suddenly felt a sharp pain in his chest. He became fearful

and his anticipatory anxiety, which he had due to his family history, became actualised. He

feared he would die of a heart attack any minute. He developed insomnia and phobias and a

superimposed depression on top of everything. His physician couldn’t reassure him. He

consulted Dr Frankl who explained to him that anticipatory anxiety produces exactly the

situation of which the patient is so afraid. Since we have no control over our autonomic

functions, if the patient tries to make his heart beat faster, he will find himself unable to do so. Dr

Frankl told him to make his heart beat faster and to have a heart attack right there in his office on

the spot. The patient started to laugh, his humour put a distance between himself and his

neurosis. The patient left the office having been instructed ‘to die at least three times a day of a
heart attack’ and instead of going to sleep ‘to try hard to remain awake’. He was seen three times

and after four weeks reported that he felt well.

A married mother of a 16-year-old, A.V., aged 45 had a claustrophobia of riding in cars. She also

had a fear of heights, riding in elevators, crossing bridges, collapsing, leaving the house, open

spaces, being alone, and becoming paralyzed. She had been treated by various psychiatrists over

24 years and was hospitalised several times, having had ECT, and lobotomy was now suggested.

She was in acute distress and had been diagnosed with schizophrenic reaction with phobic

anxiety and depressive manifestations. On March 1, 1959, all medication was discontinued, and

treatment began using paradoxical intention. The technique was explained and symptom by

symptom and fear by fear was worked through. Smaller fears such as sleeplessness were worked

though first. She was then told to become as panicky as possible and try to pass out. She said,

‘this is ridiculous. I am panicky. You’re only making me worse’. The logotherapist then

accompanied her to the elevator where she was told to ride up with the intention of becoming

panicky and paralysed. She laughed and responded, ‘I am trying so hard – I can’t do it’. She

reached the fifth floor, symptom free, and overjoyed. From then on, she used paradoxical

intention any time she needed it. For the first time in many years, the patient walked outside

alone around the hospital without fear. After five months of the therapy she was completely

symptom free. She returned home with no phobias for the first time in 24 years.

A 41-year-old father of two teenage girls who suffered from delirium tremens due to excessive

drinking precipitated by the existential vacuum wished to overcome his phobic symptom of

trembling hands when writing in front of people. His phobic symptom interfered greatly in his
job as an engineer with his ability to perform detailed mechanical work in front of others. For a

long time, he had not been able to sign cheques in front of others and had grown panicky and

anxiety ridden in meetings. On social occasions he had not been able to lift a glass without fear

of trembling and spilling the contents. Lighting someone else’s cigarette was to be avoided at all

costs. Paradoxical intention was explained to the patient and he was instructed to ‘jump right in’

to the situation and seek every opportunity to show others what a wonderful shaker he was, how

nervous he could get, and how he could spill his coffee all over the place. Having suffered from

these crippling neurotic symptoms, after three days, he reported that he couldn’t get anxious or

panicky, he couldn’t shake or tremble no matter how hard he tried. He had rid himself of his

symptom, and he found a new meaning to his existence.

A mother of four, A.S., aged 30, was referred due to severe panic and anxiety, fear of heart

attack, of smothering and strangling. She complained of dizziness, headaches, and the fear of

taking off, also of tingling around her mouth, numbness, and heart pounding. In the office she

thought she was going to die. She was instructed to go into the town with her husband and pick

out a nice coffin. She was asked what colour silk she would like in her coffin, then told to try to

die instantly from a heart attack. She and her husband began to laugh; PI was explained and

gradually she began to show signs of relief and before she left the consulting room she was

reminded to die at least three times a day of a heart attack. Dr Frankl probed for a cause and

unearthed a conflict in her marital situation which they discussed but PI brought her to a stage of

being completely symptom free.

A father, P.L., aged 38, of two teenage children complained of anxiety, panic states, phobias,

obsessions, and compulsions accompanied by depressive symptoms for more than 21 years. He

had become sick two years prior to his marriage when he began to have excessive doubts about

whether and how much he loved his wife. As a child he had feared being alone. He suffered from

guilt feelings about masturbation after his mother told him that his brother’s admission to a

psychiatric hospital (‘mental hospital’ as it was called in those days) was due to ‘self-abuse’. The

patient recalled that a friend had told him that a girl he knew suffered a nervous breakdown after

riding a horse for the sexual sensation. Almost immediately the patient became plagued with a

sexual sensation while walking. He feared that he might become gay and even grab a man’s

genital. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Over the years he received psychoanalysis, drug

therapy, and ECT, none of which had brought him relief. He described his life as ‘a kind of hell’.

His greatest fear was that he might grab someone’s penis. He feared that this would lead to

disgrace and loss of his job. Furthermore, he might even confess to a sex crime he had not

committed. He couldn’t concentrate, was restless, thought his heart would stop beating, and

feared too that he might scream out loud. He held his hands tightly against his body and became

obsessively jealous over his wife. He thought he was going insane, though he did not show any

overt psychotic symptoms. Mr K was seen biweekly over a period of 6 months for

logotherapeutic treatment, where symptom after symptom was removed. His obsessive doubts

about his love for his wife disappeared after he adopted the attitude of ‘who wants to love my

wife?’ When he was instructed to grab a man’s penis, including the therapist’s, at every

opportunity he had, he started to laugh at his obsessions and they completely disappeared. He

continues to attend therapy once a month and ‘is presently enjoying a normal and full life with is

family and is completely asymptomatic’ (Frankl, Psychotherapy and Existentialism, p. 202).

A married woman, Mrs L. L., aged 38, had a fear of a heart attack because of attacks of

tachycardia and severe palpitations. Her husband, a physician, assured her there was nothing

wrong with her heart. During World War II while serving with the British Army in Africa she

had experienced acute anxiety during a period of extremely hot weather. She had got herself into

a vicious cycle – palpitations and fear came upon her, then she lay on the couch fearing her

palpitations would get worse. One day she decided ‘not to give a damn anymore’ and went

outside and started to dig, meanwhile saying to herself ‘performing hard work is either going to

kill me or not but at least I will find out’. After a while working she noticed that her fear and

palpitations had disappeared. Anytime she has palpitations she goes out to do hard work. Since

learning how to treat herself she has not had an attack for more than 8 years.

A 31-year-old married woman, A.A., suffered for nine years from a fear of insomnia and

claustrophobia. She couldn’t be alone for one instant of the day or night and became ‘afraid of

everything’ – from crowds to water, until she was confined to her house. She had been treated in

an outpatient clinic of the university’s psychiatric hospital with ECT, drug therapy,

psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. A psychoanalyst treating her reported that sexual guilt and a

poorly resolved Oedipal situation were responsible for her phobias and that a cure was doubtful

for her. The patient was subsequently treated within six weeks using PI and has remained

completely symptom free since her release from the hospital more than three years ago.

What these case-histories show (which are all taken from chapter XV of Frankl’s Psychotherapy

and Existentialism by Hans O. Gerz, MD, entitled: ‘The Treatment of the Phobic and the
Obsessive-Compulsive Patient Using Paradoxical Intention’, pp. 188-208) is that PI can be used

with impressive results in such a short amount of time and if anyone falls back into the vicious

cycle again they themselves can apply the technique with extraordinary results. It is instructive to

note various patients’ comments, once they recovered, regarding what they believe was

instrumental in their recovery. They said they got confidence that it worked through various case

histories being presented to them; that they were taught how to apply PI themselves in the

various situations; accepting their neurosis rather than fighting it; a change in attitude towards

the symptoms; finding and using humour as a therapeutic tool; talking about the symptoms in the

present rather than talking about their childhood past; things that worried some patients were

seen to be ‘normal’; patients developed dependability on themselves rather than on their

therapists.

‘Paradoxical Intention is logotherapy in the true sense’ (Frankl, Psychotherapy and

Existentialism, p. 207).

In Frankl’s The Will to Meaning: Foundations and Applications of Logotherapy a few more case-

histories are given. A university student was anxious about an oral report he had to give the

following Friday. He was advised (by Edith Weisskopf-Joelson) to take his appointment calendar

and to write on every page of the week, with large letters, the word ‘ANXIETY’. He was

instructed to plan to have an anxious week. She reports him as being much relieved as now ‘he

was suffering from anxiety only, but not from anxiety about anxiety’ (Frankl, The Will to

Meaning p. 105).
Another case treated by Frankl at his Poliklinik concerned a man who refused to leave his house

for fear he would collapse on the street. He was given a thorough check-up to ensure there was

nothing wrong with his heart. Then it was suggested to him that he go out onto the street and try

and get a heart attack. ‘Tell yourself that yesterday you had two heart attacks, and today you

have time to get three – it’s still early in the morning. Tell yourself that you will have a nice, fat

coronary, and a stroke to boot’. The patient broke through the cocoon in which he was enclosed.

Frankl argues that PI can work in chronic cases too and here cites the example of a sixty-five-

year-old woman who suffered from a hand-washing compulsion for 60 years. A member of

Frankl’s staff successfully applied the paradoxical intention technique. Two psychiatrists applied

PI to compulsive gambling. The patient was a thirty-six-year-old man who had been gambling

since the age of fourteen. After he had been instructed to gamble daily during three specified

hours, the patient reported that after twenty years and five psychiatrists that this was the most

creative approach he had taken to the problem. The patient lost; within three weeks he had no

cash. The therapist then suggested he might sell his watch. Following treatment by paradoxical

intention, for the first time in more than twenty years the patient gained a remission. Frankl gives

the example of a case of the unwilling use of PI; it occurred when a school play was about to be

performed. One of the characters was a stutterer so they gave this role to a student who actually

stuttered. Soon, however, they had to give the role to someone else because as soon as he stood

up on stage to stutter he was unable to do so.

