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The Will to Meaning by Viktor Frankl
From the author of Man’s Search for Meaning, one of the most influential works of psychiatric literature since Freud.
Holocaust survivor Viktor E. Frankl is known as the founder of logotherapy, a mode of psychotherapy based on man’s motivation to search for meaning in his life. The author discusses his ideas in the context of other prominent psychotherapies and describes the techniques he uses with his patients to combat the “existential vacuum.”
Originally published in 1969 and compiling Frankl’s speeches on logotherapy, The Will to Meaning is regarded as a seminal work of meaning-centered therapy. This new and carefully re-edited version is the first since 1988.
About the author
Viktor Frankl was born in Vienna in 1905 and was Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Vienna Medical School. His wife, father, mother and brother all died in Nazi concentration camps, only he and his sister survived, but he never lost the qualities of compassion, loyalty, undaunted spirit and thirst for life (earning his pilot’s licence aged 67). He died in Vienna in 1997.
Why it Matters
Due to reductionism and globalization, cultures which have lasted and been perfected for millennia are being eroded and transformed. In such an age we find Man to be stuck in the existential vacuum: a state of meaninglessness.
This state, Frankl argues can be considered the root cause of our collective neurosis and explains everything all the way from depression, to individual’s untamed pursuit of prestige and money. It is such a deadly trap precisely because it avoids being identified as a one. We point to our desire for sexual conquests as the problem but never the underlying nihilism which infects our lives.
The existential vacuum results from two unique situations man finds himself in today: In contrast to an animal, no drives and instincts tell man what he must do. In contrast to former times, no conventions, traditions, and values tell him what he should do. Most times, due to the lack of self knowledge, he does not even know what he wishes to do.
Thus he either does what other people do or what other people wish him to do. Conformism manifests in the West, totalitarianism manifests out in the east.
This book provides a guideline to better understand the symptoms of meaninglessness, the qualities of meaning, and how to pursue it.
Brief
Logotherapy, Frankl’s school of psychoanalysis rests on three main tenets. The freedom of will, the will to meaning and the meaning of life.
Freedom of Will
Frankl is not rejecting determinism, but merely the perverted interpretation of determinism that renders us spineless willows blowing in the wind. Man’s freedom is no freedom from conditions but rather freedom to take a stand on whatever conditions might confront him.
The common misinterpretation of determinism is caused by reductionism. Thus, one could define reductionism as sub-humanism, for it negates the unique human aspects of Man and collapses them into cold mechanistic interactions. Reductionism is caused by the effects of scientific specialization. The danger of scientific specialization doesn’t lurk in the lack of universality but rather the pretense of totality. It only becomes problematic when an expert aims to understand and explain human beings exclusively in terms of their field. “What we have to deplore, is not that scientists are specializing but that specialists are generalizing.”
Even if we view love or consciousness as an emergent property, we should not be tempted to ignore it’s significance. Just because a lower dimension fully explains a higher dimension, that is a to say parts explain the whole as neurotransmitters do emotion, is not a valid basis for us to reject the validity, existence, or significance of the latter. It is the brilliance of the Prasangika school Of Mahayana Buddhism to point out the common fallacy of rejecting the whole’s existence in favor of the parts. What reductionists fail to see is that both whole and parts share similar nominal existences: the ocean is no less real than the wave.
Due to this first axiom, Logotherapy, unlike most other schools, treats Man in a higher dimension which aims to preserve the humanness. It is centered around helping people see the meanings in their own lives rather than treating people as a cold machine, a style most associated with the Freudian analysts. It asks “how can we find meaning in your suffering?” instead of “is your cigar smoking a sign of repressed homosexuality?”
Will to Meaning
Self-actualization, flow states, Freud’s will to pleasure, Adler’s will to power, and the most recent manifestation of the will to power: the will to money, are all substitutes. They are either means (power/money) or states that must ensue (self-actualization, flow states) through the satisfaction of the will to meaning.
The pursuit of happiness is self-defeating in that just like erections and orgasm, the potency is impaired by being made the target of intention. ”Only if one’s original concern with meaning fulfillment is frustrated is one either content with power or intent on pleasure.” When man ceases to have a reason to be happy, he will find a cause to make him feel happy. The former is psychological (cure cancer) while the latter is physiological (drugs). I partially agree but I think that what grants you pleasure, self-actualization, flow states, and power will all inform where you can find meaning.
