Hello readers! This post is in continuation with the previous post which contains the first half of the book. This post is concerned with Logotherapy, a psychotherapy approach described by Viktor Frankl. The therapy deals with “the will to meaning” instead of “will to pleasure or power” as described by Freud or Adler. The approach deals with the fact that when one does not know about what to do with their freedom, one gets hooked into meaninglessness, depression, suicidal tendencies and looses the zeal of life calling it absurd or pointless to even exist.
I have honestly refrained from sharing so many good quotes, because I do not want to spoil the book for you. And even if it is spoiled you should still read it.
| 3. | Logotherapy in a nutshell | Logo means meaning. So the therapy which provides meaning to you to live for, is logotherapy. It showcases several case studies of Victor’s patients who got immense relief and sometimes even immediately forever, when he applied his approach on them. |
| 4. | The case for a Tragic Optimism | It deals with the situation when a human finds himself in tragic triad – pain/guilt/death, and provides them an approach to strive for glory even when entire life seems to declare itself a tragedy. |
Remember that the following quote is coming from a man, who saw death on a daily basis in front of his eyes, who was having 1 in 25th chance of survival each day for 1096 days ie 3 years! I quote him:
THE WILL TO MEANING
Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a “secondary rationalization” of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning. There are some authors who contend that meanings and values are “nothing but defense mechanisms, reaction formations and sublimations.” But as for myself, I would not be willing to live merely for the sake of my “defense mechanisms,” nor would I be ready to die merely for the sake of my “reaction formations.”
Existential Frustration: The term “existential” may be used to refer to (1) existence itself, i.e., the specifically human mode of being; (2) the meaning of existence; and (3) the striving to find a concrete meaning in personal existence.
The frustration caused by any of the above three factors causes us frustration in our routine life, when the dead lake is disturbed by the rain drops of self awareness, the entertaining stillness is disturbed, the ocean of thought questions itself for what is the meaning of all this accumulation? Yes, there is life being sustained, yes there are beings supported, but to what end? The meaning of it all? The purpose of it all, the strive to not just evaporate and vanish into nothingness? Why not? Viktor Frankl here argues, that the goal of life is perhaps to never seek a tensionless easy state of mind, it infact is to seek a balance which makes people be stretched between two poles of meaning and meaning actualizer ie to grip our life in finding meaning in the action of pursuit rather than asking what is it aimed towards, or what is the conclusion of my life, see it as if what is life’s conclusion for me? And I shall execute it to the best of any human endeavor possible. It is a constant see-saw of what meaning is to be fulfilled and the one who is going to fulfill it.
Those who fail to achieve this optimum tension state, are doomed to fall into the state of Existential Vacuum.
Existential Vacuum
The ability to sit peacefully with oneself is rarely ever found. There is a constant state of distress when one has nothing to do. Most humans today succumb to either doing what others are doing around him or what others would want him to do, and he learns to confine into being told what to do. Earlier stages of human development were easy, either the inner natural instinct or after some stages tradition was there to guide people and bring meaning to their life, now the day to day routine has become so dry and incomprehensible for us, that we find people clinging to things like addiction, aggression, perversion, depression, anxiety or compulsions as a result of either an escape or a burdened overwhelm of thoughts.
The Sundays are not waited to have fun, but to escape the meaninglessness and find a temporary escape in resting. To live for the weekends is the phrase, but is it really living?
Meaning of life:
It is a very subjective answer. The analogy given in the book was that to ask for meaning of life is like asking for the best move in chess. There are different games, different situations, different goals and different best moves for each possible combination. Similar is the situation in life, the answer has to be found within, and it is not static. It is not always one end goal of it all, if it is, its good, but a lot of times, the vision the contingencies and everything is so unpredictable and unseen that we can not really attach one meaning to life for the satisfaction of this itch. The pursuit and execution of a step by step approach is something more practically applicable. I will again quote something amazing from the book to help you understand the essence of meaning and existentialism:
The role played by a logotherapist is that of an eye specialist rather than that of a painter. A painter tries to convey to us a picture of the world as he sees it; an ophthalmologist tries to enable us to see the world as it really is. The logotherapist’s role consists of widening and broadening the visual field of the patient so that the whole spectrum of potential meaning becomes conscious and visible to him.
In the previous blog I had mentioned from the book, that there are three possible ways to find meaning – meaning in love, meaning in doing something significant, and meaning in enduring suffering gracefully. All these streams have one thing in common, the fact of finding joy in the pursuit in current action. The first two are self explanatory, devotion to love and work. What needs a little bit more spotlight is suffering.
Shame in suffering? Sad about being unhappy? Why not have fun instead?
When someone bears a course of fate which is hopeless and can not be changed, for what then matters is to bear witness to the human potential being tapped at its best. In no way suffering is necessary to find meaning, but if it is unavoidable, in accepting the challenge to suffer bravely, life has a meaning up to the last moment. It retains it until the very end, unconditionally.
The value system that we have is very messed up, there is burden of unhappiness, but on top of that there is another burden of being shamed or being unhappy about being unhappy. We find people overzealously making other not so happy people feel bad for not being as lively or as happy as them, and ridiculing their suffering or strife for some good goal even. It draws away the real essence of living a life of grace.
Meaning meaning, what is meaning?