In a chapter entitled, ‘Paradoxical Intention and Dereflection’ from Frankl’s The Unheard Cry

for Meaning, he gives the example of a student who froze with fear fifteen minutes before an

exam; his mind went totally blank. He was sweating, panicky and the more he looked at his notes
the more they looked unfamiliar. Five minutes before the exam, he recalled the technique of

paradoxical intention and told himself ‘since I am going to fail anyway, I will do my very best at

failing. I will show the Professor a test so bad that it will confuse him for days. I will write down

total garbage – gibberish, answers that have nothing to do with the questions at all’. When he had

these thoughts, he started to giggle and when the exam questions were handed to him each

question made sense. He became relaxed and in a great mood. He received an A in his test and

later he said that he used PI to cure a case of the hiccups – ‘If one tries to keep hiccupping, one

can’t!’ (Frankl, The Unheard Cry for Meaning, p. 118).

A man wrote a letter to Frankl telling him he used PI for his plane phobia. So, in his mind he let

the plane explode and crash and saw himself crashing to bits in it. A month later he was about to

fly, and his hands were sweaty, his heart was palpitating, and he was scared. He imagined that

the plane exploded, that he was tumbling through the clouds, headed for the ground. Before he

could finish the fantasy, he realised that he was thinking calmly of some business he was

transacting. He tried it again – this time managing to splatter himself in a bloody heap on the

ground. When the plane was making its descent the person in question was enjoying an eagle’s

view of the land.

This case is more compulsive than phobic. A man had to check the door at night before he went

to bed. He was doing this routine ten times within a two-minute span. A colleague of Frankl’s

asked him to see how many times he could check the door within the two-minute span, to try to

set a new record. At first, he thought it was silly; after three days the compulsion had

disappeared (see Frankl, The Unheard Cry for Meaning, p. 119).

A counsellor saw a nineteen-year-old college student who was having some problems at home.

When she sat down she became tense and began to stutter. The counsellor’s natural reaction was

to say, ‘relax, just take it easy’, but remembering Frankl’s technique of paradoxical intention, he

said to her: ‘I want you to act as nervously as you can; be as tense as you can possibly be’. She

began to clench her fists and shake her hands as though they were trembling. The counsellor

responded by saying, ‘that’s good but try to be more nervous’. The humour in the session was

noted and the more she tried the less she could. Humour best illustrates our humanness. In

another case the therapist had a race with a forty-eight-year-old woman to see who could tremble

the most; they both shook their hands faster and faster to see who could win.

Another person had a fear he would choke on food – he had it for twelve years. He found it

difficult to eat and drink and became extremely anxious. He was instructed to do those very

things he feared most but also to practise relaxation whenever eating or drinking. He was given a

glass of water to drink and told to try hard to make himself choke – which he was unable to do.

Here, a combination of autogenic training and other anxiety reduction techniques were employed

together with paradoxical intention. By the twelfth session all obsessions were reported as having

disappeared. The literature on the subject Frankl has collected includes cases of students who

were afraid to give a speech but who used PI with great success. Frankl relates a case of a

stutterer who wanted to be a teacher but couldn’t because of his stutter and PI was applied so

successfully (he was told to go to the pub with his friends and show them what a good stutterer

he was) and after practising PI in a variety of settings he landed his dream job. Another case of

stuttering concerned someone who had been stuttering severely for seventeen years and was
seen, without success, by many speech therapists. After having read Frankl’s Man’s Search for

Meaning (where there is an end section on ‘Logotherapy in a Nutshell’), he tried PI on himself

and his symptoms were completely alleviated. A social worker reported a case of a young man

who came to his office with a severe case of eye winking. After unsuccessful treatment with a

psychoanalyst he was instructed to wink rapidly – as fast as possible – when talking to people.

He shouted at the social worker and stormed out of the office. He subsequently returned and was

overjoyed: it had gotten worse, so he told himself the next day he would try this strange

technique which he did with a close friend. He told himself he would wink as much as he could

but to his surprise he could not wink his eyes at all when talking to him. After a few weeks, he

didn’t think about it at all as he had become ‘normal’ in his eye winking habit (see Frankl, The

Unheard Cry for Meaning, pp. 124-130). PI can also be used with children as the following case

demonstrates. An eleven-year-old girl constantly stared at other children who complained to her

about it and even threatened her but all to no avail. Her teacher insisted that she stop staring and

she tried behaviour modification techniques, isolation punishment and one-to-one counselling.

The situation became worse. PI was applied: the teacher said to her: ‘I want you to stare at A and

R and L. First one and then the other for fifteen minutes each all day long. If you forget, I’ll

remind you. No classwork, only staring. Won’t that be fun?’ L, the girl in question, thought it

was silly and began to blush. The teacher explained to her that sometimes if we force ourselves

to do something we don’t want to do it breaks the habit. The class filed in and the teacher gave

her the secret signal to begin. The girl came up to the teacher and said, ‘I just can’t do it’. The

teacher said, ‘That’s ok. We’ll try later’. For eight consecutive days the teacher said to her,

‘Want to try staring today?’ The answer always came back the same: ‘no’! L never fell back into

her behaviour pattern of staring. The teacher used this to inform the class that they shouldn’t take
life so seriously, that, instead, they should learn to laugh at their problems and they will go away.

Once during a lecture on hypnosis, a young man said to the late great Milton H. Erickson, ‘You

may be able to hypnotize other people, but you can’t hypnotize me!’. Dr Erickson invited him to

the demonstration platform and asked him to sit down and then said: ‘I want you to stay awake,

wider and wider awake, wider and wider awake’. The subject promptly went into a deep trance

(see Frankl, The Unheard Cry for Meaning, p. 141-2).

Interestingly, there have also been cases where the person in question was instructed to use PI

during their dreams. One such person complained that her sleep was disturbed by dreams in

which she was pursued by persons who were going to shoot or knife her. Her husband’s sleep

was disturbed by her screaming and he would wake her up. She was instructed to try dream

further such dreams but stand and be shot or knifed, and her husband was told not to wake her.

She reported no more nightmares although her husband was now awakened by her laughter in

her sleep.

In another case a twenty-four-year-old male schizophrenic was instructed to pay attention to his

voices (auditory hallucinations) when he complained he couldn’t sleep because he was trying to

ignore them, and to try to hear what they are saying. The next day when asked what they were

saying he didn’t know, saying, ‘I must have fallen asleep’ (Frankl, The Unheard Cry for

Meaning, p. 143).

A Buddhist nun imagined snakes crawling all over her body and was terrified. Psychiatrists,

psychologists and psychoanalysts could not help her. A Zen psychiatrist spent five minutes with
her in her room and asked what the problem was, to which she replied, ‘Snakes crawl all over my

body and frighten me’. The Zen psychiatrist said he had to go now but would return in a week

but while he was gone he asked her to observe the snakes very carefully and on his return he

wanted her to describe their movements accurately to him. In seven days he returned and found

the nun doing her duties with no sign of illness. He asked her whether she followed his

instructions. She replied, ‘Oh yes, I centred all my attention on the snakes but I saw them no

more, for when I observed them carefully they were gone’ (Frankl, The Unheard Cry for

Meaning, p. 144).

Let me finish this section by describing three clinical cases of my own where I utilised

Paradoxical Intention with great success. A young girl consulted me on the advice of her mother

and after CBT hadn’t worked. To put it more precisely, it had worked a bit but then had stopped

working. Her presenting symptom was compulsive hand-washing – up to forty times a day. The

existential analysis had revealed a memory from a few years ago when she had brought school

friends over to her house for a BBQ but her father hadn’t cooked the chicken sufficiently and this

had given them food poisoning and made them sick. She associated her father’s hands with

bacteria and death and had developed a few phobic symptoms as a result. The CBT treatment,

which had concentrated upon reducing her symptoms, had been initially successful but it had

plateaued at 30 times a day. I instructed her to get as dirty as possible. We discussed ways she

might do this from bringing in the coals for the fire to running her fingers under paintings at her

grandmother’s old house to jumping on her wet dog. Every time she came in to my consulting

room for weekly visits I told her to up the ante. She asked a lot about how she would get clean

after. I directed her attention to dirt the whole time. Within a few sessions her washing
compulsion dropped to a normal two or three times a day. I asked her mother to report to me in 6

months; when she did she told me that her symptoms had not returned.

A second case concerned a father who was consulting with me with his own issues. Then one

day he brought in an incident which had occurred involving his young daughter. She had gone to

school inadvertently wearing odd socks. When this was discovered she got very embarrassed and

upset, especially as the other children taunted her about this. I suggested that every Friday the

father would wear colourful odd socks and with the permission of her teachers she could go to

school on Friday wearing odd socks. Soon the whole class was having an odd sock day – the first

Friday of the month and some of the teachers joined in! She was the star attraction of the whole

show.

The third and final case concerned a four-year-old boy who was twirling the hair on his head.

The father asked me for advice. Their strategy was to tell him that his hair would fall out when

he was older, all of which increased his hair twirling and his anxiety. I instructed the father to set

aside some time every evening where they could sit together and have a hair twirling session

together and see how many times they could race their hands around a lock of hair. I encouraged

him to build this new routine into the child’s activities. After a short period of time, the hair

twirling ceased completely.

