Logotherapy and the will to meaning
Viktor Frankl set out logotherapy in the second part of Man's Search for Meaning, "Logotherapy in a Nutshell". The first part is the camps. The second is the school, set out briefly and without much ceremony.
It begins with a disagreement. Where Freud placed the will to pleasure and Adler the will to power, Frankl put the will to meaning: what moves a person first is not satisfaction, and not standing among others, but having something to live for.
Meaning is not a mood
Meaning, in Frankl's account, is not the feeling of meaningfulness. It does not come of thinking well of oneself, and a person can be miserable and still be living for something definite.
He also denies that the absence of tension is the goal. A life stretched between what someone is and what they have not yet done is not a life out of order.
"What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal."
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, "Logotherapy in a Nutshell"
Where the school says meaning is found
Frankl names three roads, and none of them is introspection.
A person finds meaning in work, in something made or done that would not exist otherwise. Or in someone loved, taken as this person and not as a source of anything. Or, when the situation cannot be changed at all, in the attitude taken towards suffering that will not go away.
The third is what the book is remembered for, and also what is most often misread. Frankl does not say suffering is meaningful. He says that suffering which cannot be removed still leaves a person a choice about how to bear it, and that the choice is his own.
The existential vacuum
Having no answer to the question at all, Frankl called the existential vacuum, and described it as boredom grown past its usual size. He treats it as a fact about the century rather than a diagnosis: tradition stopped supplying answers, instinct never had them, and the question was left with the individual.
Which is why logotherapy does not hand out meanings. A meaning issued by a therapist stays the therapist's, and gives way the first day it costs anything.
What the therapist does instead
The work is to widen what the person can see, until what is actually being lived for becomes visible. Sometimes nothing is, and that is the finding.
So the question comes back turned around. The thing I live for: did I find it, or did I assign it to myself, and does the difference change anything?
Epimelea is a therapy app built around this school. Sessions carry over from one to the next, and the archive is encrypted on the device and belongs to the person who wrote it.
This page is about a school of psychotherapy. It is not medical advice and not emergency help. If you are in danger right now, contact your local emergency number, or find a helpline in your country at findahelpline.com.