Tribute To Viktor Frankl

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TRIBUTE TO VIKTOR FRANKL

CHAPTER 1 - Introduction CHAPTER 2 - Logotherapy and Freedom of Will CHAPTER 3 - Will to Meaning and Meaning of Life CHAPTER 4 - Tragic Triad, Existential Vacuum, Paradoxical Intention CHAPTER 5 - Logotherapy Techniques with Case History CHAPTER 6 - What Others Say About Frankl CHAPTER 7 - Excerpts From the Writings of Viktor Frankl CHAPTER 8 - An Interview With Viktor Frankl at 90 Years: Matthew Scully CHAPTER 9 On Hypnosis - Viktor Frankl: Recollections: Autobiography CHAPTER 10 EVERYTHING TO GAIN: LOGOTHERAPY: CRUMBAUGH CHAPTER 11 QUEST FOR ULTIMATE MEANING: REIVEN BULKA CHAPTER 12 UNHEARD CRY FOR MEANING: VIKTOR FRANKL CHAPTER 13 FRANKL AGAINST FREUD: GENRICH KRASKO (UNDER ARTICLES 2) "TRAINING OR EDUCATION: BASED ON FRANKL'S PRINCIPLES" (UNDER ARTICLES 3 AND KRASKO) CHAPTER 14 FRANKL OBITUARY: FRANKL DEAD AT 92: By ROLAND PRINZ VIKTOR FRANKL'S BIBLIOGRAPHY:

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION I wish to pay tribute to one of my heroes. Though he is not known as a hypnotherapist, his theories and counseling techniques can be used by hypnotherapist. In an address on Hypnosis and Religion, Augustin Figueroa said, "Although he may or may not be a hypnotist, Viktor Frankl's logotherapy coincides with hypnosis in the search for information of self in order to find means to cope with disastrous situations. His ability to 'talk himself' into a condition which enabled him to cope with his terrible situation at the Nazi concentration camp can most certainly be equated to hypnotic trance, his search for meaning is certainly a process similar to the utilization techniques of Ericksonian therapy." Viktor Frankl was born in Vienna on March 26, 1905 and died in the same city on September 2, 1997. He was a professor University of Vienna and guest professor at several universities in the United States to include Harvard and Southern Methodist University. Frankl was on the staff of Rothschild Hospital in Vienna when he was taken prisoner by the Nazi. Following his arrest, he was in German concentration camps till the end of World War II.

In an interview with Dr. Robert Schuler, Dr. Frankl told this story about his decision to stay in Europe when he had an opportunity to come to America in the early 40's. The situation in his homeland was becoming more and more difficult for those of the Jewish race. The local Jewish Synagogue had been bombed and left in ruins by the Nazis. Dr. Frankl was offered an opportunity to go to America. As the synagogue was destroyed, he went to a nearby Christian Church. He prayed that God would give him some direction as to what he should do. He wanted to know if he should go to America or stay with his family. Though he earnestly prayed, no answer came. He left the Church feeling that God had ignored him. On the way home, he came to the destroyed Synagogue. He stopped for a few moment and picked up a piece of wood to take home as a keepsake for his father. When he arrived home, he examined the piece of wood more closely. As he read the inscription on the piece of wood, he realized that indeed God had heard his prayer and had answered him. The inscription on the piece wood read, "Honor your father and mother." He stayed in Europe and eventually ended up a prisoner of the Nazis. If Frankl had not gone to that Church, stopped at that destroyed Synagogue, picked up that piece of wood and carried it home and read what was inscribed on it; would we have ever heard of Viktor Frankl? Maybe! Would he have had the impact on the second half of the Twenty Century that he had. I doubt it! He did go by that Church, stopped at the destroyed Synagogue, picked up that piece of wood, carried it home, read it and become one of the great contributors to psychology, life and meaning in the Twenty Century. Frankl survived the Holocaust and the Nazi death camps. During his time in the concentration camps, Frankl developed his approach to psychotherapy known as Logotherapy. At the core of his theory is the belief that humanity's primary motivational force is the search for meaning. Even in the degradation and misery of the concentration camps, Frankl was able to exercise the most important freedom of all: the freedom to determine one's own attitude and spiritual well-being. No sadistic Nazi SS guard was able to take that away from him or control the inner-life of Frankl's soul. One of the ways he found the strength to fight to stay alive and not lose hope was to think of his wife. Frankl

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clearly saw that it was those who were without hope who died quickest in the concentration camp. "He who has a why for life can put with any how." (Nietzsche) Frankl's first book in English Man's Search For Meaning was written while in a Nazi prison camp during World War II. (According to United States Library of Congress poll, that book is one of the ten most influential books in America.) During those years, he experienced incredible suffering and degradation but further developed his theory of Logotherapy which focuses on the meaning of human existence and man's search for meaning. Viktor Frankl taught at the University of Vienna Medical School and later at several schools in the United States. Frankl's first book in English was Man's Search For Meaning which he wrote while in a Nazi prison camp during World War II. During those years, he experienced incredible suffering and degradation but further developed his theory of Logotherapy. "Logos" is the Greek work for "Meaning." Logotherapy focuses on the meaning of human existence and man's search for meaning. According to Frankl, the striving to find meaning in one's life is the primary motivational force in man. In using the term, "man," Frankl is referring to the "Human Race," male and female. Logotherapy forms a chain of interconnected links: (1) freedom of will, (2) will to meaning, and (3) meaning of life. 1. FREEDOM OF WILL: Man has freedom of will which remains even when all other freedoms are gone because he can choose what attitude he will take to his limitations. Determinism is an infectious disease for many psychiatrists, educators and adherents of determinist religion who are seemingly not aware that they are thereby under-minding the very basis of their own convictions. For either man's freedom must be recognized or else psychiatry is a waste of time, religion is a delusion and education is an illusion. Freedom means freedom in the face of three things: (1) the instincts, (2) inherited disposition, 3 environment 2. WILL TO MEANING: The basic striving of human beings is to find and fulfill meaning and purpose. People reach out to encounter meanings to fulfill. Such a view is profoundly opposed to those motivational theories which are based on the homeostasis principle. Those theories depict man as if he were a closed system. According to them, man is basically concerned with maintaining or restoring an inner equilibrium and to this end with the reduction of tensions. In the final analysis, this is also assumed to be the goal of gratification of drives and the satisfaction of needs. Thus the homeostasis principle does not does not yield a sufficient ground on which to explain human behavior. Particularly such human phenomena as the creativity of man which is oriented toward values and meaning. It is Frankl's contention that the pleasure principle is self-defeating. The more one aims at pleasure, the more his aim is missed. (The hypnotherapist should understand this principle because we know that the harder you try, the more difficult it becomes to achieve. For example, a common script might read, "Your eyes are stuck shut. Your eyes are sticking tighter and tighter. You cannot open your eyes. You can try, but the harder you try, the tighter they stick." Pleasure is missed when it is the goal and obtained when it is the side effect of attaining a goal. 3. MEANING OF LIFE: Logotherapy leaves to the client the decision as to how to understand his own meaning whether along the lines of religious beliefs or agnostic convection. Logotherapy must remain available to everyone and so must hypnotherapy. The therapist can help an individual to discover his/her meaning, but it is the individual's responsibility to come to understand the meaning of his or her life. Humans are ultimately self-determining. What one becomes within limits of endowment and environment, he has made for himself. Frankl wrote, "In the concentration camp, we witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself: which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions. Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers and he is also that being who entered the gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips." It was Frankl's contention that the pleasure principle of Freud is self-defeating. The more one aims for pleasure, the more his aim is missed. The very "pursuit of happiness" is what thwarts it. Pleasure is missed when it is the goal and attained when it is the side effect of attaining a goal. Hypnotherapist calls this the Law of Reversed Effect: "The harder you try...the more difficult it becomes." I am reminded that in the Museum of the State House of Mississippi there are an old rusty breastplate and sword. They are relics of the first expedition of Spanish of Florida and the lands to the west. The Spanish came in search of gold, but found only lonely stretches of sand, dense forest, poisonous snakes and insects, wild beast and hostile people. They were at times discouraged, disheartened and ready to quit. On other occasions, they were feverish with hope from the report that gold was just around the bend, just over the hill, or just across the river. It seemed the further they went in search of gold, the further form gold they got. Is not this a parable of life? The therapist's role consists of widening and broadening the visual field of the client so that the spectrums of meaning and values become conscious and visible to her. Meaning to life may change, but it never ceases to be. We can discover meaning through creative values, experience values and attitudinal values. Meaning can come through what we give to life (creative values), by what we take from the world: Listening to music, reading, enjoying sports, etc. (experience values), and through the stand we take toward a situation we can no longer change such as the death of a loved one (attitudinal values). As long as one is conscious, he is under obligation to realize values, even if only attitudinal values. Frankl does not claim to have an answer for the client's meaning to life. Meaning must be found but it cannot be given. Logotherapy is an optimistic approach to life for it teaches that there are no tragic or negative aspects which cannot be the stand one takes to them be translated into a positive accomplishment. It is commonly observed that anxiety produces precisely what the client fears. Frankl called this "anticipatory anxiety." For instance, in the cases of insomnia, the client reports that she has been having trouble going to sleep at night. The fear of not going to sleep only adds to difficulty of trying to go to sleep. Fear of test taking, sexual problems (impotence, failure to experience orgasm) are intensified by anticipatory anxiety. Frankl developed the technique of "paradoxical intention." For instance, when a phobia client is afraid that something will happen to him, the Logotherapist encourages him to intent or wish for, even if only for a short time, precisely what he fears. Hypnotherapist calls this method or a slight variation of it, "desensitization." There can also be a bit of humor involved with paradoxical intention. I used this method with a lady who ate two bags of popcorn each night and wanted to stop or cut down. During the counseling session, I said to her, "Now, tonight just say to yourself, 'Well, I have been eating two bags of popcorn each night. Tonight, I am going to eat four bags. I am sure that if I can eat two, I can eat four." She began to laugh and said, "That is ridiculous. I don't want four bags. Two bags are too much also. I can be satisfied with one or less." You may notice there can be a touch of the ridiculous and humor in the approach. Paradoxical Intention allows the client to develop a sense of detachment toward her problem by laughing at it. This procedure is based upon the fact that problems are caused as much by compulsion to avoid or fight them as by the problem itself. The avoiding and fighting the problem focuses on the problem and strengthens the symptoms. Another part of paradox intention is to exaggerate the problem. By exaggerating the problem and then letting it go, one may observe that the symptom diminishes and the client is no longer haunted by them (circle therapy).