Anxiety
Table of Contents

 Introduction
 Anxiety in Philosophy

 Kierkegaard: The Anxiety of Existence

 Freud: Anxiety and Sex

 Heidegger: Anxiety and Fear

 Lacan: Anxiety between Desire and Jouissance

 Frankl: The Anxiety of Meaninglessness

 Against Anxiety

 Assignment
Introduction

Anxiety affects people in their bodies, and minds; it is generally seen as a medico-psychological

condition or disorder, but it is also a metaphysical and spiritual issue. Psyche and soma are one

or, to put it more precisely, two aspects of the same underlying reality. But what are the

experiences of anxiety? We enumerated them earlier: nervousness, dry throat, shaky hands,

unsteady voice, perspiring forehead, butterflies in the stomach etc.

There exist many avenues of exploration and treatment modalities. What suits one person may

not suit another and where it may be appropriate for one person to have medical intervention, it

will be appropriate for another to consult a logotherapist or spiritual director and talk through

one’s concerns and existential conflicts.

A female diagnosed with panphobia from Alexander Morison’s 1843 book The Physiognomy of

Mental Diseases.
Anxiety in Philosophy

In his The Art of Rhetoric, Aristotle analyses emotions such as anger, fear, confidence, calm,

shame, pity, indignation, envy, jealousy, etc. To repeat: Aristotle recognised that any given

emotional state is the result of three factors: the underlying psychological condition, the events

that precipitated or provoked the event, and the intentional object of the emotion. This schema

appreciates the rationality of the emotions. If we take the example of anger, Aristotle will say

what state people are in when they are angry, with what people they are accustomed to be angry

and in what circumstances.

In the nineteenth-century, the Danish philosopher Sören Kierkegaard provided a full-length

existential treatment of anxiety in his The Concept of Anxiety (sometimes translated as The

Concept of Dread). German philosopher Martin Heidegger follows in the twentieth-century with

a description of Dasein (being) including the fundamental mood of anxiety (angst) in his

magnum opus, Being and Time and also in What is Metaphysics? Both these existentialists

influenced Viktor Frankl.

Kierkegaard: The Anxiety of Existence

Anxiety does not feature in Aristotle’s treatment of the emotions in his Rhetoric. It would seem

that anxiety is a modern phenomenon. The subtitle of Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety is A

Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin; this

gives us an indication of his intent. His study purports to be both theological and psychological.

In this work, Kierkegaard describes the nature and forms of anxiety, placing it within the mental-
emotional states of human existence that precedes the leap of faith to the spiritual state of

Christian belief. The book was published in 1844 when Kierkegaard was thirty-one years old and

the year in which Friedrich Nietzsche was born. Kierkegaard himself lived intimately with

anxiety and this is reflected in the numerous references he makes to the subject in his journal

entries and in works that both precede and succeed The Concept of Anxiety. In this present work

Kierkegaard deals with the theme of ‘anxiety over nothing’. Anxiety is directed towards the

future and is an element in the make-up of every human being, Kierkegaard contends.

According to Kierkegaard, man is soma (body), psyche (soul) and spirit; the first two pertain to

the temporal realm and the third to the eternal realm. In this tripartite distinction, Kierkegaard

reveals himself to be a dialectical thinker par excellence – we think of his description of life’s

three stages: the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. Anxiety is ontological. This is a key

point. It is not just psychological. Or better, it is more fundamental than mere psychology. There

is a difference between anxiety and fear; fear has an object, anxiety doesn’t. The ‘object’ of

anxiety is nothing; it is nothingness (and nothingness is not an object). Fear has an object – I am

afraid, not ‘of afraid’, but of the face peering at me through the window at night. I am anxious,

and I don’t know why. Fear relates to objects such as danger and pain. It is psychological. Fear

can be conquered, mastered. Anxiety cannot. Why? Because one can’t overcome one’s

fundamental finitude, one’s creaturely contingency. Freedom, and the possibilities that freedom

brings, produces anxiety.

Anxiety, as both Kierkegaard and Heidegger note, is always present, though it may be latent.

Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy will not be able to remove such ontological anxiety, but it can
help with removing compulsory forms of psychological anxiety and reduce the intensity of fears

surrounding it.

For Kierkegaard, man is anxious as he stands between the temporal and the eternal domain. The

self is situated at the juncture of nature and spirit. He is both in freedom and in necessity too,

limited and limitless. Man is a synthesis of the psychical and the physical. Therein, his anxiety.

The existential psychologist, Rollo May, likewise concurs that anxiety is not just one affect

amongst others but an ontological characteristic of man as such. It is a threat to human Dasein.

Anxiety is the result of freedom; we could not experience anxiety if we were not free.

Kierkegaard compares anxiety to dizziness: ‘He whose eye happens to look down into the

yawning abyss becomes dizzy’. Why is this? Because ‘anxiety is the dizziness of freedom’.

Anxiety comes into the world with the asphyxia of birth. One associates anxiety with the future

not the past. The past is the past of history (and memory); the future is the future of possibility

(and desire). Thus, Kierkegaard can say, writing of anxiety’s relationship with time: ‘Freedom’s

possibility announces itself in anxiety’. In the Supplement to the work, which contains selected

entries from Kierkegaard’s journals and papers, he describes his anxiety as ‘the eternal night

brooding within me’.

Freud: Anxiety and Sex

‘Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety’ is Freud’s 1926 paper on the subject. His main point is that

the accumulation of sexual excitation finds its way out in a transformed way as anxiety. Anxiety,

so, is a libidinal impulse; it is transformed libido. Sex produces anxiety.

Freud attempts to chart the differences between inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety, one that is

not altogether successful. A symptom may be described as the presence of some pathological

process. Freud describes it as ‘a sign of, and substitute for, an instinctual satisfaction which has

remained in abeyance’. An inhibition is the expression of a restriction of an ego-function. For

Freud, the ego (self) is the seat of anxiety.

The case history of ‘Little Hans’ (the five-year-old phobic child) is important for our

understanding of the interconnections that Freud is attempting to establish in this article. Freud

observes: ‘Little Hans’s unaccountable fear of horses was the symptom and his inability to go

into the streets was an inhibition, a restriction which his ego had imposed on itself so as not to

arouse the anxiety-symptom’. Little Hans had an anxiety about being bitten by a horse just as the

Wolf Man (another one of Freud’s case-histories) had one about being devoured by a wolf. Both

relate to the paternal function, to put it in Lacanian terms (i.e., the symbolic father). Their

anxiety produced repression and not, as Freud formerly believed, the repression that produced

the anxiety. More specifically, the anxiety felt in animal phobias is the ego’s fear of castration

(symbolic for prohibition/deprivation), according to the Freudian formulation. Freud admits that

outbreaks of anxiety occur in situations of danger or by undischarged sexual excitation. These

animal phobias may be called or classified as ‘anxiety hysteria’. In a phobia (which is really a

lie) the ego is able to escape anxiety by means of avoidance or of inhibitory symptoms. Anxiety

is the affective response to danger, a reaction on the part of the ego to danger, and this danger is

the danger of castration. The phobia holds the anxiety in abeyance. Anxiety is a reaction to a
situation of danger. Symptoms are created to avoid anxiety. (The fear of death is analogous, for

Freud, to the fear of castration).

Birth is the first experience of anxiety and is the experience of a separation from the mother, a

separation that can be compared to a castration. Anxiety is a symbol of separation but according

to Freud the affective reactions to a separation are pain and mourning and not anxiety and this

hiatus is never completely cleared up by Freud. Though to be fair to Freud he does acknowledge

this himself when he proclaims: Non liquet: ‘it is not clear’. ‘Anxiety is not so simple a matter’.

The ten sections in the work and the addenda that follows that section VIII is the key chapter.

We may summarise Freud’s findings thus:

1) Anxiety is an affect. In other words, it is something that is felt. It is an affective state.

2) Anxiety has the quality of unpleasure though this is not unique to anxiety.

3) Anxiety is accompanied by marked physical sensations – motor innervations such as

palpitations, etc. so that we are justified in speaking of the physiology as well as the

psychology of anxiety.

4) Anxiety states reproduce the trauma of birth.

5) Anxiety does not occupy an exceptional position among the affective states.

6) Anxiety is a reaction to a state of danger; that is its function.

7) Manifestations of anxiety in children include: when the child is alone or in the dark;

when it finds itself with an unknown person; when it misses someone who is loved and

longed for.
With regards point 7 above, Freud does not say why mourning does not set in here instead of

anxiety. What determines anxiety in hysteria is loss of love, in obsessional neurosis it is fear of

the superego that causes anxiety, while in phobias it is fear of castration. Finally, in the addenda,

Freud adds: ‘Anxiety [Angst] has an unmistakeable relation to expectation: it is anxiety about

something. It has a quality of indefiniteness and lack of object. In precise speech we use the word

‘fear’ [Furcht] rather than ‘anxiety’ [Angst]’.

Heidegger: Anxiety and Fear

In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger also distinguishes between fear and anxiety. Firstly, fear.

Heidegger analyses the phenomenon of fear under three aspects: 1) that in the face of which we

fear, 2) fearing, and 3) that about which we fear. These belong together. That in the face of

which we fear is the fearsome; we encounter it within the world. That in the face of which we

fear is threatening. It is detrimental to us. Fearing, as such, is always a slumbering possibility of

our being-in-the-world. Finally, that which fear fears about is that entity which is afraid –

Dasein. Further, only a being whose existence is an issue can be afraid. Fear bewilders us. One

can also speak of fear about Others; this is fearing for them. We are apprehensive about the

Other, lest he/she be torn away from us.

If something threatening breaks in upon being, fear becomes alarm and we become alarmed at

things that are familiar to us. If it is unfamiliar, fear becomes dread. The two together may

become terror.
Anxiety, for Heidegger, is a distinctive way in which Dasein is disclosed. Anxiety can creep up

when we are absorbed in ‘the They’ (the Crowd/herd); this is a fleeing of Dasein from itself.