We do not seek tensionless states as most models that try to explain human behavior through the reaching of some homeostatic state. What we need is a sound amount of tension created by direction. But this direction is best if not imposed on us. While communist countries experience much less incidents of neurosis because they are swamped with tasks they are merely being tranquilized with the trivial — they do not share the American freedom to choose their tasks.
Freedom (lack of tension) is really a negative concept which requires a positive complement: responsibility. Responsibility has two referents: to a meaning whose fulfillment we are responsible for and to a being before whom we are responsible.
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The Meaning of Life
Meaning is relative but not subjective. It is related to the unique individual who is entangled in a specific situation. But that does not prevent us from generalizing.
It is not subjective because there is only one objective meaning, one correct reading in any given circumstance (I disagree, but hold that there is a set of valid readings). Frankl argues that meaning is discovered rather than invented. That is, with a specific individual, in a unique situation, there is one correct interpretation of the meaning of the event. “Meaning is what is meant, be it by a person who asks me a question, or by a situation which, too, implies a question and calls for an answer.” Man is free to answer but that freedom is not meant to be associated with arbitrariness but rather with responsibility to find the true meaning.
Values are just generalized heuristics where an individual or society has been able to repeatedly find meaning. ie. to say we value curiosity means that through the pursuit of this drive, we have had many meaningful moments in our life.
Here are the general places where Frankl proposes we can find meaning: “There is a meaning of life — a meaning, that is, for which man has been in search all along — and also that man has the freedom to embark on the fulfillment of this meaning.” You can find it in active creation in what you give (creative), in passive enjoyment in what you take (experiential), and in triumph against unavoidable suffering in the stance you take (attitudinal).
Universal values are on the wane; “If man is to find meanings even in an era without values, he has to be equipped with the full capacity of conscience… the foremost task of education is to refine that capacity which allows man to find unique meanings.
Our conscience and our intuition are the ways we can find meaning by ourselves. The process must be an inductive (intuition) one as well as a deductive (reason) one. Reason alone cannot lead us to meaning because we are operating on such high a level of abstraction we need to take certain axioms as true through our gut instinct. We need to ground our objective function somewhere but anything at this high an abstraction level can easily be reduced to biological drives; thus we must have faith there is a meaning, and control the desire to deconstruct.”In these moments you have found the meaning of life, found it on emotional grounds without having sought for it on intellectual ones… could not but shout out of the depth of our existence a triumphant “yes” to being.”
Freud said that psychoanalysis primarily rests on the recognition that repression is the cause of neurosis and transference is the cure. Repressed material should be made as conscious as possible. “Where id had been, ego should become.” Transference can be understood as a personal encounter based on the I-Thou relation. Frankl believes that self-understanding has to be mediated by this encounter. Expanding on Freud’s statement he says: “Where id is, ego should be; but the ego can become an ego only through a Thou.”
Metaclinical Implications of Psychotherapy
“There is no psychotherapy without a theory of man and a philosophy of life underlying it.” Logotherapy, unlike most other schools, treats man in a higher dimension which aims to preserve the humanness of man. It is centered around three pillars: the freedom of will, the will to meaning, the meaning of life.
The freedom of will simply depicts a high level freedom of Man to “take a stand on whatever conditions might confront him.” Not rejecting determinism on a lower level, Frankl responds to critiques that he, being a neurologist, should understand better than anyone the conditioned response of Man: “Along with being a professor in two fields I am a survivor of four concentration camps, and as such I also bear witness to the unexpected extent to which man is and always remains, capable of resisting and braving even the worst conditions.” He cites heroism and humor as uniquely human capacities of self-detachment.
Love enables one to grasp the other in their very uniqueness. Similarly, conscience “is that capacity which empowers him to seize the meaning of a situation in its very uniqueness, and in the final analysis meaning is something unique.” Each individual, for the ones who love him, is irreplaceable. These are intuitive and whole capacities which cannot be summed away by biochemical interactions without losing descriptive power. It is problematic when scientists take a merely physical view of man, completely rejecting the noological/spiritual (in the secular sense) dimension, because it overlooks such capacities as love and conscience.
This is but one mere example of reductionism, “a pseudoscientific approach which disregards and ignores the humanness of phenomena by making them into mere epiphenomena, more specifically, by reducing them to subhuman phenomena. In fact, one could define reductionism as sub-humanism.” Reductionism is caused by the effects of scientific specialization. Furthermore, the pictures by which individuals sciences depict reality have become so disparate, so different form each other, that is has become more and more difficult to obtain a meaningful fusion.