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CHAPTER 2: VIKTOR FRANKL'S LOGOTHERAPY AND FREEDOM OF WILL

"Logos" is a Greek word that means "meaning." Logotherapy focuses on the meaning of human existence and also on man's search for meaning. (When Frankl used the word "man" in this context, he meant "human beings.") According to Logotherapy, the striving to find meaning in one's life is the primary motivational force in man. That is why he speaks of a "will to meaning" in contrast to the pleasure principle or "will to pleasure" on which Freudian psychoanalysis is centered. The will to meaning is more important according to Frankl than the "striving for superiority" stressed by Adlerian psychology. Man does not have to endure meaninglessness of life as some existential philosophers teach or face life with a pessimistic outlook as other existential philosophers would indicate. Frankl sees man as a whole that includes body, mind, and spirit. All three are interwoven so that each affects the other. He uses the example of looking a drinking glass. To look at it from one angle it looks like a drinking glass. To look at the glass from another direction, it looks like a circle. To see the shadow of the glass, the viewer is provided with another shape. Logotherapy does not only recognizes man's spirit, but actually starts with it. It must be keep in mind, however, that within the frame of Logotherapy "spiritual" does not have a religious connotation but refers to the specifically human dimensions. In this connection, "Logos" is intended to signify "the spiritual" and beyond that, "the meaning." I would like to point out that Frankl is very friendly toward religion and does not hesitate to use it if his patient is inclined toward religion. Freud once said, "Man is not only often much more immoral than he believes, but also often much more moral than he thinks." Frankl adds that he is often much more religious than he suspects. People are now seeing more in man's morality than an interjected father-image and more in his religion than a projected father-image. Frankl says, "To consider religion a general obsessional neurosis of humanity is already old-fashioned." He stated that we must not make the mistake of looking upon religion as something emerging from the realm of the id, thus tracing it back again to instinctual drives. Even the followers of Jung have not avoided this error. They reduce religion to the collective unconscious or to archetypes. Frankl was once asked after a lecture whether he did not admit that there were such things as religious archetypes. "Was it not remarkable that all primitive people ultimately reached a similar concept of God, which seem to point to a god-archetype?" Frankl asks his questioner whether there was such a thing as a Four-archetype. The man did not understand immediately and so Frankl said, "Look here, all people discovered independently that two and two make four. Perhaps we do not need an archetype for an explanation; perhaps two and two really do make four. Perhaps we do not need a divine archetype to explain human religion either. Perhaps God really does exist." Though Logotherapy does not focus on helping the patients to regain his belief in God but time and again this is just what occurs, unintended and unexpected as it is. Frankl stated, "It is the business of existential analysis (Logotherapy) to furnish and to adorn as far as possible the chamber of immanence, while being careful not to block the door to transcendence." The Logotherapist has an "open-door policy." Through this door that is left ajar, the religious person can go out unhindered. Conversely the spirit of true religious feelings has free entrance. For the spirit of true religious feelings requires spontaneity. It appears that this "open-door policy" as well as the fact that quite often a person's faith is renewed during Logotherapy is based upon the fundamental assumptions of Logotherapy which form a chain of interconnected links: 1) Freedom of Will, 2) Will to meaning, and 3) Meaning to life. 1) FREEDOM OF WILL: Frankl said that there are two classes of people who maintain that man's will is not free: Schizophrenic patients suffering from delusions that their will is manipulated and their thoughts controlled by other and along side them, deterministic philosophers. Under deterministic philosophers, he includes philosophers, psychologist, theologians, and other who hold to a deterministic view of human beings. The later often admit that we are experiencing our will as free, but this, they say, is self deception. Psychoanalysis has often been blamed for its so-called pan-sexualism. Frankl states that there is an aspect of Psychoanalysis that is even more erroneous and dangerous: that of pan-determinism. By that Frankl means the view of man that disregards his capacity to take a stand toward any conditions whatsoever. Man is not fully conditioned or determined; he determines himself whether to give in to conditions or stand up to them. In other words, man is ultimately self-determining. Man does not simply exist, but always decided what his existence will be, what he will become in the minute. By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant. Man is influenced by the biological, psychological or sociological. Yet one of the main features of human existence is the capacity to rise above such conditions and transcend them. In the same manner, man ultimately transcends himself: a human being is a self-transcending being. In relationship to the predictability of an individual, Frankl relates the story of Dr. J. Dr. J. was what Frankl would call a satanic figure, who was known as the "mass murderer of Steinhof." When the Nazis started their euthanasia program, he held all the strings in his hands and made fantastic efforts to see that not one single psychotic individual escaped the gas chamber. After the war, a patient asked Frankl if he knew Dr. J. After Frankl's affirmative reply, he continued, "I made his acquaintance in Ljubljanka, a Russian prison camp. Dr. J. had been captured by the Russians and was in that prison camp. There he died of cancer of the urinary bladder. Before he died, however, he showed himself to be the best comrade you can image. He gave consolation to everybody. He lived up to the highest conceivable moral standard. He was the best friend I ever met during my long years in prison." Frankl said that the freedom of a finite being such as man is freedom within limits. Man is not free from conditions, be they biological or psychological or sociological in nature. Man always remains free to take a stand toward these conditions: he always retains the freedom to choose his attitude toward them. Man is free to rise above the plane of somatic and psychic determinants of his existence. By the same token a new dimension is opened. Man enters the dimension of the noetic (spiritual), in counter-distinction to the somatic and psychic phenomena. He becomes capable of taking a stand not only toward the world but also toward himself. He can be his own judge and the judge of his own deeds. In short, the specifically human phenomena linked with one another, self-consciousness and conscious, would not be understandable unless we interpret man in terms of being capable of detaching himself from himself, learning the "plane" of biological and psychological, passing into the "space" of the noological. Noological is the specifically human dimension that is not accessible to animals. A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes within limits of endowment and environment, he has made of himself. Frankl writes, "In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on condition. Our generation is

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realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man it that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips."