Fear and anxiety are kindred phenomena. Fear occurs when we shrink back in the face of what

threatens us. Anxiety makes fear possible. Our very being in the world causes us anxiety. ‘ That

in the face of which one has anxiety … is Being-in-the-world as such’. While fear has an object,

anxiety doesn’t. ‘That in the face of which one has anxiety is not an entity within-the-world’.

That in the face of which one is anxious is indefinite. In anxiety, one doesn’t encounter this or

that thing. What threatens is nowhere, according to Heidegger. It is the world itself and not a

particular object that oppresses us. When anxiety has subsided, we say ‘it was nothing’. No-

thing. ‘Being-in-the-world itself is that in the face of which anxiety is anxious’. The world as

world is disclosed to Dasein by anxiety.

In anxiety, we feel ‘uncanny’. In the original German, this word is unheimlich –which literally

means ‘not at home’. In anxiety, we feel not at home, homeless. Anxiety is not-being-at-home

(das Nicht-zuhause-sein). Uncanniness is not-at-home-ness. ‘Dasein is anxious in the very depths

of its Being’. In ‘What is Metaphysics?’ (1929), Heidegger returns to the point of view addressed

a few years earlier in Being and Time that nothing in particular makes one anxious. In section 62,

he observes: ‘The nothing that anxiety brings before us unveils the nullity that determines Dasein

in its ground – which is its being thrown into death’. Anxiety is bound to the nothing, to the

Nihil. The nothing is the name for that which arises from nowhere, for all that is dark in

existence, but also to all that is light and too brilliant to be seen.
If, according to Heidegger, science wants to know nothing about the nothing, we are scientists.

‘We know it, the nothing, in that we wish to know nothing about it’. Nothing is not an object.

Nothing is the negation of the totality of beings. Boredom is connected with the nothing.

Boredom is when time drags on; it drifts in and out of man’s being-in-the-world ‘like a muffling

fog’. Boredom, like anxiety, is a mood, an attunement. Anxiety, though, is the fundamental

mood, one that is not reducible to fearfulness. ‘Anxiety is basically different from fear’. Anxiety

relates to nothing, to no-thing. Anxiety is indeed anxiety in the face of …, but not in the face of

this or that thing. Anxiety in the face of … is always anxiety for …, but not for this or that’. In

anxiety, one feels ill at ease. Why? ‘Anxiety reveals the nothing’. We ‘hover’ in anxiety; anxiety

leaves us hanging and robs us of speech. We are anxious for nothing. In anxiety’s malaise, ‘we

often try to silent the vacant stillness with compulsive talk [but] this only proves the presence of

the nothing’. In anxiety, the nothing is there. The nothing reveals itself in the mood that is

anxiety. In our being-in-the-world, Dasein experiences ‘the clear night of the nothing of anxiety’.

However, according to Heidegger, this original anxiety is usually repressed. ‘Anxiety is there. It

is only sleeping. Its breath quivers perpetually through Dasein’. In contrast to anxiety, we may

mention joy and ‘the cheerfulness and gentleness of creative longing’. But this repressed or

concealed anxiety may irrupt at any minute. ‘Original anxiety can awaken in existence at any

moment. It needs no unusual event to rouse it’ and it makes man ‘a lieutenant of the nothing’.

From nothing, nothing comes: ex nihilo nihil fit.

Hegel had asserted that pure being and pure nothing were the same even though science would

like to dismiss the nothing ‘with a lordly wave of the hand’. However, for Heidegger, when the

strangeness of being oppresses us it evokes wonder just as when the nothing is revealed to us the
‘why?’ looms before us. The question of the nothing, which is a metaphysical question, puts us,

the questioner, in question. From anxiety, so, philosophy stems; some sort of philosophising

occurs from the nothing of anxiety. This is the positive aspect of the experience of anxiety. From

the phenomenon of anxiety, we ask the most metaphysical question of all. It is Heidegger’s and it

is this one: ‘Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing?’
A marble bust of the Roman Emperor Decius from the Capitoline Museum which conveys the

impression of anxiety and weariness in a man shouldering great responsibilities.

Lacan: Anxiety between Desire and Jouissance

It is in Seminar X, from 1962-3, L’angoisse (Anxiety), that Jacques Lacan, the French Freudian,

explores the theme of anxiety in so far as it relates to psychoanalysis. Anxiety is a sign and

signal of the Real of trauma.

For Lacan, ‘anxiety is the one which does not deceive’. We could describe the Real as the order

of anxiety. Lacan situates anxiety between jouissance (painful pleasure/ enjoyment) and desire.

Anxiety is situated in the gap between desire and enjoyment. Desire is constituted after having

gone through anxiety. What the Other wants along the path which condescends to my desire is

my anxiety. If the Other wants to enjoy me – this, for Lacan, has no other meaning other than to

stir up my anxiety. Why? Because all desire implies castration (lack/loss). The Other can reach

me only by castrating (depriving) me. The Real, so, is the object, par excellence, of all anxiety.

Anxiety, for its part, always pertains to loss. All our defences, such as phobias and fetishisms,

are protections against anxiety. Anxiety is thus present in all neurotic structures especially in

phobias. Castration is what saves the subject from anxiety. Anxiety is one way of sustaining

desire just as desire is anxiety’s remedy. ‘Acting out’ and ‘passages to the act’ are last resorts,

last defences against anxiety, according to Lacan.

Let us turn now to the Franklian understanding of anxiety as a symptom of what Frankl terms the

‘existential vacuum’ of meaninglessness and loss of an ordering principle in one’s life. Such a
noetic emphasis distinguishes Frankl from the psychoanalytic practitioners, as worthy as their

insights are. As important as psychodynamics are, it is the focus on noödynamics that

characterises Frankl’s unique approach to the subject.

Frankl: The Anxiety of Meaninglessness

People who suffer from anxiety disorder are ‘afraid of something that could happen to them’. In

paradoxical intention, which is the logotherapeutic treatment for such disorders, the patient is

directed to wish for that which he fears so much (the inversion of intention). A phobia is

maintained by the anxiety reducing mechanism of avoidance. The phobia can only be overcome

(logotherapy has this in common with CBT here) when the person faces the phobic situation and

paradoxical intention (PI) offers itself to this precise end (the object of fear is confronted).

Logotherapy poses the question: ‘What would happen if we prompted phobic patients to attempt

to desire that which they fear?’. Paradoxical intention takes the wind out of the sails of

anticipatory anxiety and effects self-distancing, often involving humour and hyperbole in the

process. This is a brief summary of what has already been discussed earlier.

Anxiety neuroses are reactive neuroses. Frankl explains: ‘The anxiety neurotic reaction pattern

involves anticipatory anxiety in which an anxious reaction (say, stuttering or sweating

excessively) is feared and fought against, and this fear then gives rise to an anxious reaction,

forming a vicious circle’. Reactive neuroses (and PI is the specific treatment of reactive

neuroses, as we said, at the heart of which is self-distancing which counters excessive self-

scrutiny) are disorders that arise from a psychological reaction to the effects of a somatic or

psychological disturbance. Psychoanalysis may lead to a severe scrutinizing of neurotic

symptoms thus increasing the anticipatory anxiety. Anticipatory anxiety fixes and fixates the

symptom in question. There are three primary neurotic reaction patterns, according to Frankl:

anxiety neurotic reaction patterns, obsessive-compulsive and sexual neurotic ones. Reactive

anxiety is a reflexive anxiety. There is also the noögenic anxiety neurosis. Noögenic neuroses are

disorders arising from spiritual or existential reasons. Anxiety is one of the symptoms of the

existential vacuum and thus of a noögenic neurosis. Frankl writes that ‘only a being who is free

can be afraid, and only a being that is responsible can be guilty’. And anxiety can also play a part

in psychoses (in cases, for example, of an endogenous depression).

We must distinguish between primary and secondary anxiety. Fear of anxiety is secondary

anxiety – Frankl calls this ‘anticipatory anxiety’. Primary anxiety has a cause but not a reason. A

reason is psychological (or noölogical); a cause is biological/physiological. We may thus speak

of psychological (or noölogical) reasons and somatic causes. To take an example from Frankl:

an onion is no reason for crying though peeling it may be the cause for the secretion of tears.

Conversely, tickling is not a reason for laughing (joking would be a reason) but rather the cause

that releases a laugh reflex. It is not uncommon that hyperthyroidism is the somatic cause of the

primary anxiety of agoraphobia, which doesn’t mean that the hyperthyroidism is itself capable of

giving rise to anxiety neurosis. The somatogenic result and symptoms of hyperthyroidism as an

illness is, what Frankl calls, a ‘readiness’ for anxiety – it is a reactive anticipatory anxiety.

People with anxiety disorders flee from anxiety. Frankl delineates the process thus: Anxiety

attack→ Fear of the anxiety→ Flight from the anxiety→ Reactive anxiety neurosis. It is a fear of

fear. For example, the fear could be fainting or having a heart attack or a stroke. Such fearful

people react to their fear of fear with flight. They may not ever leave the house; ‘agoraphobia is
the paradigm of this first neurotic reaction pattern’. Phobias are pathogenic because they are

partly due to the endeavour to avoid the situation in which anxiety arises. The flight from anxiety

through the avoidance of the anxiety-provoking or producing situation is decisive for the

perpetuation of the anxiety-neurotic pattern of reaction. Frankl highlights the mechanisms

involved thus: The symptom generates a corresponding phobia; the phobia reinforces the

symptom and the symptom thus intensified confirms patients in their fear of a return of the

symptom. This is depicted in the diagram below.

