Logotherapy - Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

In the book, Man’s Search for Meaning, after an account of his stay in the Auschwitz Concentration Camp, Frankl, a psychiatrist, explores logotherapy in detail. This is a summary of the same.

Logotherapy, which was founded by Frankl, focuses on man’s search for meaning and purpose in his life. This ‘will to meaning’ is in contrast to ‘will to pleasure’ put forward by Freud and ‘will to power’ or striving for superiority put forward by Adlerian psychology.

Existential frustration happens when a man is not able to identify a meaning for his life. For example, it may be someone who is not happy with his or her vocation. If a man with such a condition meets a mental wellness doctor, he is not a patient. Rather, a man’s concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease. It may well be that interpreting the first in terms of the latter, motivates a doctor to bury his patient’s existential despair under a heap of tranquilizing medicines. It is his task, rather, to pilot the patient through his existential crises of growth and development.

Man’s search for meaning may arouse inner tension rather than inner equilibrium. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state, but rather the struggling and striving for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. Logotherapy sees in responsible living the very essence of human existence.

The existential vacuum is a wide spread phenomenon of the twentieth century. Boredom leads to existential vacuum. Pensioners, aging people, and people without anything to do for a period of time are caught in this existential vacuum.

Frankl often mentions the quote of Nietzsche – He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.  Frankl quotes his own example. When he was in the concentration camp, he would dream of reuniting with his wife. Or he hoped that he would get a chance to talk about the psychological experiences in the camp in front of a large audience. He also started writing parts of the ready to publish manuscript that was taken away from him in the concentration camp. Such motivations gave him a will to carry on amidst dire circumstances.

According to logotherapy, we can achieve meaning in life in three different ways. 1. By accomplishing something by work or a deed. 2. Experiencing something or encountering someone. 3. By the attitude we take towards unavoidable suffering.

Point 1 is about finding meaning in fruitful work. Point 2 is about falling in love with someone and making them realize their full potential. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him.

Point 3 is about the Meaning of suffering. Frankl had a patient who was in immense sorrow as his wife had passed away leaving him alone. Frankl made him realize that if his wife was alive and he was dead, she would have suffered alone a lot. Now, because he survived her, he saved her from all the suffering of living alone. The man shook Frankl’s hand and left calmly. In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice. Frankl managed to change the attitude of the man so that he could see a meaning in his suffering.

Edith, a professor of psychology, wrote that in the present day culture, the incurable sufferer is given very little opportunity to be proud of his suffering and to consider it ennobling rather than degrading. He is not only unhappy, but also ashamed of being unhappy.

In a logodrama group session, Frankl asks a woman in her thirties to imagine she was in her eighties and on the deathbed. She should recollect her life memories. She says, “Oh, I married a millionaire. I had an easy life full of wealth, and I lived it up. I flirted with men. I teased them. But now I am eighty. I have no children of my own. Looking back as an old woman, I cannot see what all that was for; actually, I must say, my life was a failure.”

Another woman in the same session had just lost her boy and another son was crippled. She recollects her life as if she were in her eighties. She says, “I’m happy that I helped my crippled son become someone. He was, after all, my son. I have done the best for my son. My life is no failure.”

But Frankl also quotes the example of a man who lost his first wife and six children in the concentration camp. His second wife was sterile. To him, Frankl says that procreation is not the only meaning of life. For then, life in itself would be meaningless, and something which in itself is meaningless cannot be rendered meaningful by its perpetuation.

Logotherapy as a technique suggests that, “The neurotic who learns to laugh at himself, may be on the way of self-management, perhaps to cure. This is the human capacity for self-detachment inherent in a sense of humour.”