Review: Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning

Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
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The Origin of Intolerance: Fear of Different Individuals, Groups or Nations

It is usually normal for an organization, religion or government to be united in its purposes and ideals. However, uniformity (rather than unity) can be psychologically unhealthy, even dangerous, because it breeds intolerance, even fear, of those who are different. For example, in Germany during World War II, the Nazis demanded uniformity in their concept of German nationalism, racial superiority and political policies of extermination of inferior races. In other words, the Nazis did not tolerate dissent and opposition from Jewish and Polish people, even from Germans themselves.

In the Foreword of one of Viktor Frankl’s books, Swanee Hunt, formerly the United States Ambassador to Austria, said that the Nazi concentration camps were “created to annihilate those who were different.”1 Frankl suffered in the concentration camps, because he was different. His father, mother, brother and wife died, because they, too, were different.

False Tolerance: To Tolerate the Intolerable

[Paraphrased from Viktor Frankl’s View of Tolerance]

Tolerance, jealousy, benevolence, hate, decency. What will be ultimate in our lives? As Viktor Frankl would remind us, the choice is ours.

Swanee Hunt

United States Ambassador to Austria

Logotherapy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logothe...
Noology
Ontology
Facticity

Pill god romanticism

Speaking of population explosion, I would like to touch on the Pill. It is not only counteracting the population explosion but, as I see it, rendering an even greater service. If it is true that it is love that makes sex human, the Pill allows for a truly human sexual life, one in which, freed from its automatic connection with procreation, sex can realize its highest potential as one of the most direct and meaningful expressions of love. Sex is human if it is experienced as a vehicle of love, and to make it into a mere means to an end contradicts the humanness of sex, regardless of whether the pleasure principle dictates the end or the procreation instinct does so. As to the latter, sex has been emancipated, thanks to the Pill, and has thereby become capable of achieving its potential status as a human phenomenon.

Today the will to meaning is often frustrated. In logo-therapy one speaks of existential frustration. We psychiatrists are confronted more than ever before with patients who are complaining of a feeling of futility that at present plays at least as important a role as did the feeling of inferiority in Alfred Adler's time. Let me just quote from a letter I recently received from a young American student: "I am a 22-year-old with degree, car, security and the availability of more sex and power than I need. Now I have only to ex-plain to myself what it all means." However, such people are complaining not only of a sense of meaninglessness but also of emptiness, and that is why I have described this condition in terms of the "existential vacuum."

There is no doubt that the existential vacuum is in-creasing and spreading...

Existential panic that seems classic, timeless w/conformism

If asked for a brief explanation, I would say that the existential vacuum derives from the following conditions. Unlike an animal, man is not told by drives and instincts what he must do. And in contrast to man in former times, he is no longer told by traditions and values what he should do. Now, knowing neither what he must do nor what he should do, he sometimes does not even know what he basically wishes to do. Instead, he wishes to do what other people do-which is conformism-or he does what other people wish him to do which is totalitarianism.

In addition to these two effects of the existential vacuum, there is a third, namely, neuroticism. The existential vacuum per se is not a neurosis, at least not in the strictly clinical sense. If it is a neurosis at all it would have to be diagnosed as a sociogenic neurosis. However, there are also

Sacred

If we respect the spiritual and existential character of unconscious religiousness-rather than allotting it to the realm of psychological facticity—it also becomes impossible to regard it as something innate. Since it is not tied up with heredity in the biological sense, it cannot be inherited either. This is not to deny that all religiousness al-ways proceeds within certain preestablished paths and patterns of development. These, however, are not innate, inherited archetypes but given cultural molds into which personal religiousness is poured. These molds are not transmitted in a biological way, but are passed down through the world of traditional symbols indigenous to a given culture. This world of symbols is not inborn in us, but we are born into it.

Post Freud

psychoanalysis had already lost much of its territory to a sound and sober trend in the field of psychotherapy, namely, behavior therapy. As early as 1960, H. J. Eysenck deplored "the lack of experimental or clinical evidence in favor of psychoanalysis." The theories of psychoanalysis are "beliefs" with which "psychiatrists in training are now frequently indoctrinated." However, Eysenck argues not only in general that "Freudian theories are outside the realm of science" but also in particular that "so-called symptomatic cures can be achieved which are long-lasting and do not produce alternative symptoms." This fact "argues strongly against the Freudian hypothesis." In contrast to the Freudian "belief," Eysenck thinks that abolition of the symptoms does not at all "leave behind some mysterious complex seeking outlet in alternative symptoms. "

Long before this, logotherapy also had offered evi-dence that neuroses need not in each and every case be traced to the Oedipal situation or other types of conflicts and complexes but may derive from feedback mecha-nisms such as the circle formation built up by anticipato-ry anxiety. 43 And as early as 1947 I myself attempted to interpret neurosis in reflexological terms ...

It is my contention that behavior therapy has made a valuable contribution to the evolution of psychotherapy in that it has shown how to demythologize neurosis. This formulation is not too far-fetched when one considers the fact that Sigmund Freud himself described his instinct theory as a "mythology" and the instincts as "mythical" entities.

To sum up, Freud has unmasked the neurotic; Rogers has de-ideologized psychotherapy; and Eysenck, Wolpe, and others have demythologized neurosis; and yet a discontent remains. Even to such a declared materialist as Christa Kohler, who runs the department of psychotherapy at Karl Marx University in Leipzig, "the behavioristically oriented psychotherapists Wolpe and Eysenck" are, to her mind, excessively "sliding into a biologistic and mechanistic position."45 She may be right. Particularly in an era such as ours, one of meaningless-ness, depersonalization, and dehumanization, it is not possible to cope with the ills of the age unless the human dimension, the dimension of human phenomena, is included in the concept of man, which indispensably underlies every sort of psychotherapy, be it on the conscious or unconscious level

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