 Produces

Symptom Reinforces Phobia

Intensifies

Anticipatory anxiety makes it clear that ‘fear makes real that which it fears’. Frankl asserts: ‘If

the psychological weeds ... are to be removed, then the existential vacuum must be filled. Only

when this happens can the therapy be completed, and the neurosis conquered’. What must be

risked and accomplished is entry into the spiritual dimension. This would involve making it clear
to the patient that their existence is not devoid of personal meaning, that man not only has a body

(soma) or mind (psyche) but is a spirit (noös). This is in substantial agreement with

Kierkegaard’s existential anthropology.

Against Anxiety

Many philosophers urge us to live in the present (Frankl too), cultivating the meanings of the

moment but with an eye on the future. Biblically, let us cite Matthew 6: 25-27, as it is a famous

saying on anxiety:

‘Therefore, I tell you, do not be anxious (merimnate) about your life, what you shall eat
or what you shall drink, nor about your body, what you put on. Is not life more than food,
and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap
nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more
value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit to his span of
life?’

Jesus is against anxiety. Jesus’s temporality is in the opposite direction to Heidegger’s. In the

latter, anxiety is for the future, whereas in the former, the future is not our doing and we are told

not to waste time worrying about the morrow – each day has enough trouble of its own.

‘Sufficient unto the day the evil thereof’. The future is God’s, not ours. If a man gathers a great

harvest and thinks himself secure for the future, he is a fool, for this very night God will require

his soul of him (Luke 12: 16-20). ‘Therefore, do not be anxious for tomorrow (aurion), for

tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day’ (Luke 6:

34). Jesus is enjoining us to live in the present moment, and to trust the divine

Presence/Providence in our lives. Today is the day of the Lord. When tomorrow comes,

tomorrow will be today and will absorb all our attention. Anxiety is lost time for it frets about the
future; ‘Lord, protect us from all anxiety’. Life is happening here just as happiness is now, as the

Stoics say, or it is never.

‘And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow;
they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like
one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive, and
tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you?’ (Matthew 6: 22-30).

To live in the flow of presence is to live in a time without anxiety over the future. We are never

without our worries, but we must worry without worry. Let the future come. The triad of faith,

hope and trust are required. ‘And do not keep striving for what you are to eat and what you are to

drink, and do not keep worrying. For it is the nations of the world that strive after all these

things; and your Father knows that you need them. Instead, strive for his kingdom, and these

things will be given to you as well’ (Luke 12: 29-31). So, we try and forget the past; forget the

future; and live in the Open Moment of the Eternal Now … today. If our redemption from the

future is to live without anxiety, the only redemption from the past is forgiveness, but this is

another topic. The coming of the kingdom of justice and love lays anxiety to rest. The kingdom

disarms our anxiety in the sapiential eschatology of the Kingdom sayings and saws. To live fully

in the present moment is, thus, to be without anxiety; indeed, it is the ultimate answer to anxiety,

be we theists or not.

Assignment

Provide an outline of Frankl’s understanding of anxiety.

 Boredom
Table of Contents

 Introduction

 Boredom and the Noögenic Neuroses

 Divertissement

 The Challenge of Boredom

 Time and Waiting

 Symptoms of the Collective Neuroses

 Boredom as Attitude More than Affect

 Leisure and Lack of Meaning

 Types and Varieties of Boredom

 The Mood of Boredom

 Effects of Boredom

 Bertrand Russell on Boredom

 Assignment
Introduction

‘Boredom has become a spiritual illness of the first order’: this is how Viktor Frankl describes

boredom in his On the Theory and Therapy of Mental Disorders. Seeing as boredom is,

according to Frankl, the main symptom of the existential vacuum, it has received surprisingly

little attention by logotherapists or philosophers. We will attempt to redress and remedy this

situation here. Can boredom be a blessing? What is boredom’s relation to leisure, melancholia,

ennui, desire, tristesse, the taedium vitae? Let us explore the subject in more detail.

Boredom by Gaston de La Touche, 1893.

Boredom and the Noögenic Neuroses

Arthur Schopenhauer maintained that the human person moves between boredom and need. But

need we? If we know what causes boredom can we cure it? If a final solution is not possible,

perhaps we can mitigate its power and presence through pleasure or purpose? What threatens

contemporary man is the alleged meaninglessness of his life – the existential vacuum within, and

this latent vacuum becomes manifest in the state of boredom, what Frankl calls a ‘spiritual crisis’

of meaning. Noögenic neurosis constitutes about 55% of given clinical cases and is a direct

response to ‘a complete emptiness of purpose in life’ (Frankl, On the Theory and Therapy of

Mental Disorders, p. 174), whose chief dynamic is existential frustration, created by a vacuum of

meaning in personal existence, and manifested by the symptom of boredom. Now, the noögenic

neurosis should not be identified with the existential vacuum. The former is an illness, the latter

is part of the human condition. In The Feeling of Meaninglessness, Frankl observes that this

inner emptiness, which he is calling the existential vacuum (‘ev’), is ‘the feeling of having lost

the meaning of existence’ (Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness, p. 86). The ‘ev’ ‘becomes

manifest in the condition of boredom’ (Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness, p. 87). So,

boredom brings on, more than anything else does, the existential vacuum. Two logotherapists

(Lukas and Crumbaugh) have put noögenic neuroses at 20%. Frankl, for his part, puts the

percentage at 25% for his European students compared with 60% for his American ones. So,

there are wide discrepancies and differences here in the statistical studies.

Divertissement
It was Blaise Pascal who, in modern times, charted the inner cartography of the experience of

boredom and aligned it, almost identifying it, with the human condition. In his Pensées he

diagnoses our little lives thus: ‘we seek rest by struggling against certain obstacles, and once they

are overcome, rest proves intolerable because of the boredom it produces. We must get away

from it and crave excitement. We think either of present or threatened miseries, and even if we

feel quite safe on either side, boredom on its own account would not fail to emerge from the

depths of our hearts, where it is naturally rooted, and poison our whole mind’. For Pascal,

boredom is ubiquitous and endemic; what he seems to be describing here is the experience of

existential boredom which we flee by various diversions. He goes on: ‘man is so unhappy that he

would be bored even if had no cause for boredom, by the very nature of his temperament, and he

is so vain that, though he has a thousand and one basic reasons for being bored, the slightest

thing, like pushing a ball with a billiard cue, will be enough to divert him’. So, boredom or the

capacity for boredom lurks within it all and we flee or fight it. Those are the traditional reactions

to it. Pascal again: ‘A given man lives a life free from boredom by gambling a small sum every

day .... Make him play ... for nothing; his interest will not be fired, and he will become bored, so

it is not just entertainment he wants. A half-hearted entertainment without excitement will bore

him .... He must create some target for his passions and then arouse his desire, anger, fear, for

this object he has created’. According to Pascal, the cause of boredom is man’s condition; its

cure consists in distractions: ‘if he lacks diversion and has no absorbing passion or entertainment

to keep boredom away, he will soon be depressed and unhappy. Without diversion there is no

joy; with diversion there is no sadness’.

Pascal depicted the human person as a being doomed to boredom without God. There is no solid

satisfaction in the soul without sublimity. But for the solace of diversions we should all be bored

to death. Life is a boring nothingness unless underpinned by transcendent reality. If diversion is

flight from the nothing, boredom is the realisation of the nothing. Pascal opines: ‘Man finds

nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation,

without diversion, without effort. Then he frets his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence,

helplessness, emptiness. And at once there wells up from the depths of his soul boredom, gloom,

depression, chagrin, resentment, despair’. This is as good a description of the existential vacuum

as one is likely to get. The dread of the void, the horror vacui, is a foretaste of death; the only

cure is purpose rather than pleasure or power or profits. The Stoic spiritual practise of memento

mori runs against such divertissements. Death appears more frightening the less one has lived.

Boredom is life’s dimunition and despair. Existentialists such as Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer and

Nietzsche are aware, all too aware, as aware as Pascal, of this modern predicament of boredom

and see life flooded with, and exacerbated by, ennui. Without meaning, life can become one long

yawn. If the same is always boring, the choice is clear: chase ever more sources of sensory and

sensual stimulations or change one’s attitude.

Another choice confronting us which is boredom’s ‘beyond’: transgression or transcendence. In

the case of the former boredom is a cause of violence, in the latter it is a cause of values. It is the

difference between emptiness and ethics. Locked up in one’s self where ‘me’ becomes a monad,

encased within ego, boredom swells ups and strangles, becoming pure immanence. The world is

shut out and shunned. As Samuel Beckett put it: ‘Longing the so-said mind long lost to

longing .... Longing that all go. Dim go. Void go. Longing go. Vain longing that vain longing go’
(Worstward Ho). But Beckett’s own work left a stain upon the silence of the world; creativity

was his path to meaning, like Joyce, and in becoming artists they managed to save themselves

from madness and formed in the smithy of their souls the uncreated conscience of their race.

The Challenge of Boredom

To change gear and put these Pascalian insights in a Franklian framework: the cause of boredom

is the existential frustration of the will to meaning; its cure: dereflection onto something more

meaningful, that engages us in our tri-dimensional being.

A contemporary psychologist (Csikszentmihalyi) has described such absorbed creative activity

and meaningful existential engagement as ‘flow’ (which we noted earlier), which is delicately

balanced between boredom and anxiety. When we have too little challenge, we become bored.

When the challenge is too great, we get anxious. The answer in such cases is mindfulness

meditation which is a training in attention, alluded to many times by Frankl in the corpus of his

works but never fully explicated. This is the practise of presence to self which the Stoics called

prosoché or ‘awareness’ as the basis of all meditative practice. Increased capacity for absorbed

attention decreases both boredom and anxiety. The non-Pascalian answer is to observe our

distractions but not to react to them. This is the very essence of spiritual or noetic (and

logotherapeutic) self-distancing, which is at the heart of all meditation.

