Meaning in Life

If we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how.

--Nietzsche

Vienna has a habit of giving birth to schools of psychiatry and then putting them up for adoption in other countries. An exception is the latest Viennese system of mind healing called logotherapy, which has won quick acceptance in its native land and is gaining adherents in the U.S. and behind the Iron Curtain.

Dr. Viktor E. Frankl, 62, founder of logotherapy, is a lecturer at the University of Vienna, as was Freud. But Frankl has dismissed Freud's idea that human beings are driven mainly by sexual energy, no matter how broadly defined. Similarly, he rejects Adler's emphasis on power drives and Jung's turning back to vague, ancestral archetypes. He has only contempt for the reductionist, or "nothing-but" schools, which define man as nothing but a biochemical machine or nothing but the product of his conditioning or nothing but an economic animal. What is left? Only, says Frankl, the most fundamental of all human strivings: the search for the meaning of life, or at least for a meaning in life.

Existential Vacuum. Since this search is at the intellectual rather than the instinctual level, Dr. Frankl makes great play with words beginning with noo, from the Greek nooes (mind), as in nooe-dynamics and nooegenic neuroses.* He coined logotherapy from logos, usually translated as word, speech or reason, which he defines as "meaning." As Dr. Frankl views the human condition to day, it is distinguished by "the existential vacuum," or "a total lack, or loss, of an ultimate meaning to one's existence that would make life worthwhile."

This loss results, he says, from the fact that man, unlike the animals, has no instincts to tell him what he must do, and in recent years has grown away from traditions that once told him what he should do.

Frankl freely concedes that logotherapy is an existential approach. Existentialism has built up a strong undercurrent in both European and U.S. analysis and psychotherapy in the past dozen years. But Frankl notes that there are almost as many kinds of existentialism as there are existentialists, and insists that his is different. He has spelled it out in books such as Man's Search for Meaning and Psychotherapy and Existentialism. The Existential Vacuum: A Challenge to Psychiatry is on press.

Without a sense of meaning, says Dr. Frankl, even the pursuit of happiness must lead to a dead end. A man who sets out deliberately to seek pleasure through sexual gratification will, he believes, defeat himself. So will the man who lusts for power; even its achievement will avail him nothing unless it involves the satisfaction of some inner goal.

Greater than the Sum. In defining such goals, Frankl runs into difficulty. In English, he says, he is forced back upon the word spiritual, but he insists that this does not require a religious connotation. No psychiatrist, he points out, can prescribe religion for an irreligious patient. At the same time, just as emphatically, he warns psychiatrists against suppressing or ignoring whatever religious feelings, overt and latent, a patient may have.

In answering the question "What is meant by meaning?", Dr. Frankl first makes a distinction between meaning and values. To him, values are meanings shared by many people throughout history or throughout a society. The "meaning" in which Frankl is interested is an individual's own, and is unique to his situation at any given moment. It is, he insists, something that each man must find for himself, through his conscience. When he does so, he is likely to find that it has a Gestalt quality --the whole of an experience is, in some indefinable way, greater than the sum of its parts.

Survival Insight. Logotherapy proposes few set rules for the psychiatrist. Dr. Frankl does not even exclude combining it with the most drastic physical treatments, when he thinks that nothing else will help. He takes pride in having introduced guaiphenesin, which he calls the first widely used tranquilizer, in 1952; he also uses electric shock, still a standard treatment in some cases of depression.

In logotherapy the patient sits facing his doctor, who, unlike the classical analyst, may do much of the talking. Dr. Frankl is only half jesting when he says that the patient "must hear things that sometimes are very disagreeable to hear." It is virtually impossible in any, language to describe the process of helping a patient to find meaning or new meaning in his life. Not only does it vary from patient to patient, but in many cases Dr. Frankl, guided by his own intuition, improvises changes in method as he goes along.

Vienna-born and educated, Dr. Frankl was spared by the Nazis until late 1942, when he was confined in Theresienstadt, and in 1944 he was sent to Auschwitz. His mother and his wife died in concentration camps. Another casualty was the manuscript of a book on which he had worked for years. Dr. Frankl survived three camps, and has written of his experiences with a keen humanism as well as psychiatric insight. Since World War II, he has won wider recognition, and he now heads the neurological department of Vienna's famed Poliklinik Hospital.

Freud offended the hierarchs of all faiths by his dismissal of religion as a neurosis, and psychoanalysis is still frowned upon by Austria's Roman Catholic Church, even when it is practiced by unswervingly Catholic psychiatrists. But Dr. Frankl's Jewishness is not held against him by Catholics as it was against Freud and Adler. In his system there is such a big place for religion that he is a favorite of Salzburg's Archbishop Franz Jachym, who endorses his writings. To the extent that the church accepts Frankl, the Freudians and Adlerians tend to reject him. And Frankl admits that logotherapy was at first attacked for confusing religion with psychiatry. Now, he contends, its acceptance in officially atheistic Iron Curtain countries shows that it is indeed a truly psychotherapeutic system.

*Similarly, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin used nooesphere to mean "world of the mind," but Frankl says his psychiatric terms were developed independently.

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