Viktor Frankl and Logotherapy
To Frankl, the fundamental human characteristic is freedom of will. Human beings have freedom of will even when all other freedoms are gone, because they can choose what attitude to take toward their other limitations. Freedom is a reality despite limitations posed by the instincts, inherited dispositional factors, and environmental conditions; "Man's freedom is not a freedom from conditions, but rather, a freedom to take a stand regarding whatever conditions might confront him." All human endeavors are a waste of time if the premise of freedom is not accepted: "We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing... to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." Frankl argued that the opposite (deterministic, reductionistic) point of view is inherently destructive of all we would want to call human: "The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment or, as the Nazis likes to say, of 'Blood and Soil'."
What is the purpose of freedom of will? Fundamentally, it is the will to meaning: the basic striving of human beings is to find and to fulfill meaning and purpose. People reach out to encounter meanings to fulfill. This view is opposed to homeostatic models of human motivation in which people are seen as motivated entirely by the desire to eliminate or reduce tension. The will to meaning often implies a willingness to endure tension, even to seek out difficulties when they will produce or enhance meaning. Thus, the core motives are not "pushes" (drives, as with Freud), but "pulls" (freely chosen values and commitments). The goal, then, is not a tensionless existence, but the right kind of tension: "Mental health is based on a certain degree of tension... between what one is and what one should become. What man needs is not a tensionless state, but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. Logotherapy... considers man as a being whose main concern consists in fulfilling a meaning and in actualizing values, rather than in the mere gratification and satisfaction of drives and instincts."
Logotherapy does not dictate to clients how to think about the meaning of life, though it offers some suggestions and insights about how meaning is to be found. "Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Everyone's task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it." (Here Frankl reminds me of Jung's famous phrase, "A person who weeds a garden well has saved the world in that spot.") Logotherapy does insist that meaning is indispensible and real, that it is something that is more discovered than invented, that it is external to the self, not a part of it or within the self, that it is found through self-transcendence and not self-actualization. "The more one forgets himself... the more human he is. Happiness is the side effect of living out of the self-transcendence of existence. Once one has served a cause or is involved in loving another, happiness occurs by itself." Three common routes to meaning are (a) loving another person more than one loves oneself, (b) achieving a goal that transcends the self, (c) transcending suffering.
The term logotherapy itself comes from the Greek word logos which means "word", "meaning", or "purpose" (the same Greek word that is used, incidentally, in John 1:1). Logotherapy addresses itself to the existential problem of meaninglessness (boredom, apathy, a "wasted" life, "squandered" time) and is not afraid to speak, albeit in rather generic terms, about spiritual issues and concerns (see also Unit 8). The deepest issues ("What is life all about? Why am I here?") are not meaningless questions even though the answers elude or transcend rationality (see Unit 8); "logotherapy speaks in the context of ultimate meanings or supra-meaning which surpasses the finite intellectual capacities of man; logos is deeper than logic. Spiritual issues such as man's aspiration for a meaningful existence... are taken earnestly and seriously instead of... being dealt with in merely instinctual terms". While Frankl deliberately refused to state whether he was a "religious" person or whether he believed in God, clearly his viewpoint has much more in common with traditional religious understandings than, say, reductive psychoanalysis or classical behaviorism.
In his writings, Frankl contrasted the notions of the nous and the psyche (two Greek words for the mind or self). To him, psychological needs were deterministic and instinctual, but these were subordinate to noetic or noological needs which were freely chosen and unconstrained. In plainer English, we might use the words "spirit" and "spiritual" (whether or not viewed in religious terms) to summarize what Frankl meant by the nous: the aspect of the human being that is genuinely autonomous, not a mere product of what Maslow would call deficit motives. The nous is what is uniquely human about us, the part of us that can make genuine, unconstrained choices.
Suffering is inherently linked to meaning; in fact Frankl might argue that one cannot have one without the other. Suffering is not viewed as a problem as such or as a neurotic symptom, but as part and parcel of the human condition that can lead to growth. (John 17:33, "in this world you will have tribulation" -- the Greek word, thlipsis, means an unaccountable, inevitable, universal condition.) It can be a paradoxical route to the achievement of meaning. Even a life that is not marked by evident suffering has to deal with the transitoriness, and the seeming arbitrariness, of life: we cannot have all the possibilities, we are forced to make choices, things don't always work out as we plan or wish (though often, with the wisdom of hindsight, better than we could have engineered for ourselves), we must confront our finitude. This constitutes our "response-ability", for we are forced to find (or concretize) meaning through deciding. "You are committed: you must wager" (Pascal).
Not all anxiety is neurotic; existential anxiety is an inherent part of the human condition. While neurotic anxiety is characterized by its anticipatory character (it creates what it fears), existential anxiety is not. Frankl makes much of the notion of paradoxical intentionality as a form of treatment. Since direct forced intention makes impossible what one forcibly wishes (the more an insomniac wills himself to sleep, the more awake he will become), an indirect paradoxical approach -- often involving self-detachment, de-reflection, and humor -- is required. (Frankl would agree with Roger Brown's classic statement, "Humor and faith are twins. Both allow a person to escape the tyranny of the present moment.")
Neurosis, to Frankl, need not be individual, and many of his writings treat the notion of collective (societal) neurosis. The collective neurosis of our age, Frankl believed, is the existential vacuum of nihilism, the notion that life has no inherent meaning.