no Man's Search for Meaning
Logotherapy in a Nutshell m
barracks of a Bavarian concentration camp
assisted me in overcoming the danger of
cardiovascular collapse.
Thus it can be seen that mental health
is based on a certain degree of tension, the
tension between what one has already
achieved and what one still ought to
accomplish, or the gap between what one is
and what one should become. Such a
tension is inherent in the human being and
therefore is indispensable to mental well-
being. We should not, then, be hesitant
about challenging man with a potential
meaning for him to fulfill. It is only thus that
we evoke his will to meaning from its state
of latency. I consider it a dangerous
misconception of mental hygiene to assume
that what man needs in the first place is
equilibrium or, as it is called in biology,
"homeostasis," i.e., a tensionless state.
What man actually needs is not a
tensionless state but rather the striving
and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a
freely chosen task. What he needs is not
the discharge of tension at any cost but
the call of a potential meaning waiting
to be fulfilled by him. What man needs
is not homeostasis but what I call "nod-
dynamics," i.e., the existential dynamics in
a polar field of tension where one pole is
represented by a meaning that is to be
fulfilled and the other pole by the man who
has to fulfill it. And one should not think
that this holds true only for normal
conditions; in neurotic individuals, it is
even more valid. If architects want to
strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase
the load which is laid upon it, for thereby
the parts are joined more firmly together. So
if therapists wish to foster their patients'
mental health, they should not be afraid to
create a sound amount of tension through
a reorientation toward the meaning of
one's life.
Having shown the beneficial impact of
meaning orientation, I turn to the
detrimental influence of that feeling of
which so many patients complain today,
namely, the feeling of the total and
ultimate meaninglessness of their lives.
They lack the awareness of a meaning
worth living for. They are haunted by the
experience of their inner emptiness, a void
within themselves; they are caught in that
situation which I have called the "existential
vacuum."
THE EXISTENTIAL VACUUM
The existential vacuum is a widespread
phenomenon of the twentieth century. This
is understandable; it may be due to a
twofold loss which man has had to undergo
since he became a truly human being. At
the beginning of human history, man lost
some of the basic animal instincts in which
an animal's behavior is imbedded and by
which it is secured. Such security, like
Paradise, is closed to man forever; man has
to make choices. In addition to this, however,
man has suffered another loss in his more
recent development inasmuch as the
traditions which buttressed his behavior are
now rapidly diminishing. No instinct tells
him. what he has to do, and no tradition tells
him what he ought to do; sometimes he does
not even know what he wishes to do. Instead,
he either wishes to do what other people do
(conformism) or he does what other people
wish him to do (totalitarianism).
A statistical survey recently revealed that
among my European students, 25 percent
showed a more-or-less marked degree of
existential vacuum. Among my American
students it was not 25 but 60 percent.
The existential vacuum manifests itself
mainly in a state of boredom. Now we can
understand Schopenhauer when he said that
mankind was apparently doomed to vacillate
eternally between the two extremes of
distress and boredom. In actual fact,
boredom is now causing, and certainly
bringing to psychiatrists, more problems to
solve than distress. And these problems are
growing increasingly crucial,
for
progressive automation will probably lead
to an enor-
112 Man's Search for Meaning
Logotherapy in a Nutshell
113
mous increase in the leisure hours available
to the average worker. The pity of it is that
many of these will not know what to do with
all their newly acquired free time.
Let us consider, for instance, "Sunday
neurosis," that kind of depression which
afflicts people who become aware of the
lack of content in their lives when the rush
of the busy week is over and the void within
themselves becomes manifest. Not a few
cases of suicide can be traced back to this
existential vacuum. Such widespread
phenomena as depression, aggression and
addiction are not understandable unless we
recognize the existential vacuum underlying
them. This is also true of the crises of
pensioners and aging people.
Moreover, there are various masks and
guises under which the existential vacuum
appears. Sometimes the frustrated will to
meaning is vicariously compensated for by a
will to power, including the most primitive
form of the will to power, the will to money.
In other cases, the place of frustrated will to
meaning is taken by the will to pleasure. That
is why existential frustration often
eventuates in sexual compensation. We can
observe in such cases that the sexual libido
becomes rampant in the existential vacuum.
An analogous event occurs in neurotic
cases. There are certain types of feedback
mechanisms and vicious-circle formations
which I will touch upon later. One can
observe again and again, however, that this
symptomatology has invaded an existential
vacuum wherein it then continues to flourish.
In such patients, what we have to deal with
is not a noogenic neurosis. However, we will
never succeed in having the patient overcome
his condition if we have not supplemented the
psychotherapeutic treatment with logo-
therapy. For by filling the existential
vacuum, the patient will be prevented from
suffering further relapses. Therefore,
logotherapy is indicated not only in noogenic
cases, as pointed out above, but also in
psychogenic cases, and some-
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