CHAPTER 3: VIKTOR FRANKL'S WILL TO MEANING AND MEANING OF LIFE

For Frankl, the WILL TO MEANING is the basic striving of man to find and fulfill meaning and purpose in life. (Frankl uses "man" to mean human beings.) Man is open to the world. He is so in contrast to animals, which are not open to the world (welt) but is bound to an environment (unwelt) which is specific to their species. Man is reaching out for the world; a world, which is replete with other beings to encounter and meanings to fulfill. Such a view is profoundly opposed to those motivational theories based on the homeostasis principle. Those theories depict man as if he were a closed system. According to them, man is basically concerned with maintaining or restoring equilibrium, and to this end with the reduction of tensions. Homeostasis principles also assume that man is driven by the goal of gratification of drives and satisfaction of needs. Frankl believes there is more to man's quest than those put forth by homeostasis principles so quotes Charlotte Buhler, who "conceives of man as living with intentionality, which means living with purpose. The purpose is to give meaning to life...the individual...wants to create values...the human being has a primary or native orientation in the directions of creating and of values." Thus the homeostasis principle does not yield a sufficient ground on which to explain human behavior, particularly such human phenomena as the creativity of man oriented towards values and meaning. It was Frankl's contention that the pleasure principle is selfdefeating. The more one aims at pleasure, the more his aim is missed. The very "pursuit of happiness" is what thwarts it and this selfdefeating quality of pleasure-seeking accounts for many sexual neuroses. Time and again therapists are in a position to witness how both orgasm and potency are impaired by being made the target of intention. Pleasure is missed when it is the goal and attained when it is the side effect of attaining a goal. Attaining the goal constitutes a reason for being happy. If there is a reason for happiness, happiness comes: automatically and spontaneously. Only if one's original concern with meaning is frustrated is one either contend with power or intent on pleasure. Both happiness and success are mere substitutes for fulfillment and that is why the pleasure principle and striving for superiority are mere derivatives of the will to meaning. Self-actualization is not man's ultimate destination. It is not even his primary intention. Self-actualization, if made an end in itself, contradicts the self-transcendent quality of human existence. Like happiness, self-actualization is an effect, the effect of meaning fulfillment. Frankl says that his is in accordance with Maslow's own view since he admits that the "business of self-actualization" can best be carried out "via a commitment to an important job." The important thing is not pleasure and happiness as such but for that which causes these effects, be if fulfillment of a personal meaning or the encounter with another human being. What goes on in man when he is oriented toward meaning is revealed in the fundamental difference between being driven to something on the one hand and striving for something on the other. Man is pushed by drives but pulled by meaning and this implies that it is always up to him to decide whether or hot he wishes to fulfill the later. Meaning fulfillment always implies decision-making, thus a will to meaning rather than a drive to meaning. Contrary to the homeostasis theory, tension is not something to avoid unconditionally. Some tension, such as the tension aroused by meaning to fulfill, is inherent in being human and is indispensable to mental well-being. Man is oriented toward meaning and he should be confronted with meaning. Logotherapy does not spare the patient a confrontation with the specific meaning that he has to carry out and which we have to help him find. An American doctor once asked Frankl to tell him the difference between Logotherapy and Psychoanalysis in one sentence. Frankl asked the doctor to tell him the essence of Psychoanalysis. The doctor replied, "During Psychoanalysis, the patient must life down on a couch and tell you things that are at times are very disagreeable to tell." Frankl jokingly replied, "In Logotherapy, the patient may remain sitting erect, but must hear things that sometimes are very disagreeable to hear." Meaning must not coincide with being: meaning must be ahead of being. Meaning sets the pace for being. Pacemakers and peacemakers: Pacemakers confront us with meaning and values, while peacemakers try to alleviate the burden of meaning confrontation. Man is responsible for the fulfillment of the specific meaning of his personal life. He is also responsible before something, or to something, be it society, or humanity, or God, or his own conscious. Many people interpret their existence not just in terms of being responsible in general terms but rather to someone, namely God. Logotherapy, as a secular theory, must restrict itself to factual statements, leaving to the patient the decision about how to understand his own being, responsibility, and meaning: whether along the line of religious beliefs or agnostic convection. Logotherapy must remain available to everyone. Capitalizing on responsibleness to this extent, a Logotherapist cannot spare his patient the decision for what, to what, or to whom he is responsible. MEANING OF LIFE: The meaning of life differs from person to person, from day to day, and from hour to hour. What matters it not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment. Everyone has his own specific mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Each person's task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it. It is the individual's responsibility to come to an understanding of the meaning of his or her life. This emphasis on responsibleness is reflected in this saying, "So live as if your were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as your are about to ace now." This invites man to imagine first that the present is past and second that as the present is changed so is the past. Such a precept confronts the individual with life's finiteness and the finality of what he makes out of both his life and himself. Logotherapy attempts to make the individual fully aware of his own responsibility, but must leave to him the option for what, to what or to whom he understands to be responsible. The Logotherapist's role consists in widening and broadening the visual field of the patient so that the spectrum of meaning and values becomes conscious and visible to him. Meaning of life may change, but it never ceases to be. We can discover the meaning of life through CREATIVE VALUES, EXPERIENCE VALUES, AND ATTITUDINAL VALUES. To put this in different words, meaning can come through what we give to life (creative values),

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by what we take from the world (experience values) such as listening to music, reading a book, etc., and through the stand we take toward a fate we no longer can change (attitudinal values) such as the lose of a loved one to death, the lose of an arm, etc. Even when one's activities are very limited because of an illness or injury, life still offers an opportunity for the realization of attitudinal values. What is the significant is the person's attitude toward his unalterable fate. The way in which he accepts, what courage he manifest in suffering and the dignity he displays in doom and disaster is the measure of his human fulfillment. A person's life retains its meaning up to the last, until he draws his last breath. As long as a person remains conscious, he is under obligations to realize values, even if those are only be attitudinal values. An individual needs some content for their lives and Frankl said, "If we can help them find an aim and a purpose in their existence, in other words, if they can be shown the task before them. 'Whoever has a reason for living endures almost any mode of life.' says Nietzsche. The conviction that one has a task before him has enormous psychotherapeutic values." Frankl does not claim to have an answer for the individual's meaning to life. Meaning must be found but it cannot be given. The individual must find it spontaneously. The Logotherapist is convinced, and if need be persuades his patients, which there is a meaning to fulfill, but he does not pretend to know what the meaning is. Along with the freedom of will and the will to meaning, there is meaning to life: a meaning for which man has been in search all along and also that man has the freedom to embark on the fulfillment of that meaning.

CHAPTER 4: TRAGIC TRIAD, EXISTENTIAL VACUUM, PARADOXICAL INTENTION

THE TRAGIC TRIAD OF HUMAN EXISTENCE: The tragic triad of human existence is made up of pain, guilt, and death. Every person has experienced pain, guilt and will some day die. Speaking of the tragic triad should not mislead the reader to assume that Logotherapy is pessimistic. Logotherapy is an optimistic approach to life for it teaches that there are no tragic or negative aspect of life that can not be, by the stand one takes to them, translated into positive accomplishment. One prerogative of being human is the ability to change and a constituent of human existence is the capability of shaping and reshaping oneself. In other words, it is a privilege of man to become guilty and his responsibility to overcome guilt. Man does not have the freedom to undo what he has done, but he does have the freedom to choose the right attitude to guilt. A man who has failed by a deed cannot change what happened, but by repentance he can change himself. As for pain, man by virtue of his humaneness is capable of rising above and taking a stand to his suffering. A human being, by the very attitude he chooses, is capable of finding and fulfilling meaning in suffering. It is a basic tenet of Logotherapy that man's main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain, but experience meaning to his life. That is why man is even ready to suffer, on the condition, that his suffering has meaning. Suffering does not have meaning unless it is absolutely necessary. For instance, a dangerous growth that can be cured by surgery must not be shoulder by the patient as though it were his cross. This would be masochism rather than heroism. In spite of suffering, life can have meaning up to the last moment and it retains this meaning latterly to the end. Life's meaning is an unconditional one for it even includes the potential meaning of suffering and death. Frankl proposes the question, "can death make life meaningfully?" Death does make life meaningful for if we were immortal, we could postpone every action forever. With the fact of death, we are under the imperative of utilizing our life time to the utmost, not letting the singular opportunities pass unused. Man's positioning life is like that of a student at final examination: in both cases, it less important that the work be completed but that its quality is high. The student must be prepared for the bell to ring signaling that the time at his disposal has ended and in life, we must always be ready to be "called away" (to die). THE EXISTENTIAL VACUUM: The existential vacuum is a widespread phenomenon of the twentieth century. This is due to a twofold loss that man has undergone since he became truly a human being. At the beginning of human history, man lost some basic animal instincts in which an animal's behavior is embedded and by which it is secured. Such security is closed for man as he has to make choices. Beyond this, man has suffered another loss in his more recent development: the traditions that had fortified his behavior are now rapidly diminishing. No instinct tells man what he has to do and no tradition tells him what he ought to do and often he does not even know what he basically wishes to do. Instead he wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism) or he refuses to follow anyone directions or guidance (rebellionism) The existential vacuum is often experienced as a state of boredom. Frankl refers to this let down due to leisure time as the "Sunday Neurosis." This kind of depression affects people who become aware of the lack of content and meaning in their lives when the rush of the busy week is over and the void within themselves becomes manifest. The existential vacuum leads to a neurosis that shows itself in for main symptoms. 1) First, there is the planless day-to-day attitude toward life. 2) The second symptom is the fatalist attitude toward life. The day-to-day man considers planned action unnecessary while the fatalist considers it impossible. 3) The third symptom is collective thinking. Man would like to submerge himself in the masses. The conformist or collectivist man denies his own personality. 4) The fourth symptom is fanaticism. While the collectivist ignores his own personality, the fanatic ignores that of others. For the fanatic, only his views are valid. Ultimately, all four symptoms can e traced back to man's fear of responsibility and his escape from freedom. These attitudes lead to nihilism that is that response to life that says that being has no meaning. A nihilist is one who considers that life is meaningless. Responsibility and freedom comprise the spiritual domain of man so today man must be reminded that he has a spirit and that he is a spiritual being. The spirituality of man it a "thing-in-itself." Man has freedom in spite of his instincts, inherited disposition, and environment. Certainly man has instincts, but these instincts do not have him. One can accept or reject his instincts. Regarding heredity, Frankl talks about twins, one of which was a cunning criminal and the other a cunning criminologist. Both were born with cunning, but each used it differently. As for environment, it does not make the man, but everything depends on what man makes of it: on his attitude toward it. Frankl referred to Freud who said, "Try to subject a number of very strongly differentiated human beings to the same amount of starvation.