One hears children say: ‘what will we do now? Such is the ennui of childhood that every adult

carries. Our lives are punctuated, punctured by spells of boredom which Adam Phillips, the

British psychoanalyst, in his book, On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, describes as ‘that state
of suspended anticipation in which things are started and nothing begins, the mood of diffuse

restlessness which contains that most absurd and paradoxical wish, the wish for a desire’ (Adam

Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, p. 71). The mood of boredom is a point of view,

a perspective on the world. Clinically, if we are unable to be bored what else are we unable to

do? The bored person is waiting unconsciously for an experience of anticipation. So, boredom

should not be sabotaged by distraction. In Winnicottian terms we can relate it to the achievement

of being alone in the presence of our mothers (lovers or Others). When we experience an

existential frustration, which is at the root of boredom, we are preoccupied by our lack of

preoccupation. In ‘the banal crisis of boredom’ (Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling and Being

Bored, p. 72) we are waiting, in some sense, for ourselves, as much as for something to happen

to us. Boredom is both an incapacity and an opportunity. Most predicaments contain within

themselves problematical and positive aspects. The mood of boredom must hold lest acting-out

occurs or avoidance. In all existential experiences of emptiness, unconscious possibilities of

desire lurk and loom. The opposite of inhibition is, perhaps, invitation; the bored person

experiences an inhibition and needs an invitation. The bored person ‘is absorbed by his lack of

absorption, and yet he is also preparing for something of which he is unaware, something that

will eventually occasion an easy transition or a mild surprise of interest’ (Adam Phillips, On

Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, p. 75). Boredoms are irruptions, interruptions after and

before something – transitional states. If the bored person is looking for something to engage,

encourage or engross him, then ‘attention’ becomes the answer.

Time and Waiting

But what to do with one’s time? Boredom is always related to time. ‘After all, who can wait for

nothing?’ (Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, p. 79). And in the waiting, if it

is not too quickly foreclosed, we learn to defer, to postpone pleasure. This may be called the will

to substitution. It is the need or demand for every absence to become a presence, but as French

psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan tells us, the demand can wait... We wait and try and do other things

other than waiting (think of waiting a long time for a friend to arrive at a designated place for a

coffee – isn’t it hard to enjoy those for whom you have waited too long?). And we often get

bored in the waiting: ‘the boredom of protest that is always a screen for rage’ (Adam Phillips,

On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, p. 80). So, we might think of boredom as a defence

against waiting. Boredom paralyses because it signals a destruction of meaning. As Phillips

explains: ‘In boredom there is the lure of a possible object of desire, and the lure of the escape

from desire, of its meaninglessness’ (Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, pp.

80-1). Of course, we often don’t know for what we are waiting and, in that sense, the analytic

attitude has been described as one of ‘attentive boredom’. Outside the clinic, boredom becomes

‘a permanent suspended animation of desire’ (Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling and Being

Bored, p. 82).

‘Repose is a good thing, but boredom is its brother’, Voltaire voiced. We know nature abhors a

vacuum especially when that void is the existential emptiness of boredom. In The Conquest of

Happiness, British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, wrote: ‘Boredom is ... a vital consideration for

the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it’. What is the

source of boredom, so? Sartre’s wise answer: it is when there is simultaneously too much and not
enough. This seems to go to the kernel of the problem: it’s a combination of too much comfort

and not enough creation.

In ‘The Storyteller’, in his book, Illuminations, the mystical Marxist, Walter Benjamin, writes

this: ‘Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves

drives him away’. This rustling can conceivably be anything: from Pascalian diversions and

distractions to Franklian dereflections; from avoidance to attitudinal alteration.

We seek myriad ways to mitigate boredom and occupy leisure and our lonely hours. The need

for meaningfulness in life is metaphysical. And as humans we influence and are influenced in

turn by the society in which we live. Frankl writes: ‘The present era is marked by a failure to

fulfil the will to meaning, which can lead to an exaggerated will to pleasure. The existential

vacuum that results from failing to fulfil the will to meaning is most powerfully felt during

leisure time in the form of boredom’ (Frankl, On the Theory and Therapy of Mental Disorders,

p. 155).

Symptoms of the Collective Neuroses

According to Frankl, four symptoms characterise the collective neurosis of our time:

provisionalism (having a provisional existential attitude in which one immerses oneself solely in

the present moment without due care or forethought for the future); fatalism (a fatalistic attitude,

believing life is fated or controlled by outside forces such as astrological predictions. But as

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar says: ‘The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars but in ourselves’);

collectivism (collective thinking in which one becomes absorbed by The They (Das Man) – the
crowd, abandoning the view of the self as free and responsible. (As Kierkegaard opined: ‘The

crowd is untruth; truth is subjectivity’); fanaticism (which ignores the personhood of the Other).

If freedom and responsibility are the hallmarks of human spirituality then all four symptoms of

the collective neurosis of the current time (the pathology of the Zeitgeist) can, Frankl contends,

be traced back to a flight from responsibility and to a fear of freedom. ‘The symptoms indicate a

spiritual weariness or nihilism’ (Frankl, On the Theory and Therapy of Mental Disorders, p.

155). People are in flight from an inner desolation and existential emptiness – from a feeling that

there is no goal or meaning to their existence or in life. In such cases boredom becomes an ever-

increasing problem. It’s a problem for the young and those with advanced age where the will to

meaning is frustrated and even where there is a high standard of living, Frankl says, many young

people commit criminal offenses out of boredom. The existential vacuum may, of course, be

masked through work-mania, will to power and the will to money. ‘Sunday neurosis’ is thus not

only the ‘illness of managers’ but of all those – young, old, unemployed, workaholics – who

become bored and are unable to dereflect and self-transcend their predicament and turn it into

productivity or creativity.

Sunday neurosis can end in suicide. Frankl cites a statistic: on the basis of 50 suicide attempts;

‘they were all ultimately and actually to be traced back neither to illness nor to economic trouble,

neither to professional nor to other conflicts, but amazingly to one thing only: to boredom

(Frankl, On the Theory and Therapy of Mental Disorders, p. 160). Individuals, it is worth noting,

who are not clinically neurotic can be collectively neurotic. Max Scheler: ‘The endless

emptiness of space and time is the emptiness of the human heart’; anxiety is always afraid of the
Nothing, which boredom brings. The answer is always to find meaning and purpose, a goal and

life-task – a passion which will consume one. Schopenhauer saw the world through gray glasses

just as others see it through rose-coloured spectacles (see Frankl, On the Theory and Therapy of

Mental Disorders, p, 175, note 3). The thing is to see it as it is – in all its squalor and splendour,

and to engage with life meaningfully.

Boredom as Attitude More than Affect

Boredom is an existential challenge and is more of an attitude than an affect. Boredom relates to

insomnia in that both experiences confront the sufferer with an inner void, whereby the ‘I’ loses

its identity in the dark of nonbeing. In both boredom and insomnia, sensations slumber like a fog

and threaten to submerge us, phenomenologically speaking. Frankl, at least once, cited

Bernano’s book, The Diary of a Country Priest, in which the village priest provides us with a

destructive account of the nature of boredom, describing the inhabitants of the place as being

consumed by boredom which he likens to a fog. This fog is a mist in the mind, formless and

objectless, like anxiety. Boredom brings to consciousness the awareness of a loss, of a weariness

without why. To be more precise, we should speak of boredoms in the plural because as Adam

Phillips rightly observes, boredom includes a multiplicity of moods. If there is an overlap

between boredom and anxiety there is also a parallel between boredom and depression. If ten

percent of the population suffer from depression at some point in their lives, it is probable that

100% do so in the case of boredom. But boredom is more than ‘just in the mind’, as it pertains to

social practises in which we participate. So much so that we can surely identify with Lord

Byron’s proclamation: ‘There’s little left but to be bored or bore’. In such cases, we kill time, as

we wait endlessly in airport lounges, in shop queues, for the phone to ring, for the text to arrive,
for someone to call at the door, anyone, waiting, in the end, for Beckett’s Godot or Sartre’s Satan

in No Exit, none of whom show up.

Leisure and Lack of Meaning

In psychological studies and surveys, it seems that men are more likely to be more bored than

women (an idea first propounded by Nietzsche) and that it decreases with age (an insight

deriving originally from Schopenhauer) but maybe people just get used to it. Perhaps

Kierkegaard can be forgiven his hyperbole when he says that ‘Boredom is the root of all evil’

(see his Either-Or, Part One), seeing as it has been linked to and become associated with drug

and alcohol abuse, eating disorders, vandalism, violence, depression, aggression, addiction, etc.

The early Fathers of the Church would have sided with Kierkegaard seeing in boredom or

acedia, its mediaeval forerunner, the worst sin, from which all others derive. But ‘boredom and a

loss of meaning are connected in some way’, as the Norwegian philosopher, Lars Svendsen puts

it in his splendid and profound little book, A Philosophy of Boredom (Lars Svendsen, A

Philosophy of Boredom, p. 17). Usually, boredom is bearable, and we find ways through it;

sometimes it is not and becomes a silent killer. In boredom we lose our bearings; it is, so, a

philosophical problem. Wittgenstein had said that a philosophical problem possesses the form of

‘I don’t know my way about’ (Philosophical Investigations). In a state of profound philosophical

or noögenic boredom, our being is without contour, our centre everywhere and our periphery

nowhere. We are without will (the ataraxia of antiquity). And we wander, meaninglessly around:

lost, lonely, and listless.