The danger of scientific specialization doesn’t lurk in the lack of universality but rather the pretense of totality. It only becomes problematic when an expert aims to understand and explain human beings exclusively in terms of their field. Perhaps, this generalization from scientific specializations is a reactionary movement out of shame against the millennia when we explained Man exclusively from religion and god. Ironically, “at the moment at which totality is claimed, biology becomes biologism, psychology becomes psychologism, and sociology becomes sociologism.” In the attempt to expulse religion, we have set up new all-encompassing idols of worship. It is no less religious to explain all of Man’s interactions in biological terms than in religious ones for you negate all other dimensions in favor of an arbitrary one.
“What we have to deplore, is not that scientists are specializing but that specialists are generalizing.” To say that man is a computer is both valid and insightful. But to say that man is “nothing-but” a computer overlooks the higher dimensionality of the former. “Today nihilism no longer unmasks itself by speaking of “nothingness.” Today nihilism is masked by speaking of the “nothing but-ness” of man. Reductionism has become the mask of nihilism.”
In order to “preserve the oneness of man in the face of the pluralism of sciences,” Frankl proposes dimensional ontology and anthropology, an “approach which makes use of the geometrical concept of dimensions as an analogy for qualitative differences which do not destroy the unity of a structure.”
The first law is that the same phenomena projected onto lower dimensions may result in projections contradicting each other, just as a cylinder projected on a flat surface may result in a rectangle or a circle. The second law states that different phenomena projected onto lower dimensions may result in the same projections, just as how a circle, cyllinder and cone observed from their base appear to be circles.
In like manner, when applied to Man, we may obtain contradictory explanations of the same person by analyzing them through different dimensions (psychotherapy, biology, sociology….); furthermore, we may obtain the same conclusions about two different individuals in a specific dimension.
Just because a lower dimension fully explains a higher dimension, that is a to say parts explain the whole as neurotransmitters do emotion, is not a valid basis for us to reject the validity, existence, or significance of the latter. It is the brilliance of the Prasangika school Of Mahayana Buddhism to point out the common fallacy of rejecting the whole’s existence in favor of the parts. What reductionists fail to see is that both whole and parts share similar nominal existences: the ocean is no less real than the wave.
“Science cannot cope with reality in its multidimensionality but must deal with reality as if reality were unidimensional. However, a scientist should remain aware of what he does, if for no other reason than to avoid the pitfalls of reductionism.”
A clear consequence that Frankl implies is how, the seemingly closedness in the lower dimensions of biology and physics does not necessitate a lack of “freedom of will” in the higher dimensions, an “openness” of man as opposed to animal who is bound by environment.
Self-transcendence as a human Phenomenon
Frankl opposes all homeostatic principles of human motivation, that is all principles that attempt to explain human behavior as resolving some form of tension. Instead, life is an infinite game — one played to continue to be played — tension is maintained rather than reduced.
The pursuit of happiness is self-defeating in that just like erections and orgasm, the potency is impaired by being made the target of intention. “Attaining the goal constitutes a reason for being happy. In other words, if there is a reason for happiness, happiness ensues, automatically and spontaneously, as it were. And that is why one need not pursue happiness, one need not care for it once there is a reason for it.”
What Freudian psychology is to happiness/pleasure, Adlerian psychology is to status. Yet the pursuit of status, Frankl argues less convincingly, is also self-defeating in that once the intention is made explicit it effectively lowers one’s status and power.
Freud’s will to pleasure and Adler’s will to meaning are mere derivatives of the will to meaning. Pleasure is what ensues from meaning and power is the means to the ends of meaning. “Only if one’s original concern with meaning fulfillment is frustrated is one either content with power or intent on pleasure.” When man ceases to have a reason to be happy, he will find a cause to make him feel happy. The former is psychological (cure cancer) while the latter is physiological (drugs).
Similarly, pursuing self-actualization is self-defeating because it contradicts the self-transcendent quality of human existence. “Only to the extent to which man fulfills a meaning out there in the world, does he fulfill himself.”
“As the boomerang comes back to the hunter who has thrown it only if it has missed its target, man, too, returns to himself and is intent upon self-actualization only if he has missed his mission.”
Flow states should ensue as well, for chasing one directly is like chasing an orgasm.
It is even problematic to think about man’s primary concern as a drive. There is a “fundamental difference between being driven to something on the one hand and striving for something on the other. It is one of the immediate data of life experience that man is pushed by drives but pulled by meaning.” Meaning fulfillment always implies decision-making it is always a choice of the observer.