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With the increase of the imperative need for food, all individual differences will be blotted out and in their place, we shall see the uniform expression of the on unsatisfied instinct." Frankl's response was, "In the concentration camps we witnessed the contrary: we saw how, face with the identical situations one man degenerated while another attained virtual saintliness." PARADOXICAL INTENTION: It is commonly observed that anxiety often produces precisely what the patient fears. Frankl calls this anticipatory anxiety. For instance, in cases of insomnia, the patient reports that she has trouble going to sleep. The fear of not going to sleep only adds to the difficulty of trying to go to sleep. Many sexual problems may be traced back to the forced intention of attaining the goal of sexual intercourse: as in the male seeking to prove his potency or the female her ability to experience orgasm. It seems that anticipatory anxiety causes precisely what the patient fears. It is upon this fact that Logotherapist bases the technique know as "paradoxical intention." For instance, when a phobic patient is afraid that something will happen to him, the Logotherapist encourages him to intend for precisely what he fears. Hypnotherapist uses the same techniques in "desensitization" and "circle therapy." Frankl tells the story of a young physician who sweated excessively when in the presence of his chief. At other time, he was not bothered by excessive sweating. The patient was advised to resolve deliberately to show the chief just how much he really could sweat. He was to say to himself, "I only sweated out a liter before, but now I'm going to pour out at least 10 liters." Through this paradoxical intention, he was able to free himself of his excess sweating. The treatment consists not only in a reversal of the patient's attitude toward his phobia but also that it is carried out in a humorous way if possible. This procedure is based on the fact that, according to Logotherapeutic teachings, phobias and obsessive-compulsive neuroses is partially due to the increase of anxieties and compulsions caused by the endeavor to avoid or fight them. (The subconscious cannot tell the difference between a fear and a wish and so attempts to bring either into reality.) A phobic person usually tries to avoid the situation in which his anxieties arise, while the obsessive-compulsive tries to suppress and fight his problem. In either case, the result is a strengthening of the symptoms. If we can succeed in bringing the patient to the point where he ceases to flee from or to fight his symptoms, then we may observe that the symptoms diminish and the patient is no longer haunted by them.

CHAPTER 5: LOGOTHERAPY TECHNIQUES WITH CASE HISTORY

The therapist is always faced with the seemingly impossible twofold task of considering the uniqueness of each person, as well as the uniqueness of the life situation with which each person has to cope. The choice of an appropriate treatment method to be applied in any concrete case depends not only upon the individuality of the patient involved, but also upon the personality of the therapist. More important than the method used is the relationship between the patient and the therapist. The relationship between two persons is the most significant aspect of the therapeutic process, an even more import factor than any method or technique. MR. WILDER'S CASE HISTORY: Mr. Wilder, a 70-year-old man, came to me because he could not get over the death of his wife. Since his wife's death about a year before, he felt that he had not meaning and had lost the will to life. He worried about many things, much of which was beyond his control. He said, "I worry about everything from the state of the economy to may own personal safety. I have no reason to get up in the morning. I spend most of my time at home and some days I do not even get dressed. I just spend the day in my pj's. I still go to church, but that is about all." In Frankl's terms, Mr. Wilder had lost his MEANING OF LIFE. Tough I could not give Mr. Wilder his meaning, I could help him discover meaning for himself. Meaning must be found but it cannot be given. The individual must find it for himself. Because of his lost of meaning, Mr. Wilder was experiencing the Existential Vacuum. One thing that Mr. Wilder had going for him was that he was still going to church and that was sustaining him although he may not have realized it. A good relationship had developed with Mr. Wilder while he was a patient at the hospital and he had confidence in me as a therapist. I had three sessions with Mr. Wilder over a month's period. We discussed the grief process and worked together to help him accept his wife's death and accept his worth as a person. We also worked to increase his self-confidence and to find him meaning for life. During his second session, I asked him, "What is it you can do to help other?" He thought for several minutes and responded, "In our church newsletter, I read about the need for volunteers at the hospital near my home. I would rather volunteer here at Methodist, but as you know I live across town. Maybe I could volunteer to work at the hospital near my home." I share with you some suggestions, imagery, and healing stories used with Mr. Wilder. THE GOOSE IN THE BOTTLE: As you relax peacefully and comfortable, I would like to share with you a story. You have told me about how you worry about many things so may you allow this story to speak to you its message. This is the story about a teacher who said to his students, "Let's make-believe we place a goose egg into a bottle. The goose egg hatches and the goose begins to grow. Your assignment is to get the goose out of the bottle without breaking the bottle or injuring the goose." One student thought and thought about this at great length. How could he get the goose out of the bottle without hurting the goose or breaking the bottled? Not being able to figure it out, he became so frustrated with the question that he could not sleep. The next morning at class, he raised his hand and was recognized by the teacher. The student said, "You must get the goose out of the bottle. This problem is driving me out of my mind. I can't figure it out." "Very well," said the teacher and continued, "Bring me the bottle with the goose inside." It was only then that the student realized he had been struggling with a situation that did not actually exist...And so it is with some of the things you have been worrying about...They either do not exist or they are beyond your power to change...so let them go. BUILDING SELF-CONFIDENCE: These suggestions and instruction I'm telling you now are going into the storehouse of your subconscious mind and are progressively having a greater influence over you. Each day these suggestions keep becoming more effective and they help you in many different ways: Physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually...These things that I say are influencing your thoughts, your feelings, and your actions in a positive and helpful way...Even after you come out of this hypnotic state these suggestions

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continue influencing you just as surely as they do while you are in the hypnotic state. You find ways to affirm yourself and find meaning for life...You feel better and better about yourself. You experience improvements in your life...The improvements are progressive. As each day passes, you continue improving more and you can be sure it is permanent and lasting...You can be calm and relaxed during your daily life and that causes your mind to be more clear, more alert, and causes you to feel better about life. This enables you to be more efficient in you life and it keep increasing self-confidence, your self-reliance, your selfacceptance and your self-esteem. You continue developing a more relaxed attitude, greater concentration, and keep achieving more outstanding accomplishments in your life...You find ways to make your life more meaningful. It's a cycle of progress that keeps growing stronger each day and causes you to continue advancing and enables you to experience life with meaning. You have many talents, many skills, and many abilities, therefore, you have many reasons to have confidence in yourself. You enjoy life more each day. Your happiness keeps increasing and you are more optimistic...You feel more productive, more useful, more healthy, experience more happiness and experience meaning for life. THE TURNING POINT: PRINCE ANDREW: Sometimes ago while visiting a book store, I saw a book, The Turning Point. Though I did not buy that book, it brought to mind that each of us faces many turning points in our life. You are facing a turning point in your life today and you have the chance to make a positive change in your life. There is an interesting incident in the book, War and Peace concerning Prince Andrew. The Prince had gone though a long period of grief and depression that had sapped his strength. He thought that his life had no meaning or purpose. As he traveled over his land in the winter, he passed an old oak tree that was bare of laves and looked dead. He thought to himself, "I am like that tree." It was not until the following spring that he traveled back across the same route where he had seen the old oak tree. Feeling as old, as tired, as meaningless, as depressed as ever, he came to the old oak tree. To his surprise, noticed the oak tree had come to life. It had new leaves and new growth. The tree that he had identified himself was new, green, growing, and beautiful. It was a turning point for him as he realized new life, new meaning, new hope, and new purpose was available to him as it was for the tree. New hope, new purpose, new meaning can yours.... About a month after our last session, I talked to Mr. Wilder on the phone. He told me that he was working as a volunteer at the hospital near his home. He said, "Now I have a reason to get up in the morning and I am enjoying life again." There is meaning to life and it is unconditional meaning. Life has meaning and neither suffering nor dying can distract from it. This has been demonstrated by many individuals in our own day but also by a man who lived in Biblical times. Referring to Habakkuk, Frankl wrote of an unconditional trust in the ultimate meaning and unconditional faith in the ultimate being, God. He quotes Habakkuk's (3:17-18) triumphant hymn "Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines, the labor of the olive tree shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in God of my Salvation." Frankl concluded his book, The Will to Meaning, with that Biblical quotation and this statement, "May this be lesson to learn from this book." BIOGRAPHY: Crumbaugh, J. Everything To Gain: A Guide To Logotherapy. Chicago, IL. Nelson-Hull. 1974 Frankl, V. The Doctor and The Soul. New York. Vintage Books. 1986 Frankl, V. Man's Search For Meaning. New York. Pocket Book. 1963 Frankl, V. Psychotherapy And Existentialism. New York. Clarion Book. 1967 Frankl, V. The Will To Meaning. New York. Plum Book. 1970 Stern, A. The Search For Meaning. Memphis. TN Memphis State University. 1971 Tweedie, Jr. R. Logotherapy. Grand Rapids, MN Baker Book House. 1961

