Logotherapy
"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how."
- Nietzsche
Viktor Frankl, the renowned Viennese psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, founded logotherapy around the simple claim that human beings are not primarily driven by pleasure or power, but by the need to find meaning. He called this the will to meaning and argued that when it goes unfulfilled, the result is not necessarily illness in the usual psychological sense, but something closer to existential disorientation, in which life loses its purpose and becomes hollow.
One of his most important innovations was the recognition of successful and psychologically healthy individuals who might still suffer the consequences of a thwarted will to meaning.
Frankl was one of the first thinkers in the therapeutic tradition to insist that many of the struggles people bring to a consulting room are not psychological symptoms to be treated, but existential or philosophical questions to be thought through in order to uncover their meaning.
Viktor Emil Frankl
Central to logotherapy is the idea that ultimate meaning cannot be given or prescribed by someone else: it must be uncovered by each individual. This meaning can be found in specific circumstances, which should constitute an overall coherent direction of life. Key to this process is the use of both reflection and feeling to ensure that we are discovering true meaning, rather than merely conforming to what we assume provides it.
Also central to Logotherapy is the development of freedom, especially in choosing the attitude we take toward ourselves and toward circumstances. For Frankl, we are always free to choose our attitude toward whatever we face. Freedom is the space in which a person becomes, or fails to become, the author of their own life, which translates into a fulfilled or unfulfilled way of living. The emphasis on freedom becomes especially important where negative circumstances cannot be changed, as we can always choose our attitude.
Another of Frankl’s strongest points is that life should be understood in terms of fulfillment, which is independent of whatever idea we might have of success or failure. A fulfilled life is one that is in touch with what is valuable and meaningful for us as irreplaceable individuals. Widespread ideas of success might provide us with a substitute for meaning for some time, but eventually something in us starts to resent how we live, which shows up as the feeling of meaninglessness of life.
In an age where instant success seems to be the only guiding principle society has to offer, reflections on true fulfillment cease to be mere luxury questions. They become urgent ones.
My philosophical counselling draws directly on this tradition. It offers a rigorous, unhurried space to examine the questions that underlie everyday dissatisfaction, both in what might feel failure and in what seem feel like success, so that we can find what you actually value, so that meaning can appear.
First edition of Man's search for Meaning.
Literal translation: "A psychologist experiences the concentration camp."
