Man's Search For Meaning

by: Viktor Emil Frankl

To speak of logotherapy and Frankl is to speak quidditively of the same thing. Logotherapy is Frankl's thought-child, and much as the man himself, remains a driving force in psychotherapy and sociological etiology. As much as an exposition in brief of the basic tenets of logotherapy, the work - autobiographical in brief as well - posits the firmament of Frankl's professional and personal philosophy contextual to the noological conceit of his life in the systematic degredation of concentration camp life; its application to psychological analysis and treatment to the singular person while acknowledging the motivating forces of group - particularly negative - mentality.

Logotherapy is to look to the future. To, as its name suggests focus on meaning, through strife and struggle, and to defocus on vacuuous - though not always - psychoanalysation. To find bravery, dignity, and truth in the most odious of man's machinations and situations. To achieve these things through truth, honesty, and responsibility. How many times during the latter half of his life did he exhort audiences and students alike to envision a Statue of Responsibility on America's west coast? The proper balance, in Frankl's (and yours truly) opinion to liberty as a concept and practice.

In two parts, Frankls lucumbrations (completed in nine days!) first speak of his life in the concentration camp system of Europe in World War II, proceeding to a more in depth and technical dialectic on the rudiments of logotherapy, as distinctly applied to an array of contemporary psychological malaise. How difficult it must have been, as a professional in the pyschotherapeutic field, to remain objective while also a participant in the exigeses and enactments of not only his own, but the existential foments of the National Socialist regime! To this, Frankl posits the external observer, as ever, unable to truly perceive and therefore understand circumstance and perception, inception and denoument of the cycle of imminent struggle in the face of hopelesness and death.

Identified in the struggle of the detainee and doomed, Frankl excavates three stages of psychological strife as the person enters the camp, struggles for existence, and meets their end, whatever that may have been. Death, for all too many. As deliniated by Frankl, these three stages, extrapolative to the greater humanity, at large, distill as shock, apathy, and resolution - each pernicious and potentially warping if not outright sinister, spelling out doom.

A number of vignettes ensue, supporting the thesis of each, each pathotically resonant. In each stage and case, the importance, nay, imminence of a struggle to and recognition of meaning and future is paramount to success in a psychological and psychohygienic manner. That one may find courage and meaning, and thus embody the highest aspirations of the human conditon, in even the most abject and senseless of crimes and situations.

As the text progresses into technicality, a number of pathologies emerge as being existentially detrimental (after all, the pursuit of mental well-being is, in an anti-psychoanalytical vein, an existential one) to mental wellness and hygiene. Borrowing de Chardin, Frankl exposes essentially Heideggarian nihilism - an existential vaccuum (de Chardin uses the term desert) - as the cri de coeur of the postwar generations. Incipient issues and dilemmas such as occupational obsession and drug abuse fuel Frankl's point that modern man, having lost his meaning - hence, his compass, moral or otherwise - has fallen into a vaccuous state of existence, devoid of meaning and dignity, even -and especially - in the face of trial and suffering. In recognizing the noological conceit, namely, that the human can, and particularly has, the capacity to reify the meaning of his own existence via turmoil, Frankl neatly casts aside the post modern model of success and happiness as being ends in and of themselves.

His concluding words ably and succinctly captures the gravity of our search for meaning as one of the past, present, and future:

"Auschwitz showed us what man is capable of.
Hiroshima showed us what is at stake."

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