CHAPTER 6: WHAT OTHER SAY ABOUT DR FRANKL

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From Jesus and Logotherapy: by Robert C Leslie: Abingdon Press, Nashville, 1965: This study draws heavily on the approaches in psychotherapy evolved by psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl, M.D., under the name of "logotherapy" the "therapy of meaning." "Tested in the rigors of concentration camp living, logotherapy offers a philosophy of life and a method of counseling which is more consistent with a basically Christian view of life than any other existing system of current therapeutic world. Frankl's point of view is broader than any sectarian approach. (p 9) A basic insistence of the Christian faith is that man is free to make his decisions consciously. Without discounting the influence of unconscious factors operating in a person's life, Christianity nevertheless asserts, in an unqualified way, that the ultimate outcome of man= adventure in life depends upon his personal response. Whatever unfortunate experiences have come to him in life he decisive factor lies not in the conditions but in the personal response to them. Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl describes the religious man as the one says "yes" to life; as the man who, in spite of anything that life brings, still faces his existence with a basic conviction in the worthwhileness of life. (p 13-14) Frankl refers to the capacity of man to rise above the confining restraints of the past with the term the "defiant power of the human spirit." The spiritual core of a person can take a stand, whether positive or negative, affirming or denying, in the face of his own psychological character structure, as when attempting to overcome a habit or resist an urge. This potentiality essentially inherent in human existence is called in logotherapy the psychonoetic antagonism or the defiant power of the human spirit. What is meant thereby is man's capacity as a spiritual being to resist and brave whatsoever kind of conditioning, whether biological, psychological, or sociological in nature. The point of view is one which Frankl reached through wrestling with his own private adversaries. "I had to wrestle but eventually succeeded in building up my own Weltanschauung featured by an unconditional trust in the unconditional meaningfulness of life, which may be phrased by those unconditionally life-affirming words which formed a verse in the song of the inmates of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp and which I chose for the title of a book, "Say 'Yes' to Life in Spite of Everything." Even Zacchaeus could change. Caught up as he was as a "Quisling," a traitor to his own community, involved as he was in dishonest and underhanded dealings, enmeshed in physical, psychological, and sociological entanglements, he could nevertheless change." (p 31-32) Existential vacuum does not describe an illness so much as a condition that is often present where there is no pathology at all. To be sure, existential vacuum may also exist where there is acute illness, and in such cases may be recognized and treated along with other symptoms that are more abnormal. But for the most part, the sense of aimlessness in life is a characteristic of those who are physically and mentally well but spiritual sick. To refuse to recognize the existential vacuum for what it really is, a loss of the sense of meaning, and to try to treat it without reference to the world of values, is to fall into the common fallacy of psychologism which sees value concerns only as secondary defense mechanisms rather than as primary legitimate conscious concerns. (p 50) The decisive factor does not lie in the conditions: the determining element is found in personal responses to the conditions. "Freedom," as Frankl puts it, "is freedom to take a stand toward conditions, but it is not freedom from conditions." Man is responsible for how he handles the conditions which life presents to him. Great as the condition of depth psychology has been to our deeper understanding of forces at work beneath the surface in man, we are in danger of overlooking the most human aspect of life, if we fail to hold man as accountable and responsible for his action in the present and in the future. Conscious decision with a definite goal in mind can break the circle of behavior dictated by past conditioning. (p 51-52) Man finds the meaning of his life not so much by reflecting on it as by committing himself to the immediate challenge of the concrete situation. Dedicate yourself to the here and now, to the given situation and the present hour, and the meaning will dawn on you. Try to be honest to yourself in pondering your vocational possibilities as well as your personal relationships. I would do injustice to you j and to your freedom of choice if I took over any decisions like these. They are up to you and therefore you should keep in mind your: responsibleness. Struggling for a meaning in your life, for a life task, may be the immediate task of your present life. (p 62) From Man's Search for a Meaningful Faith: by Robert Leslie, Graded Press, Nashville, TN 1967: Frankl uses the term "Existential Vacuum" to describe a feeling of inner void, of inner emptiness. He often found this among his patients. Many psychiatrists are finding more and more patients who complain of a lack of a sense of meaning, who are without purpose, and who speak of a sense of futility about life. Such, for example, was a forty-year-old junior college professor. He was successful as a teacher and was popular with his students. Nevertheless, he sought treatment because he felt that he was leading a completely meaningless kind of life. He had achieved success in the eyes of the world but was unhappy and discontented within. (p 19) From Logotherapy: Donald Tweedie, Jr. Baker Books, Ann Arbor, MI 1972: According to Frankl, Freud's psychoanalysis has "sinned against" the spiritual nature of man in three ways: by depersonalizing him, by "derealizing" him, and by devaluating his scare of values. (p 40) All ethical precepts are swept away by the revelation of "moralizing" and "rationalizing" mechanisms. Values are no longer independent of the person. They are rather, the ethically relative and morally indifferent derivatives of unconscious, instinctive needs. Frankl says, "For myself, I am not prepared to live for the sake of my reaction formations, or to die for the sake of my secondary rationalizations." (p 45) In logotherapy, the individual is comprised of three factors: the physical, the psychological, and the spiritual. (p 53) Frankl likens the body to a piano, while the psyche is represented by the pianist, who can "activate" the piano, and the spiritual dimension, in turn, is represented by the artistic "necessity" of the pianist. In the Logotherapeutic theory of man, it is the spiritual dimension which is of central importance. It the spiritual which truly constitutes the person. While it is proper to say that one has a psyche, or a body, he must say that his a spiritual being. (p 55-56) Freedom is the ground for man's special modes of existence which are distinctive of his species and separate from the animals. It is the most immediate fact of his awareness. His personality is determined by his free choices; man is a "deciding creature." (Jasper). But what is man? He is the essence which always decides. And he again and again decides what he will be in the next instant.

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In the first place, man is free from his instinctive drives. Just as he has the ability to affirm these psychic impulses, so does he have the power to deny them. He is also free from his inherited characteristics. Although he is conditioned by the limits set by his genetic structure, yet is he unconditioned as to what he will do within limits. Frankl cites the case of identical twins who had a high intelligence factor. However, one of them became a clever criminal and the other an equally clever criminologist. In the third place man is also free from his environment. Frankl insists that freedom is not only freedom from something, but that, in addition, and most importantly, is freedom for something. (p 60-61) In Logotherapy, it is emphasized that man is a person, rather than a reflex mechanism, or a mere biological specimen. Frankl develops this concept in a summary fashion in this book, Logos and Existenz (ch 2 )in terms of ten theses characterizing the person: 1. The person is an individual. 2. A person is complete in himself. 3. A person is an absolute novelty. 4. A person is spiritual. 5. A person is existential. 6. A person is an "ego" and not an "id." 7. A person is not only a unity and complete in himself, but he also establishes unity and completeness in the physicalpsychological-spiritual unity which describes the totality of man. 8. A person is dynamic. 9. An animal is not a person. Animals are not able to transcends themselves, nor to oppose themselves in existential decision. They have no world (Welt) only an environment (Umwelt). Frankl believed that animals are analogously related to man, as man, in turn, is related to God. 10. A person can only be understood, when viewed as being made in the image of God. (p 69-70)

(Paul Wong and Joseph Fabry): From The Pursuit of Meaning: by Joseph B. Fabry, Beacon, Boston,1970. Logotherapy assumes that man, in addition to his physical and psychological dimensions, possesses a specifically human dimension, and that all three must be considered if he is to be fully understood. It assumes that this human dimension enables man to reach out beyond himself and make his aspirations and ideals part of his reality; that his life has meaning under all, even the most miserable circumstances; and that he had a deeply rooted conscience that can help him find the specific meaning of this life. Logotherapy further assumes that man primarily seeks not pleasure but life task, and that the deepest pleasure comes from accomplishing these tasks. It asserts that each person is unique in the sense that he has to lead his own life, that he is irreplaceable, and that no moment of his life is repeatable. Logotherapy further asserts that man is fee, within obvious limitations, to make choices regarding his activities, experiences, and attitudes, and that freedom allows him to change himself - to decide not only what kind of a person he is but also what kind of a person he is going to become. Logotherapy insists that man must not use his freedom arbitrarily, but tempered with responsibility; that he must assume the awful and magnificent responsibility of his own choices. Finally, logotherapy contends that man's discovery of the meanings of his life is made easier by certain values and traditions passed on from generation to generation; but it asserts that the final decision is always with the individual, and that in the present era of changing values and crumbling traditions, each person is forced more than ever to rely on his personal conscience and his responsibility to listen to and to follow its voice. (p 18) To Frankl, the sum is not a biologically determined being as he was with Darwin, nor a sociologically determined being as he was to Marx; nor a psychologically determined being as he was to Freud. To Frankl, man is a being who, while determined in all these ways, retains an important area of freedom where his not determined at all, but free to take a stand. (p 22) Frankl warns that "man's freedom will degenerate into arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness." As long as man regards freedom as something merely negative, as a freedom from restrictions, as a license to do as he pleases, there is danger that it will lead not to fulfillment, but to boredom and frustration. Proper use of freedom, Frankl says, means the we regard ourselves free to assume our own responsibleness; only then is freedom a positive value. The positive value of freedom is contained in a freedom to a cause or a person, in response to a demand coming from the outside, but freely accepted. If freedom is not used in terms of responsibleness, it will not lead to meaning but, on the contrary, will add to the existential vacuum. (p 124) YOU CAN ORDER ANY OF THE ABOVE BOOKS THAT ARE STILL IN PRINT BY GOING TO:

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Dan Short on Viktor Frankl: Editor's Note: These collected thoughts of Viktor Frankl, M.D., Ph.D. provide a rare opportunity to glance into the life of someone who at 92 years of age is a living witness to the history of psychotherapy. (Durbin: Dr. Frankl died in 1997. Truly a great man.) Frankl, having exchanged ideas with Freud, Adler, and other great minds such as Heidigger, is an impressive source of intellectual insight. Because he survived 34 months in the Nazi death camps; where his wife, unborn child, mother, father, and brother where murdered, Frankl is a testament to man's ability to master even the most tragic of fates. In spite of his age and the trouble he suffers from degeneration of the retina, Frankl was still willing to correspond with us so that we could compose this brief account of his complex thinking and his exceptional attitude towards life. Background Information: At only 22 years of age Frankl founded the journal "Der Mensch Im Allertag" [Man in everyday life]; since that time he has written 27 books and been published in 22 languages. In 1928 he introduced the concept of "Logotherapy." After his liberation from his last concentration camp he rewrote The Doctor and the Soul; the reconstruction of this lost manuscript took only nine days. This was shortly followed by Man's search for Meaning, a book which has sold over 4 million copies. Logotherapy, also referred to as the third Viennese School of Psychotherapy, is currently the only major theory which includes the human spirit as a source of healing and strength. His theoretical approach is known as "height psychology," rather than "depth psychology," because it recognizes the human capacity to aspire to motivational factors beyond mere instinct. Now faced with blindness and other physical difficulties, Viktor Frankl continues to live as he taught, that is to find meaning in life by facing each new trial with courage and with dignity. The question posed by a 14 year old child: As a 14 year old student in middle school, I did something which was very unusual at the time. I had a professor of Natural Sciences who was very distant, teaching as one would expect a scientists to do. One day he made the statement that life is simply a burning process, nothing more than the process of oxidation. Jumping to my feet I questioned him, "But Professor, then what meaning does life have?" That was when it all began, the first time that I inquired about the meaning in life. What is the purpose of one's existence? This is a question which will never be answered through the nihilistic efforts of scientist who reduce everything to "nothing but..." You can say that such a person practices reductionism, or in the case of my teacher, "Oxidationism." It would be appropriate if a biologist, instead of promoting his own disbelief under the guise of science, just admitted that within the plane of biology there is no evidence of a higher meaning. This does not mean that such a thing does not exist. Ultimate meaning must be found in another dimension. For example, a cylinder is both a circle and a rectangle depending upon the plane from which you view it. However, only in a higher dimension can it be recognized as a cylinder. The higher dimension does not exclude; it includes. Since the time of my youth I have tried to find, and take meaning from all of life's events. Life is not only meaningful in the larger sense, but there is meaning in each moment. This meaning I cannot get hold of by mere rationale means, but instead by existential means. I will it to be that way. I decide that there is ultimate meaning in the world rather than ultimate meaninglessness--meaning so rich that it cannot be entirely grasped by my finite intellectual capacity. Work with Suicidal Clients: From 1928 to 1938 I worked with William Burner who was the Director of a center for people who suffer from depression. I learned something there that I was able to use when I became Director of the Suicide Pavilion at the Steinhof, a psychiatric hospital in Vienna. During my four years at the hospital approximately 12,000 suicidal patients were put in my charge. As the Director it was my responsibility to determine whether or not a patient was ready for discharge, a decision which carried tremendous responsibility. Out of this experience I developed a series of questions which allowed me to assess the condition of a patient in only five minutes. During a face to face interview I would ask, "Do you know that it is time for your release?" He would say, "Yes." I would then ask, "What do we do next? Should we keep you here?" In almost every case the patient would say, "No." Then I would ask, "Are you truly free from all intention to commit suicide?" To this he would respond, "I have no more intentions of committing suicide. You can let me go home." But I had to make sure that the patient was not dissimulating, so immediately after his response, that he had no intention of killing himself, I would ask, "Why not?" Next, one of two things would happen. The first type would sink into the chair, unable to respond or to look me in the eye. With a toneless voice he might repeat himself saying, "No, no, doctor...I am not going to commit suicide." This sort of response indicated that the patient was in very serious danger of suicide. In contrast, a patient who immediately stated that he had a duty, (e.g., "I am needed at work." or "My religion forbids suicide."), some meaning to fulfill, (e.g., "My family is counting on me."), he was safe to release from care. He would not kill himself because he had a "why." As Nietzsche has said, whoever has a "why" will in almost every situation find a "how." Human uniqueness: The uniqueness of an individual can be appreciated solely by a loving person. It is he who sees the essence and the potential in the beloved person, and will therefore promote the person. The loss of a best friend: Every single moment in life offers a concrete opportunity for meaning to be fulfilled and actualized. This holds true even under the most miserable of circumstances and literally to the last breath of ourselves. Let me give you an example. During the time of Hitler I lost my best friend, Hubert Suer. He was arrested by the SS because he was working in the Underground. After two weeks he was given the death sentence. During his imprisonment his wife was able to smuggle into his cell a copy of my manuscript on logotherapy. This was the same manuscript that I reconstructed after my release from the last concentration camp. Before his death, my friend was able to smuggle out a message to his wife stating that in the last days of his life the manuscript from Viktor Frankl had given him strength and courage. His death was one of meaning and dignity. His wife could not save him from the execution but she was able to perform the meaningful act of providing him some comfort. And for myself, I can say that this was the most beautiful reward that I got from the writing of my book. It was much more meaningful than any of the thousands of copies that sold, after the war. Logotherapy, as described in my first book, is something which deals with everyday problems, down-to-earth things, practical aspects of living that are enhanced by finding meaning in life. And, it is possible to find meaning in all of life's events, even when confronted with a fate that cannot be changed or manipulated in any manor. For example, many years ago an elderly man came to me at my clinic. He told me that he too was a doctor and that since the death of his wife, two years previous, he had suffered from severe depression. He said that he had loved her above all else. Rather than giving him advice, I confronted him with the question, "What would have happened, Doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?" He said right away that this would have caused her tremendous

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suffering. Then I replied, "You see, you have saved your wife from that terrible suffering. You have spared her this suffering, at the price that you now have to survive and mourn her." He said no word but shook my hand and calmly left the office. In the midst of his doubts he now saw reason for his experience, a meaningful sacrifice for his beloved wife. You see, even in a situation where you have no external freedom, when circumstance does not offer you any choice of action, you retain the freedom to choose your attitude toward the tragic situation. You do not despair because this choice is always with you until your last moment of life. Speaking at San Quentin: A remarkable thing happened when I was invited to speak at San Quentin, at that time a high security prison for those who have committed murder, at least once. After I was finished speaking I was told how favorably the prisoners had reacted to my address. One prisoner had said that other psychologists had always told them that their criminal actions were a result of their childhood and that try as hard as they may, there was little they could do to change this reality. This excuse was something they did not want to hear, because they were being treated as though they had no human worth, no freedom to make choices and decisions. In contrast, I had told them that, "You are a human just as I am and therefore you had the same freedom to make the choices that I did. You could of decided not to do something so terrible and senseless, just like every other man. You could have made use of this freedom through a sense of responsibility." You see, it is a prerogative of mankind to realize guilt. It is also his responsibility to overcome guilt. The call to responsibility: Members of society must be provided with a direction, instruction that life does have meaning, so that a person in San Quieten realizes that the person he killed was a human being who had significance. Criminal behavior in adulthood and in youth comes from a lack of responsibility, or of meaning. When gangster youth were asked, "Why do you do these violent things?" the typical response was, "Why not?" The absence of an answer to the question, "Why not?" can result in senseless aggression. In other cases it results in depression and even suicide, or addiction and drug use. This trio of aggression, addiction, and depression is the mass neurotic symptomology of the feeling of meaninglessness or existential vacuum that exists in our society. There is no such thing as freedom all by itself. Freedom is always preceded by responsibility; they are connected to one another. It is a mistake to pursue freedom without the consideration of responsibility. That is why I have recommended in America that in addition to the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast, there should be the Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast. As for the pursuit of happiness: The more we make it a target, the more widely we miss. Happiness is, and will always remain, the unintended effect of meaningful activity. Therefore, Logotherapy is much more than a process of asking the client questions. It is a call to responsibility. I once had a patient tell me that he was suffering from an "evil parent complex." The patient had shifted his responsibility for his behavior onto his parents. In the same manner the logotherapist must be careful to see that the patient does not shift his responsibilities onto the clinician. To practice true logotherapy, meaning must be found in a place beyond the control of the therapist. In contrast to the concept of responsibility which I have described, a response which frightens me is when I see someone who has resolved themselves to hate or resent an entire race of people. When a Jew, or anyone else who has suffered, insists that, "I am not willing to reconcile myself with the sons and daughters or even the grandchildren of those who are responsible for my suffering," then he has embraced the National Socialistic concept of collective guilt. It was called "Zebien Haufen," which means the whole family. If someone opposed the Nationalist Party, the whole family; including the sons, daughters, and grandchildren, was arrested. I have been in strict opposition to this concept of collective guilt since my first day of liberation from the last concentration camp in which I had been imprisoned. It is absolutely unethical to hold someone responsible for something they have not done. Accountability is a personal concept. It belongs to the single individual who is guilty by either commission or omission. For all others who have no guilt on their shoulders, reconciliation is the proper objective. Self-transcendence: When the eye has a cataract one sees a harsh grayness in the form of a cloud. In the case of glaucoma there is a green light in the form of a halo. In each case the vision of the eye is blocked by what is occurring within. The eye is not made to see itself. This is pathology. The same can be said of a person who suffers from neurosis. He is obsessed with what is in himself, worried that he might be an egotist, or a sexist, or only God knows what else. Unfortunately this condition of hyper-reflection is only exacerbated by analytical therapies which attempt to explain everything in terms of "overcompensation." For example, the client who asserts his desire to accomplish something significant is told by those who practice reductionism, "No, that is not your true motive. You are simply trying to overcome a feeling of inferiority that you have had from birth." A Freudian once wrote that philosophy, religion, and schizophrenia are nothing more than a fear of castration. This is absurdity. I agree that Freud was correct in uncovering impure motives but there are also pure motives. There is more to healthy human motivation than the pleasure principle, more than the striving for superiority. These are only degenerated, neurotic forms of existence. However, in the healthy human, there is a will to meaning and it is this that sets man a part from the animals. One would never hear an animal ask himself How the Treatments Are Done: "Does my life have meaning?" But this question is asked by Homo Sapiens. To be human is to strive for something outside of oneself. I use the term "self-transcendence" to describe this quality behind the will to meaning, the grasping for something or someone outside of oneself. Like the eye, we are made to turn outward, toward another human being to whom we can love and give ourselves. Only in such a way does Homo sapiens demonstrate itself to be truly human. Only when in service of another does a person truly know his or her humanity. The locus of logos: The question of meaning, or logos, is decided in the mind of the individual and cannot be answered except in the context of a specific, concrete situation. For example, in 1936 a young man came to me and said that his best friend was about to leave town which provided a one time opportunity to sleep with his friend's girlfriend. He wanted to know if he should do this. Now one must realize that each situation has its own meaning. Both the uniqueness of the situation and of the human personality need to be addressed. Meaning cannot be forced on the client by the psychotherapist. It would not have made any sense for me to preach at him saying, "This is not proper," or "This is what I believe you should do." Instead, I addressed his understanding of what was significant by stating, "You have told me that this is a one time opportunity and you have told me that this man is your best friend, so look out! You do not want to give him any reason to no longer consider you a friend. This is a one time opportunity for you to prove your friendship in a way that is undeniable, by denying yourself. Do you understand me?" He understood the importance of his friendship, without me telling him what to do. In all cases the client must be encouraged to push forward independently toward the concrete meaning of his own existence. In the end, education must be education toward the ability to decide. It makes no sense to try to teach the client what in our own life is meaningful. A logotherapist cannot tell a patient what the meaning is, but he can at least show that there is a meaning in life. Every situation implies a call, a responsibility. To this call we must react according to our best ability and our best conscience. During the three years I spent in Auschwitz and Dachau I decided that I was responsible for making use of the slightest chance of survival and ignoring the great danger around me. This was my coping maxim that I espoused at each moment. You see, meaning must be discovered from within, from the individual's experiences, from his worth, his courage, his creativity. While teaching in San Diego three of my students were American officers who had been imprisoned for up to seven years in the North

