Psychiatry: Meaning in Life

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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 noös (mind), as in noö-dynamics and noögenic 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.