A healthy amount of tension is important for mental health. Today people are spared tension, a condition only likely to worsen with growing automation, and an existential vacuum is manifesting itself mainly in a state of boredom. Unfortunately, people who are spared tension are likely to create it, usually in unhealthy ways.
American society has such a strong aversion to being authoritarian “to avoid even being directive.” “The collective obsessive fear that meaning and purpose might be imposed upon ourselves has resulted in an idiosyncrasy against ideals and values. Thus, the baby has been dumped out along with the bathwater, and ideals and values have been dismissed altogether.”
What we need is a sound amount of tension created by direction. But this direction is best if not imposed on us. While communist countries experience much less incidents of neurosis because they are swamped with tasks they are merely being tranquilized with the trivial — they do not share the American freedom to choose their tasks.
Freedom (lack of tension) is really a negative concept which requires a positive complement: responsibility. Responsibility has two referents: to a meaning whose fulfillment we are responsible for and to a being before whom we are responsible. “The sound spirit of democracy is but one-sidedly conceived of if understood as freedom without responsibility. Freedom threatens to degenerate into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibility.”
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What is Meant by meaning.
“Man’s original and natural concern with meaning and values is endangered by the prevalent subjectivism and relativism. Both are liable to erode idealism and enthusiasm.”
Q1: Is meaning relative?
Frankl agrees that meanings are unique: “Uniqueness, however, is a quality not only of a situation but even of life as a whole, since life is a string of unique situations.” But this uniqueness isn’t to reject that among these situations there are ones with many things in common. “Rather than being related to unique situations these meanings refer to the human condition. And these meanings are what is understood by values. So that one may define values as those meaning universals which crystallize in the typical situations a society or even humanity has to face.” He defines values as generalized decision heuristics which alleviate each individual’s search for meaning by providing a framework. E.g. the value of “charity” indicates that multiple unique individuals all experiences more meaning in their lives by giving then hoarding.
While values may seemingly collide we overlook the dimension of the hierarchical order of values “valuing implicitly means preferring one value to another.” Therefore, there is no true place for value conflicts.
This is how meaning is relative: it is related to the unique individual who is entangled in a specific situation. But that does not prevent us from generalizing.
Q2: Is meaning subjective?
Frankl argues that meaning is discovered rather than invented. That is, with a specific individual, in a unique situation, there is one correct interpretation of the meaning of the event. “Meaning is what is meant, be it by a person who asks me a question, or by a situation which, too, implies a question and calls for an answer.” Man is free to answer but that freedom is not meant to be associated with arbitrariness but rather with responsibility to find the true meaning.
Conscience “could be defined as the intuitive capacity of man to find out the meaning of a situation.” Frankl argues that conscience is intuitive as well as creative: often going against established norms to find unique meanings which generalize into the universal values of tomorrow. E.g. The first hunter gatherer in an cannibal society who chooses not to kill and eat his prisoners in a specific scenario that is transformed into a cultural norm.
Universals values are on the wane. Thus, more people are caught in the existential vacuum because they no longer have these heuristics to guide their action. Of course, even if all universal values disappeared, life could remain meaningful since it does not rob us from the creation of unique meanings. “If man is to find meanings even in an era without values, he has to be equipped with the full capacity of conscience… the foremost task of education is to refine that capacity which allows man to find unique meanings.”
Of course conscience is fallible but “the possibility of error does not dispense him from the necessity of trial.”
We’ve arrived at the third tenet of logotherapy: the meaning of life. “There is a meaning of life — a meaning, that is, for which man has been in search all along — and also that man has the freedom to embark on the fulfillment of this meaning.” You can find it in active creation in what you give (creative), in passive enjoyment in what you take (experiential), and in triumph against unavoidable suffering in the stance you take (attitudinal).
It is important to avoid all suffering necessary otherwise it would constitute a form of perverse heroism or masochism.
In the fulfilment-despair, failure-success quadrants: success and despair constitutes the existential vacuum while the fulfilment in failure constitutes attitudinal meaning in life.
The Existential Vacuum: A Challenge to Psychiatry
The existential vacuum results from two unique situations man finds himself in today: In contrast to an animal, no drives and instincts tell man what he must do. In contrast to former times, no conventions, traditions, and values tell him what he should do. Most times, due to the lack of self knowledge, he does not even know what he wishes to do.
Thus he either does what other people do or what other people wish him to do. Conformism manifests in the West, totalitarianism manifests out in the east.