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Vietnamese POW camps. They told me that the one thing which held them up, in the most horrible conditions of isolation and torture, was the vision of coming home to loved ones or knowing that they would be needed at work. The moment in which they caught that vision was the deciding moment in their survival. Even when death comes, meaning remains as something that has been fulfilled. In contrast to religious or philosophical meaning, which can change over time, individual human meaning remains permanent. My conviction is that nothing is lost or destroyed. No one can deprive us of what we have safely deposited into the past. Inside each of us there are full granaries where we have stored our life's harvest. The meaning is always there, like barns full of valuable experiences. Whether it is the deeds that we have done, or the things we have learned, the love we have had for someone else, or the suffering we have over come with courage and resolution, each of these bring meaning to life. Indeed, to bear a terrible fate with dignity and compassion for others is something extraordinary. To master your fate and use your suffering to help others is for me the highest of all meanings. The majority of the information contained in this article can be found in Frankl's July 1994 address to the Evolution of Psychotherapy Conference in Hamburg. Translation/summary from German to English has been provided by Bill Short, Ph.D.

CHAPTER 7: VIKTOR FRANKL EXCERPTS FROM THE WRITINGS OF VIKTOR FRANKL

From Man's Search for Meaning: Frankl is found of quoting Nietzsche, "He who has a way to live can bear with almost any how." In the concentration comp every circumstance conspires to make the prisoner lose his hold. All familiar goals in life are snatched away. What alone remains is "the last of human freedoms" - the ability to choose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances (p xi) Unlike many European existentialist, Frankl is neither pessimistic nor antireligious. On the contrary , for a writer who faces fully the ubiquity of suffering and the forces of evil, he takes a surprisingly hopeful view of man=s capacity to transcend his predicament and discover an adequate guiding truth. (p xii) The religious interest of the prisoners, as far and as soon as it developed, was the most sincere imaginable. The depth and vigor of religious belief often surprised and moved a new arrival. Most impressive in this connection were improvised prayers or services in the corner of a hut, or in the darkness of he locked cattle truck in which we were brought back from a distant work site, tired, hungry and frozen in our ragged clothing. (p 54) The truth - that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief can impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. (p 59) Humor was another of the soul's weapons in the fight for self-preservation. It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation even if only for a few seconds. (p 68) An active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity to realize values in creative work, while a passive life of enjoyment affords him the opportunity to obtain fulfillment in experiencing beauty, art, or nature. But there is also purpose in that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of behavior: namely, in man's attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces. A creative life and a life of enjoyment are banned to him. But not only creativeness and enjoyment are meaningful. If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life can not be complete. The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity-even under the most difficult circumstances - to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forego the opportunities of attaining the values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not. Do not think that these considerations are unworldly and too far removed from real life. It is true that only a few people are capable of reaching such high standards. Of the prisoners only a few kept their full inner liberty and obtained those values which their suffering afforded, but even one such example is sufficient proof that man's inner strength may raise him above his outward fate. Such men are not only in concentration camps. Everywhere man is confronted with fate, with the chance of achieving something through his own suffering. (p 106-107) I once had a dramatic demonstration of the close link between the loss of faith in the future and this dangerous giving up. F., my senior block warden, a fairly well-known composer and librettist, confided in me one day: "I would like to tell you something, Doctor. I have had a strange dream. A voice told me that I could wish for something, that I should only say what I wanted to know, and all my questions would be answered. What do you think I asked? That I would like to know when the war would be over for me. You know what I mean, Doctor-for me! I wanted to know when we, when our camp, would be liberated and our sufferings come to an end." "And when did you have this dream?" I asked. "In February, I945," he answered. It was then the beginning of March. "What did your dream voice answer?" Furtively he whispered to me, "March thirtieth." When F. told me about his dream, he was still full of hope and convinced that the voice of his dream would be right. But as the promised day drew nearer, the war news which reached our camp made it appear very unlikely that we would be free on the promised date. On March twenty-ninth, F. suddenly became ill and ran a high temperature. On March thirtieth, the day his prophecy had told him that the war

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and suffering would be Over for him, he became delirious and lost consciousness. On March thirty-first, he was dead. To all outward appearances, he died of typhus. Those who know how close the connection is between the state of mind of a man-his courage and hope, or lack of them - and the state of immunity of his body will understand that the sudden loss of hope and courage can have a deadly effect. The ultimate cause of my friend's death was that the expected liberation did not come and he was severely disappointed. This suddenly lowered his body's resistance against the latent typhus infection. His faith in the future and his will to live had become paralyzed and his body fell victim to illness-and thus the voice of his dream was right after all. (p 118-120) He talked about the many comrades who had died in the last few days, either of sickness or of suicide. But he also mentioned what may have been the real reason for their deaths: giving up hope. (p 129) The existential vacuum is a widespread phenomenon of the twentieth century. This is understandable; it may b due to a twofold loss that man 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 embedded 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 recent development; the traditions that had buttressed his behavior are now rapidly diminishing. Not instinct 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). (p 167) Anticipatory anxiety is characteristic of this fear that it produces precisely that of which the patient is afraid. An individual, for example, who is afraid of blushing when he enters a large room and faces many people, will actually blush. In this context, one might transpose the saying, "the wish is, father to the thought" to "the fear is mother of he event." (p 193) From The Doctor and the Soul: Man lives in three dimensions: the somatic, the mental, and the spiritual. The spiritual dimension cannot be ignored, for it is what makes us human. To be concerned about the meaning of life is not necessarily a sign of disease or of neurosis. It may be; but then again, spiritual agony may have very little connection with a disease of the psyche. The proper diagnosis can be made only by someone who can see the spiritual side of man. Psychoanalysis speaks of the pleasure principle, individual psychology of status drive. The pleasure principle might be termed the will-topleasure the status drive is equivalent to the will-to power. But where do we hear of that which most deeply inspires man; where is the innate desire to give as much meaning as possible to one's life, to actualized as many values as possible--what I should like to call the will-to-meaning? This will-to-meaning is the most human phenomenon of all, since an animal certainly never worries about the meaning of its existence. Yet psychotherapy would turn this will-to-meaning into a human frailty neurotic complex. A therapist who ignores man's spiritual side, and is thus forced to ignore the will-to-meaning, is giving away one of his most valuable assets. For it is to this will that a psychotherapist should appeal. Again and again we have seen that an appeal to continue life, to survive the most unfavorable conditions, can be made only when such survival appears to have a meaning. That meaning must be specific and personal, a meaning which can be realized by this one person alone. For we must never forget that every man is unique in the universe. (p xvi) Men can give meaning to their lives by realizing what I call creative values, by achieving task. But they can also give meaning to their live by realizing experiential values, by experiencing the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, or by knowing one single human being in all his uniqueness. And to experience one human being as unique means to love him. But even a man who finds himself in the greatest distress, in which neither activity nor creativity can bring values to life, nor experience give meaning to it - even such a man can still give his life a meaning by the way he faces his fate, his distress. By taking his unavoidable suffering upon himself he may yet realize values. Thus, life has a meaning to the last breath. For the possibility of realizing values by the very attitude with which we face our unchangeable suffering - this possibility exists to the very last moment. I call such values attitudinal values. (p xix) When it comes to evaluating people, collectivism leads us astray. For in place of responsible persons, the collectivist idea substitutes a mere type, and in place of personal responsibility, substitutes conformity to norms. (p 73) Destiny appears to man in three principal forms: (1) natural disposition or endowment, what Tandler has called "somatic fate"; (2) as his situation, the total of his external environment; (3) disposition and situation together make up man's position. Toward this he "takes a position"--that is, he form an attitude. This "position taken" or attitude is - in contrast I basically destined "position given" matter of free choice. Proof of this is the fact that man can "change his position," take a attitude (as soon as we include the time dimension in our scheme, since a change of position means an alteration of attitude course of time). Included under change of position in this is, for example, everything we call education, learning and self-improvement, but also psychotherapy in the broadest sense of the word, and such inner revolutions as religious conversion. (p 80) From The Will to Meaning: A person is free to shape his own character, and man is responsible for what he may have made of himself. What matters is not the features of our character or the drives and instincts per es, but rather the stand we take toward them. And the capacity t take such a stand is what makes us human beings. (p 17) Suffering is only one aspect of what I call "The Tragic Triad" of human existence. This triad is made up of pain, guilt, and death. There is no human being who may say that he has not failed, that he does not suffer, and that he will not die. The reader may notice that here the third "triad" is introduced. The first triad is constituted by freedom of will, will to meaning, and meaning to life. Meaning of life is composed of the second triad - creative , experiential, and attitudinal values. And attitudinal values are subdivided into the third triad - meaningful attitudes to pain, guilt, and death. Speaking of the "tragic triad" should not mislead the reader to assume that logotherapy is as pessimistic as existentialism is said to be. Rather logotherapy is an optimistic approach to life, for it teaches that there are no tragic and negative aspects which could not be by the stand one takes to them transmuted into a positive accomplishment. (p 73) From Psychotherapy and existentialism: Logotherapy exceeds and surpasses existential analysis, ...to the extent that it is essentially more than analysis of existence, of being, and involves more than a mere analysis of its subject. Logotherapy is concerned not only with