We should not blatantly say oh everything is meaningless, but rather take note on our incapacity to make sense of everything all the time, to grasp the unconditional meaning in rational terms, at every moment. A leap of faith, a sense of being devoted to something without question, takes us a long way. I questioned is it not keeping ourselves in illusion? But if not this, then what replaces it? It is mere dissatisfaction and a sense of depersonalization with disgust, and fails to make the world around us as better as the leap of faith, even in the long run.
Frankl was “concerned with the potential meaning inherent and dormant in all the single situations one has to face throughout his or her life,” rather than trying to understand the meaning of life as a whole. He was not suggesting there is no meaning to an entire human life, but that this final meaning depends “on whether or not the potential meaning of every single situation has been actualized …” In other words: “the perception of meaning … boils down to becoming aware of a possibility against the background of reality or … becoming aware of what can be done.”
There is passion in the force of creation and there is placid tastelessness in killing the engagement in devotion to work or love or suffering. The course of nature is creation! Even the worst destruction happens for sustenance of a greater cause. I would like to quote the author again for this paragraph actually makes us realise that the problem is not in meaninglessness but in our incapability of grasping it, and in our incapability of making something useful out of this life:
Freedom however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.
Logotheraphy as a methodology:
- Dissolving the dissatisfaction with dereflection or looking beyond self:
This involves asking questions which dissolve the usually trivial need for having enjoyed a different, easier, better or more pleasurable life in some way or to have had a different kind of meaning in life. The questions can be like – What would your perfect version of life would be and why is it not as meaningful as the present? Or What if you were 80 years old, lying on your deathbed, what would you possibly say to your current self to make it more fulfilling while you still are not 80 and have the capacity to do that? - Paradoxical Intention: The wish is the father of thought and the fear is the mother of the event.
This method deals with anticipatory anxiety, in which the fear itself produces precisely that of which the patient is scared of. This mainly happens because either the goal is misunderstood or the person is extremely hyper-focused on the goal and not the process. The neurotic who earns to laugh at himself maybe on the way of management. Eg- The fear of sleeplessness results in a hyper-focused state to fall asleep, which is the wrong way to do so. Instead the person is supposed to do the paradoxical thing, I will stay awake as long as possible, the anxiety diminishes quite fatly, because the anticipatory failure is now not expected anymore, instead it is being welcomed which demolishes the fear. - Socratic Dialogues:
This one I could not identify in the book, instead had to look for online. The author talks to their patients and makes them reveal the things which are probably uncomfortable, and then hooks on specifics which are possibly restraining the wind of anxiety in their sail of life. It deals with self revelation and client themselves ends up dissolving their neurosis.
A man is more than just psyche or his accumulation of memories, ethics and principles. A human being is not just another thing on this planet, man is ultimately self-determining. What he is able to achieve within the constraints of life, to tap the potential and to actualize what once was conceived only as a dream, is more than enough to prove that it is not just conditional factors but a man’s choice to do and to be.
The Case for Tragic Optimism
This part deals with the case of finding motivation even in the times of extreme distress in life. He says there is a tragic triad which are the most common tree agents of distress in life – pain, guilt and death. Frankl reiterates that to counter these three cases, we again have the three ways to find meaning in life – in love, in significant wok or in suffering gracefully.
- Pain- to not live a life hyper-focused on pleasure seeking principle. It is helpful to keep meaning orientation higher than immediate pleasure seeking. You can not be focused on laughing, you must be focused on a task for which laughing is a potential by product.
- Guilt – to explain that oh, because of these circumstances and these reasons, for your crime might be justified in your perspective brings tastelessness and disgust in mind. What is fundamentally wrong is wrong, and the meaning is found in striving to rise above and changing for the better.
- Death – live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly as the first time as you are about to act now.
Unemployment Neurosis:
People have the means but no meaning. …… Being jobless was equated with being useless and being useless was equated with having a meaningless life. Consequently, whenever I succeeded in persuading the patients to volunteer in organization, education, public libraries and like in other words, as soon as they could filll their abundant free time with some sort of unpaid but meaningful activity – their depression disappeared although their economic situation had not changed, and their hunger was the same. The truth is that man does not live by welfare alone.
The society today, I am sure we all have experienced is so much focused on achievement oriented value based system. And it makes you feel easily dispensable even if you have achieved some good chunk. The society adores the young for their possibilities, and adores those who are successful and happy. It ignores everyone else who are not able to provide. Men are made to feel shame for not being able to provide, even in marriage traditions, a man’s worth is decided by how well off he is? It simply is being ignored that there is a decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is to align by these principles, then tell me, is there not an Adolf Hitler in all of us, who would kill all those who were not able to work for him, old, sick, handicapped, mentally disoriented, all just mere variables in the production function based value system of life. The only difference is Hitler infact achieved this value based system to the level he could justify and commit atrocities, and you just brood over them and derive some sense of betterment over it. There is for sure more to life than the aspect of being useful. One finds the self worth in being true to dignity, true to morals, true to the choices to make of being human, of belonging to the race of decent humans.
For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best. So, let us be alert in a twofold sense: Since Auschwitz we know what a man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.
Man’s search for Meaning – Viktor Frankl
So…
That was it my dear readers, I really appreciate your efforts to read whatever I wrote. Congratulations ! You just read 2500+ words and I hope that you gained some beautiful insights from this post.
Indeed it is a thought-book, this is all what I think whenever I am… existing.
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