The existential vacuum is a disease whose spread is amplified by modern education and it’s scientific and reductionist tendencies. Instead of equipping Man with the means to find meaning even in an age of crumbling universal values, it further obliterates any ground for meaning.
There is much to be learned in a conversation between Frankl and a patient trapped in the existential vacuum.
Frankl: What do you do to help yourself.
Patient: I listen to classic music, “I enjoy the fact that at least its creators have been granted the good fortune to arrive at a full conviction that there is a deeper or even ultimate meaning to human existence”.
F: Even if you do not believe in such a meaning yourself, you believe at least in the great believers. Man is given the chance to receive from them what he is not in each instance able to obtain by himself. When music touches you do you not even question the meaning of life in these moments?
P: no.
F: “In these moments you have found the meaning of life, found it on emotional grounds without having sought for it on intellectual ones… could not but shout out of the depth of our existence a triumphant “yes” to being.”
F: you should not cling only to those great spirits who have found meaning but also turn to those who have sought them in vain: When you put your problems on an academic level, you put a distance between them and yourself. There is nothing to be ashamed of, admitting to the vacuum is just the intellectual honesty of admitting to the collective neurosis of our day. “What I want to say is that you need not despair beause of your despair. You should rather take this despair as evidence of the existence of what I am used to calling “the will to meaning.” And in a sense, the very fact of your will justifies your faith in meaning: ‘thirst is the surest proof for the existence of water’,”
P: I need to be patient in leaving some problems unresolved but courageous in not giving up the struggle for the final solution. “Sometimes in order to get relief I need only to turn to the immediate tasks confronting me.”
The breakdown of social and cultural norms renders the vacuum to be more prevalent then ever. “Only if one’s original concern with meaning fulfillment is frustrated is one either intent on pleasure, or content with power.”
One of the manifestations of the will to power is the will to money. The will to money accounts for professional overactivity that aims to tranquilize us with the trivial. Money should not be an end in and of itself. But when it starts become the end, it starts becoming a defense mechanism, an attempt to escape the confrontation with the questions that actually matter.
A distinction between centrifugal leisure (leisure that aims us to take away the problems we are facing) and centripetal leisure (leisure which is conducive to meditation and contemplation) is made. The former is emphasized in our culture.
We enjoy our freedom, but we are not yet fully aware of our responsibility. If we were, we would realize that there is plenty of meaning waiting to be fulfilled by us, be it with respect to underprivileged people or with respect to underdeveloped countries.
Sigmund Freud: “The moment one inquires about the sense or value of life, one is sick.”
“If a young man confesses to his prerogative and challenges life’s meaning, he must have patience — enough patience to wait until meaning dawns upon him.”
Logotherapeutic Techniques
Logotherapy aims to tackle psychoanalysis in the meaning/spiritual dimension while most other schools treat man as a machine.
Specifically, Logotherapy relies on two techniques: dereflection (turning focus away from what is anxiety inducing and onto meaningful matters) and paradoxical intention (wishing for what you dread which supposedly lessens anticipatory anxiety). They rest on two essential qualities of human existence, namely, man’s capacities of self-transcendence and self-detachment.
Medical Ministry
When a patient can no longer avoid his suffering what then matters is the stand he takes towards his predicament, the attitude he chooses toward his suffering: “in other words, the fulfillment of the potential meaning of suffering.”
The interviews and case studies in this chapter are worth rereading. It is so powerful the stance he takes towards suffering: he paints a heroic narrative for people to subscribe to and thus face to their suffering with dignity. He often does this with mythology and religion, drawing comparisons to Jonah in the whale and Jacob wrestling with the angel.
“Such creative psychiatrists as the founders of the pioneering schools are said to have developed systems which in the final analysis depict their own neuroses. In this I would see an achievement, for in this way they have not only overcome their own neuroses but also taught other doctors how to help their patients overcome their neuroses. The misery of a single man is turned into a sacrifice for the sake of mankind. The only question is whether the neurosis of a given psychiatrist is representative of the neuroses of the time in which he lives. If it is, his suffering stands for the suffering of humanity. One must go through his own existential despair if he is to learn how to immunize his patients against it. “
Conclusion
There is meaning, it is unconditional meaning, and neither suffering nor dying can detract from it.
“Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labor of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stall: Yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation… May this be the lesson to learn from my book.”
He makes a great point and I am much more sympathetic to an immaterial sphere of free will. Just as apes and dogs cannot comprehend humans, it is not within the realm of possibilities that we do not understand how higher beings work.
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