Of course, boredom doesn’t have a good ‘rep’; adolescents frequently moan (the ‘moaning of

life’): ‘I’m boooored’ and adults lose patience. Svendsen is surely right when he writes:

‘Boredom lacks the charm of melancholy – a charm that is connected to melancholy’s traditional

link to wisdom, sensitivity and beauty’ (Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom, p. 19). Being

bogged down in boredom – boredom’s behaviour – is an ignoble condition and seems to be too

trivial or vulgar, unlike depression’s seriousness, to attract academic attention – a point also

made by Bertrand Russell in his book, The Conquest of Happiness.

Kierkegaard maintained that the gods were bored and therefore created human beings. Culturally

and sociologically, boredom was associated with the upper echelons of society, with the

‘privileged’ leisured classes. Adam was bored too so he needed his soul-mate, Eve, who was

created from his rib as much as from his being bored. Nietzsche tells us that God was bored on

the seventh day, thus turning the deity into a Sunday neurotic, to speak in Franklian terms.

Immanuel Kant, for his part, tells us that Adam and Eve would have been bored had they

remained in Paradise – perhaps that’s why they were expelled?

Types and Varieties of Boredom

‘Situational boredom’ (a boredom of facticity) seems likely to have existed since time

immemorial but ‘existential boredom’ is a product of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. It is,

thus, a phenomenon of modernity – a specifically modern malaise. Of course, earlier writers such

as Seneca had talked of the tiredness of life and even Ecclesiastes tells us that all is vanity and

there is nothing new under the sun – a case of Nietzschean ‘eternal recurrence’. But boredom

becomes broader after the advent of Romanticism, and deeper and deadlier.
Where does the fault (so to speak) lie? Is boredom part and parcel of contemporary living? Is it

in me or the Other or in the transitional space between? La Rochefoucauld, the great French

moralist, opines: ‘Almost always we are bored by people to whom we ourselves are boring’

(Maxims). Boredom as psychological projection, so. When boredom increases, meaning

decreases. We are left with the existential emptiness of time. Hans-Georg Gadamer expresses it

thus: ‘What is actually passed when passing the time? Not time, surely, that passes? And yet it is

time that is meant, in its empty lastingness, but which as something that lasts is too long and

assumes the form of painful boredom?’ (cited by Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom, p. 23).

‘The emptiness of time is an emptiness of meaning’ (Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom, p.

31).

Interestingly, the word ‘boredom’ is not found in English until the 1760’s. Thereafter, the term is

employed to suggest or convey a lack of meaning in situations, a loss of sense and solidity. In

Either-Or the great Dane avers: ‘How frightful boredom is – frightfully boring .... the only thing

I see is emptiness; the only thing I live off: emptiness; the only thing I move in: emptiness. I do

not even experience pain’. Perhaps this is why some people self-harm – just to feel something

again?, to remind them that they’re still alive? Dostoyevsky’s ‘Underground Man’ tells us that

everything stems from boredom. That’s because boredom stems from desire – the desire for

desires, as Russell calls it. It’s a case of when too much is not enough. Increased intensity leads

to spiritual satiation. Boredom is a meaning withdrawal and ‘Meaninglessness is boring’

(Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom, p. 30). When the need for meaning is not being met

symptoms and symbolic substitutes such as substance misuse arise. The experience of boredom
signals that the need for meaning is not being met. As Svendsen writes: ‘I believe that boredom

is the result of a lack of personal meaning’ (Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom, p. 31). The

great Goethe says somewhere that monkeys could be considered human if they were capable of

being bored. Boredom attests, therefore, to personal nihilism.

Some seek the cure for boredom in diversions, others in work. But there is a difference between

removing the symptoms and curing the disease. Work can be boring as can busyness. Svendsen

again: ‘Boredom is not a question of idleness but of meaning’ (Svendsen, A Philosophy of

Boredom, p. 32). Boredom arises not when there is nothing to do but when we feel there is

nothing worth doing. Boredom is our greatest source of unhappiness. Boredom is a death within

life. It so often arises from repetition. It can exist when nothing specific bores us. As Heidegger

would say: in such cases even boredom is bored. It is a tame longing without an object.

Many commentators on the subject have distinguished between typologies of boredom from

Milan Kundera’s passive, active and rebellious boredom to Martin Doehlemann’s four varieties:

situational boredom (when one is waiting for someone, listening to a lecture or taking the train);

the boredom of satiety (when one gets too much of the same thing and it becomes banal);

existential boredom (the taedium vitae); and creative boredom (when one has to do something

novel). Flaubert divides it into common (situational) boredom and modern (existential) boredom.

If the former involves longing for something that is desired, the second is a longing for any

desire at all. The first is expressive (wriggling, yawning, stretching, drumming one’s fingers,

fidgeting) whereas the second is impassive (such as staring into space). The former is agitated

boredom, the second is apathetic boredom.

Freud made the famous distinction between mourning and melancholia thus: in mourning the

world has become empty and poor; in melancholia it is the ego itself that has become empty and

poor. In boredom it is both. In Franklian fashion, we can say that boredom is the privation of

personal meaning, and this absence reduces human life to animal life. If situational boredom is

the dearth of eventful meaning, existential boredom is the dearth of experiential meaning. In such

situational circumstances we go in search of the forever new only to experience the Nietzschean

eternal recurrence of the same. Boredom is an immanence which has lost all contact with

transcendence. Boredom is indifferentism. The traditional philosophical question used to take the

form of: why is there something and not rather nothing but as Baudrillard has pointed out, now it

is: why is there nothing rather than something? Reality is on the line here. Nothing matters. Das

Nichts. And being becomes blunt.

The Mood of Boredom

Boredom, like anxiety, is a mood, in the Heideggerian sense, not an emotion. What’s the

difference? Emotion is intentional, a mood (or an affect) is objectless. Emotions are specific;

moods are general. Emotions are particular; moods involve the totality of things, therefore, the

world as a whole. We relate to our surroundings via moods. The mood of boredom leaves us

profoundly unattuned to being; to be attuned to the world is always to see it under some aspect

(aka Ortega y Gasset) or perspect(ive). So, to the bored person the world appears differently than

to the unbored (aka Wittgenstein). For Heidegger, Frankl’s friend, boredom is a fundamental

mood of our being-towards-death. For Heidegger, too, there are various forms of boredom: from

superficial to serious. Isn’t the existential aim to encourage boredom to find its Other by way of
attending to this Other, of this Other who can hold my attention and interest, my intrigue? In a

series of lectures Heidegger gave in 1929-30 on three fundamental features of metaphysics: the

world, finitude and loneliness, Heidegger gives this well-known example: you are invited to a

dinner-party where the food is good, the music exhilarating and the company convivial. The

party ends, and I walk home; once home I am struck by the thought that I was actually bored the

entire evening. But I can’t identify that of which I was bored. The party was entertaining but

empty. The situation, in short, was not meaning-ful for me. I was just a guest, though I played

my part well. The problem is I am more – so much more – than a dinner-party guest just as

Sartre’s waiter is more than a waiter in Being and Nothingness. This is superficial or situational

boredom but in profound boredom one is bored by boredom itself. In such cases, I am

completely attuned to boredom. What bores us is the Boring. You don’t bore me; I don’t even

bore myself. The Boring bores me. I am left empty by everything. Perhaps here the answer is to

introduce a burden – a task to do, a noö-dynamic striving after something, in the logotherapeutic

sense. One possible burden is philosophy with its attunement to melancholy. So instead of being

bored one writes about it or becomes so bored that one finds something to do to dereflect.

Svendsen puts the Heideggerian position clearly thus: ‘Dasein is bored because life lacks a

purpose and a meaning – and the task of boredom is to draw our attention to precisely this.

Boredom is dehumanizing by depriving life of the meaning that constitutes it as a life’

(Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom, p. 128). In such cases we approach animal life and that is

why, for Frankl, boredom is a spiritual problem. It is a spiritual problem because it is a uniquely

human problem. ‘To be bored one must be able to be aware of a lack of meaning’ (Svendsen, A

Philosophy of Boredom, p. 128). In boredom the world appears as unhomely, uncanny.

‘Boredom removes a veil of meaning from things and allows them to appear as empty and
ephemeral’ (Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom, p. 130). Boredom detaches oneself from the

world but through derealisation and dissociation, through disinterest and disengagement, rather

than through self-distancing and dereflection. Boredom needs to be accepted rather than

overcome, faced rather than fought or feared. Because in its superficial profundity, boredom tells

us something about the meaning of Being (our being). Beckett’s answer to boredom is to go on

despite the fact that he could not. Philosophy may overcome one’s alienation or increase it, but it

doesn’t proffer salvation. Why should it? It has not been asked of it. It is religion alone that

offers salvation to man. As Heidegger said: only a god can save us now, in this the dark of the

world’s night. The solution to boredom: work, though that can get boring; music; chemical

substances; love; God. People seek cures in aesthetics (art) and anaesthetics (drugs). But in

reality, the only cure is death. What life can offer, however, are pathways to meaning,

consolations rather than cures – cues, clues, logo-hints and hooks that alter attitudes and forge

meaningful living. One can’t fight (anger/aggression) or flee (avoidance) boredom. One must

take responsibility for it and this responsibility is beyond both fear and fury. We must have the

courage to be able to be bored. Boredom shouldn’t be banished but nor should it be brought on –

one must bear its conditions, its contours. Boredom’s substitutes and replacements simply bring

us back to boredom. But boredom is only one aspect of existence. ‘It springs from a lack of

meaning’ (Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom, p. 154); such a lack is best filled with purpose

and meaning. It is not about replacing or bypassing boredom but about a radical reorientation of

desire towards the true, the good and the beautiful (the transcendental categories of being). There

is meaning and there is boredom and life consists of both. Such is the delicate and dialectical

balance of being.
Effects of Boredom

In terms of statistics one survey suggests that the average Briton suffers from boredom for

approximately six hours per week; over 60 years this amounts to two years of boredom (see Peter

Toohey’s Boredom: A Lively History). And in another study 400 secondary school students in

the New England area of the United States reported that 9% of them experienced boredom as a

serious problem in their lives with 17% saying they were somewhat or completely dissatisfied

with their lives. By contrast, existential boredom is a philosophical sickness expressing itself as a

tristesse or taedium vitae. Boredom keeps company with anxiety, melancholia, anger and nausea.

