Among such problems, the frustration of the
will to meaning plays a large role.
It is obvious that in noogenic cases the
appropriate and adequate therapy is not
psychotherapy in general but rather
logotherapy; a therapy, that is, which dares
to enter the specifically human dimension.
Let me quote the following instance: A
high-ranking American diplomat came to my
office in Vienna in order to continue
psychoanalytic treatment which he had begun
five years previously with an analyst in New
York. At the outset I asked him why he
thought he should be analyzed, why his
analysis had been started in the first place.
It turned out that the patient was
discontented with his career and found it
most difficult to comply with American
foreign policy. His analyst, however, had
told him again and again that he should try to
reconcile himself with his father; because the
government of the U.S. as well as his
superiors were "nothing but" father images
and, consequently, his dissatisfaction with his
job was due to the hatred he unconsciously
harbored toward his father. Through an
analysis lasting five years, the patient had
been prompted more and more to accept his
analyst's interpretations until he finally was
unable to see the forest of reality for the trees
of symbols and images. After a few
interviews, it was clear that his will to
meaning was frustrated by his vocation, and
he actually longed to be engaged in some
other kind of work. As there was no reason
for not giving up his profession and embark
ing on a different one, he did so, with most
gratifying results. He has remained
contented in this new occupation for over
five years, as he recently reported. I doubt
that, in this case, I was dealing with a
neurotic condition at all, and that is why I
thought that he did not need any psychother
apy, nor even logotherapy, for the simple
reason that he was
108 Man's Search for
Meaning
Logotherapy in a Nutshell 109
not actually a patient. Not every conflict is
necessarily neurotic; some amount of conflict
is normal and healthy. In a similar sense
suffering is not always a pathological phenom
enon; rather than being a symptom of
neurosis, suffering may well be a human
achievement, especially if the suffering
grows out of existential frustration. I would
strictly deny that one's search for a meaning
to his existence, or even his doubt of it, in
every case is derived from, or results in, any
disease. Existential frustration is in itself
neither pathological nor pathogenic. A man's
concern, even his despair, over the
worthwhileness of life is an existential
distress but by no means a mental disease. It
may well be that interpreting the first in
terms of the latter motivates a doctor to bury
his patient's existential despair under a heap
of tranquilizing drugs. It is his task, rather,
to pilot the patient through his existential
crises of growth and development.
Logotherapy regards its assignment as that
of assisting the patient to find meaning in his
life. Inasmuch as logotherapy makes him
aware of the hidden logos of his existence, it
is an analytical process. To this extent,
logotherapy resembles
psychoanalysis.
However, in logotherapy's attempt to make
something conscious again it does not restrict
its activity to instinctual facts within the
individual's unconscious but also cares for
existential realities, such as the potential
meaning of his existence to be fulfilled as well
as his will to meaning. Any analysis, however,
even when it refrains from including the
noological dimension in its therapeutic pro
cess, tries to make the patient aware of what
he actually longs for in the depth of his
being. Logotherapy deviates from
psychoanalysis insofar as it considers man a
being whose main concern consists in
fulfilling a meaning, rather than in the mere
gratification and satisfaction of drives and
instincts, or in merely reconciling the
conflicting claims of
id, ego and superego, or in the mere
adaptation and adjustment to society and
environment.
NOO
-
DYNAMICS
To be sure, man's search for meaning may
arouse inner tension rather than inner
equilibrium. However, precisely such
tension is an indispensable prerequisite of
mental health. There is nothing in the world,
I venture to say, that would so effectively help
one to survive even the worst conditions as the
knowledge that there is a meaning in one's
life. There is much wisdom in the words of
Nietzsche: "He who has a why to live for can
bear almost any how." I can see in these
words a motto which holds true for any
psychotherapy. In the Nazi concentration
camps, one could have witnessed that those
who knew that there was a task waiting for
them to fulfill were most apt to survive. The
same conclusion has since been reached by
other authors of books on concentration
camps, and also by psychiatric investigations
into Japanese, North Korean and North
Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camps.
As for myself, when I was taken to the
concentration camp of Auschwitz, a
manuscript of mine ready for publication was
confiscated.
1
Certainly, my deep desire to
write this manuscript anew helped me to
survive the rigors of the camps I was in. For
instance, when in a camp in Bavaria I fell ill
with typhus fever, I jotted down on little
scraps of paper many notes intended to
enable me to rewrite the manuscript, should I
live to the day of liberation. I am sure that
this reconstruction of my lost manuscript in
the dark
1 It was the first version of my first book, the
English translation of which was published by Alfred
A. Knopf, New York, in 1955, under the title The
Doctor and the Soul: An Introduction to Logotherapy.
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