But, depending on one’s attitude, boredom can become a blessing. If monotony, predictability,

entrapment, sameness and repetition signal the beginnings of boredom then from such

confinement creativity can occur. When we experience a bout of boredom we experience a form

of mild disgust, a weariness as time is felt as slow and being as sluggish. Boredom can halt the

march of time. If travel and sex are the clichéd cures for boredom, then how do we account for

post-coital tristesse?, and in terms of holidaying sometimes we are fed up on holidays because as

Freud noted the ego can never escape from itself; to be is to be oneself. So, if situational

boredom has a cause, existential boredom does not. Such spiritual boredom affects one’s

personal existence; the reason for it is humanity itself. As Byron put it: boredom is ‘that awful

yawn which sleep cannot abate’. The somatic clues to this mood are the yawn and the head

cupped in the hand. Boredom is that experience or mood which ‘produces feelings of being

constrained or confined by some unavoidable and distastefully predictable circumstance and, as a

result, a feeling of being distanced from one’s surroundings and the normal flow of time’

(Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom, p. 45). Physiologically, it may be traced to a lack of the

neurotransmitter dopamine which is the reward system of the brain. Dopamine depletion is at the
heart, some scientists say, of so-called ADHD too. Boredom can be located in the region of the

brain called the insular cortex. There is a test titled the Boredom Proneness Scale (BPS) which

was devised in 1986 by psychologist Norman Sundberg of the University of Oregon and it helps

distinguish people suffering from ‘transient’ (what I am labelling ‘situational’ boredom – what

Otto Fenichel calls ‘normal’ boredom in his paper on the psychology of boredom) or ‘chronic’

boredom (what I am calling ‘existential’ and what Fenichel labels ‘pathological’ boredom).

Those subjects who are chronically bored are at more of a risk from developing anxiety,

depression, and drug or alcohol addiction (the long-standing ‘solution’ to boredom). A 2010

study hypothesised that the more bored you are the ore prone you are to die at a younger age. A

2003 report from Columbia University maintained that 52% of teens are in danger of slipping

into substance abuse if they fall prey to the following risk factors: being stressed out, being

frequently bored or having too much money to spend. Chronic boredom and anger are

symbiotically linked; they are close companions. Indeed, boredom can be regarded as the

outcome of anger or as an anger substitute. If depression is directed to the self, then boredom is

directed outwards towards activities, engagements and the environment and that is why no doubt

extraverts are more prone to boredom than introverts. In such cases life can appear to resemble a

cockatoo’s cage or a concentration camp. Of course, there is also the link between loneliness and

boredom which certain memories can stave off. Boredom, anger, loneliness, depression all exist

in close conjunction, confusion even. Loneliness isn’t absence but the felt bewildering presence

of absence. Boredom has been called the noonday demon – the devil that lays waste at noon.

This biblical account of boredom is depicted in the 90 th Psalm which reads: ‘You will not fear the

terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the plague that prowls in the darkness nor
the scourge that lays waste at noon’. Monks who experience the noonday demon are instructed to

meditate and keep busy, holding to the Benedictine balance of ora et labora – ‘pray and work’.

Boredom is seen as the work of the devil who makes work for idle hands or for him who thinks

too much (hyperreflection). Such spiritual/philosophical/personal/noögenic boredom produces a

powerful sense of existential emptiness and feeling of pervasive purposelessness. Boredom is the

symptom of meaninglessness. Deadly, dull, dreary, stale, soporific, tedious, torpid – these are the

adjectives employed in an attempt to describe it. Variety, stimulation, sociability (community),

aerobic exercise, social interaction, intellectual activity, curiosity, travel, a transcendental cause,

finding one’s passion and purpose are all barriers – Beta-blocks – to boredom, as they transform

empty time into enjoyable time. The positive potential in boredom is that it can create a space in

the mind for creative daydreaming and contemplation. When we are dereflected and attending to

other activities or thoughts, to non-self-objects, boredom dissipates if not disappears. And this,

even in cases of negative experiences. For example, when we’re fatigued and fearful we can’t be

bored or when we are about to be executed, to give Bertrand Russell’s example (Russell, The

Conquest of Happiness, p. 36). Russell likewise advises against ego-immersion and ego-

absorption countenancing instead self-forgetfulness, what he calls ‘a diminishing preoccupation

with myself’ (Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, p. 6), advising instead that we pay attention

to external interests and affections which will become ‘preventive of ennui’. He has a chapter on

boredom in his book The Conquest of Happiness, in which he maintains that one of boredom’s

essentials is that one’s faculties must not be fully occupied. He defines it thus: ‘Boredom is

essentially a thwarted desire for events’ (Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, p. 36), not even

necessarily pleasant ones. The opposite of boredom, according to Russell, is excitement not
pleasure. A wish to escape boredom is natural but the experience of boredom is a necessary

ingredient in life.

Bertrand Russell on Boredom

Russell distinguishes between two types of boredom – one more benign, the other more

malevolent, malignant even. He calls them ‘fructifying’ and ‘stultifying’ boredom. The former

arises from the absence of drugs, the latter from the absence of vital activities (see Russell, The

Conquest of Happiness, p. 38). But we should know that life contains many uninteresting

stretches, just as many great books contain passages and portions that are best described as

boring. ‘A certain power of enduring boredom is therefore essential to a happy life, and is one of

the things that ought to be taught to the young’ (Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, p. 39). It is

the capacity to endure monotony. Russell commends to us constructive purposes rather than

‘living a life of distractions and dissipations’ (Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, p. 39). If we

can’t succeed in this, we will chase the next pleasure rather than plan to accomplish distant

achievements. ‘For all these reasons a generation that cannot endure boredom will be a

generation of little men’ (Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, p. 39). There will always be arid

stretches in life, periods spent as pilgrimages in the desert or dark, but this paradoxically may

result from a fear of boredom. Russell writes: ‘In flying from the fructifying kind of boredom,

they fall prey to the other far worse kind. A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it

is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live’ (Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, p.

43).
For Russell, the person who can centre his thoughts and actions on something transcending self

can enjoy a peace that is forbidden the true egoist. Selflessness is the cure. Admiration must

increase and envy decrease. Wonder must grow, and worry diminish. Russell writes: ‘Worry is a

form of fear, and all forms of fear produce fatigue’ (Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, p. 50),

which is another obstacle to happiness happening. He who enlarges his heart gains the freedom

of the universe. Frankl cites Kierkegaard to the effect that the door to happiness opens outwards;

similarly, Russell asserts: ‘Nothing is so dull as to be encased in self, nothing so exhilarating as

to have attention and energy directed outwards’ (Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, p. 72). The

narcissist knows only boredom; the saint only beauty. Happiness, for Russell, consists in ‘that

freedom of spirit’, as he puts it (Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, p. 94). His recipe for

human happiness – Russell’s secret formula: ‘let your interests be as wide as possible, and let

your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than

hostile’ (Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, p. 109). This injunction helps keep boredom at

bay. The most distinctive mark of the happy person, Russell contends, is zest for life; ‘it is good

to be interested in as many things as are necessary to fill our days’ (Russell, The Conquest of

Happiness, p. 112). Zest and curiosity are the key to existential wellbeing.

Freud laid it down that the essence of life was love and work and obviously there is much to say

about the world of work. In work’s relation to boredom, Russell opines that even the dullest

work is preferable to and less painful than the torment of idleness which may produce a boredom

of the spirit. Work may be irksome, and tiresome but it is desirable ‘as a preventive of boredom,

for the boredom that a man feels when he is doing necessary though uninteresting work is as

nothing in comparison with the boredom that he feels when he has nothing to do with his days’
(Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, p. 147). Work, so, and wide personal interests rather than a

narrow intensity, which can but lead to hyper-reflection and hyper-intention. The former is the

path to happiness and wisdom, the latter ‘puts the whole meaning and purpose of our life at the

mercy of accident’ (Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, p. 161). Effort is also important: the

sheer Spinozistic will to survive and even thrive, what we may call resilience or inner steel, or

what Frankl calls ‘the defiant power of the human spirit’. And acceptance of life as gift rooted in

hope. Russell cautions against us portraying or painting ourselves as clowns in a comedy or as

heroes in a high tragedy, encouraging, enjoining us, rather, to play well the part that has been

given us, even forgetting our lines and even when we are unsure of our exits and entrances, to

have at our disposal a wide repertoire rather than a baneful dearth of inner resources. Such a

person won’t be bored but, on the contrary, realise that the happy life is, to an extraordinary

extent, the same as the good life.

Russell concludes his book with the view that all unhappiness stems from disintegration, of the

conscious with the unconscious mind, of self pitted against society or one’s neighbours. The

happy person, who is almost by definition not bored, is one who is undivided; he is one who has

achieved some form of unity or integration and more even – a certain kind of wholeness. Indeed,

viewing life as a whole, with boring pieces and happy portions, is an essential part of wisdom

and of wellness too.

To see the world sub specie aeternitatis is to be touched and transformed by transcendence.

Boredom passes, as depressions do too, like clouds in the night sky. What remains above them is

the sun as the source of good by whose rays our load is lightened, and our hearts healed -
gladdened by great joy. For happiness is ultimately achieved as a by-product of meaning, and it

was Dr Viktor Frankl who, heroically, showed us the way. The question for those who follow

him is: who can live up to him?