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being but also with meaning; not only with ontos but also with logos; and this feature may well account for the activistic, therapeutic orientation of logotherapy. In other words, logotherapy is not only analysis but also therapy. (p 1) A good sense of humor is inherent in this technique. This is understandable since we know that humor is a paramount way of putting distance between something and oneself. One might say as well, that humor helps man to rise above his own predicament by allowing him to look at himself in a more detached way. So humor would also have to located in the noetic dimension. After all, no animal is able to laugh, least of all at himself.. (p 4) In fact, it is my conviction that man should not, indeed cannot, struggle for identity in a direct way; he rather finds identity to the extent to which he commits himself to something beyond himself. No one has put it as cogently as Karl Jaspers did when he said, "What man is, he ultimately becomes through the cause which he made his own." (p 9) Man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes - within limits of endowment and environment - he has made himself. In the living laboratories of the concentration camps we watched comrades behaving like swine while others like saints. Man has both these potentialities within himself. Which one he actualizes depends on decision, not on conditions. It is time that this decision quality of human existence be included in our definition man. Our generation has come to know man as he really is: the being that has invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz, and also the being who entered those gas chambers upright, the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips. (p 35) To this extent man is not only responsible for what he does but also for what is, inasmuch as man does not only behave according to what he is but also becomes what he is according to how he behaves. In the last analysis, man has become what he has made of himself. Instead of being fully conditioned by any conditions, he is constructing himself. (p 61) TO ORDER ANY OF THE ABOVE BOOKS GO TO: (SOME MAY BE OUT OF PRINT)

CHAPTER 8 AN INTERVIEW WITH VIKTOR FRANKL AT AGE NINETY: MATTHEY SCULLY

[Matthew Scully, a former Literary Editor for National Review and speechwriter for Vice President Dan Quayle, is a writer living in Arlington, Virginia.] [This data file is the sole property of FIRST THINGS. It may not be altered or edited in any way. It may be reproduced only in its entirety for circulation as "freeware," without charge. All reproductions of this data file must contain the copyright notice (i.e., "Copyright (c) 1994 by First Things") and this Copyright/Reproduction Limitations notice.] "Did you ever hear from Otto?" I asked Viktor Frankl. Readers of Frankl's classic Man's Search for Meaning: Experiences in the Concentration Camp will remember Otto as the fellow prisoner to whom he recited his final testament before being sent to a "rest camp" for the sick prisoners of Auschwitz. "No one knew whether this was a ruse to obtain the last bit of work for the sick . . . or whether it would go to the gas ovens or to a genuine rest camp," Frankl wrote. The chief doctor offered that evening to take his name from the list. "I told him this was not my way; that I had learned to let fate take its course." Returning to the hut, "I found a good friend waiting for me." "Tears came to his eyes and I tried to comfort him. Then there was something else to do-make my will. 'Listen, Otto, if I don't get back home to my wife, and if you should see her again, tell her that I talked of her daily, hourly. You remember. Secondly, I have loved her more than anyone. Thirdly, the short time I have been married to her outweighs everything, even all we have been through here.' . . . Otto, where are you now? Are you alive? What has happened to you since our last hour together?" What did happen? "Ah, yes, Otto," Frankl recalled in an interview last year. "No, I heard nothing. One must assume he did not make it out." Frankel wrote Man's Search for Meaning in 1946, the year before The Diary of Anne Frank came out and three years before Orwell's 1984. Still entitled From Concentration Camp to Existentialism in German editions, it is as deeply somber a book as any to come from the era. It is a strangely hopeful book, still a staple on the self-help shelves, but inescapably a book about death. Yet in Frankl's own case, fate took a different course. After the loss of his wife in the Holocaust he remarried, wrote another twenty-five books, founded a school of psychotherapy, built an institute bearing his name in Vienna, lectured around the world, and has lived to see Man's Search for Meaning reprinted in twenty-three languages and at least nine million copies. Finding him at the University of Vienna, I realized, however, that the wistful retrospective I had in mind-Aging Lion Looks at Our Troubled World-would be not only trite but false. Dr. Frankl looks quite healthy. An assistant asked that students not take pictures because the flash hurts his failing eyes. But otherwise, approaching ninety, he sat in easy command-joking, pounding the table for emphasis, telling stories about Freud (whom he met in 1923 and worked with thereafter). Now and then he would dart to the blackboard to illustrate his idea of "dimensional ontology" or the "tragic triage" of life. One story reflected Frankl's conviction that many psychotherapists are themselves mad. It was in the forties, he recalled, here in Vienna. He read a quotation from a noted modern philosopher and another from a schizophrenic patient, and asked his listeners to match quotation with author. Overwhelmingly, he said triumphantly (as though the results of the experiment had just come in), "the majority of listeners got it wrong!"

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What philosopher and lunatic had in common, Frankl went on to explain, is the certainty that happiness can be attained by furious pursuit and a consequent rage at the unsatisfying results. His useful word for this is "hyperintention," a tendency that only inflames what is usually the real problem, our own self-centeredness. "Everything can be taken away from man but one thing-to choose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." The sane are those who accept this charge and do not expect happiness by right. Thus Frankl's own "logotherapy," which views suffering not as an obstacle to happiness but often the necessary means to it, less a pathology than a path. Logotherapy amounts in nearly all situations to the advice, "Get to work." Other psychologies begin by asking, "What do I want from life? Why am I unhappy?" Logotherapy asks, "What does life at this moment demand of me?" Happiness, runs a favored Frankl formulation, "ensues." "Happiness must happen." Life should find us out there in the world doing good things for their own sake. Even "if we strive for a good conscience, we are no longer justified in having it. The very fact has made us into Pharisees. And if we make health our main concern we have fallen ill. We have become hypochondriacs." At the time of his deportation, from a train station just blocks from where he was now speaking, Frankl was putting the final touches on a book advancing these same points. He had a chance before the war to go to America to write his books and build a reputation. "Should I foster my brainchild, logotherapy . . . or should I concentrate on my duties as a real child of my parents" and stay by them? He arrived home from the American consulate, visa in hand, to find a large block of marble sitting on the table. Recovered by his father from a local synagogue razed by the Nazis, it was, Frankl recalled, a piece from a tablet bearing the first letters of the Commandment, "Honor thy father and mother that thy days may be long upon the land." He let his visa lapse. Frankl is the rare intellectual called to live out his theories, and then rewarded against staggering odds for his faithfulness. Man's Search for Meaning itself attests to his notion of hyperintention. Had he used the visa and the excuse of professional obligation he would not be the same compelling witness. The camps, he wrote, reveal man much as Freud and others had described him-a creature driven by ego and instinct and sublimated drives. But they reveal something even more fundamental-our defining "capacity for self-transcendence." "Man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips." Frankl-who in the early thirties coined the word "existentialism"-is the man who reminded modern psychology of one detail it had overlooked, the patient's soul. Man's Search for Meaning is known for powerful scenes like the parting with Otto and for its insights from camp life. "If only our wives could see us now!'" said the man next to Frankl as they set off on a morning march to the labor site. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another upward and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking about his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. . . . A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth-that love is the highest goal to which man can aspire. . . . I understand how a man who has nothing left in this world may still know bliss. . . . In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way-an honorable way-in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to under-stand the meaning of the words, "The angels are lost in divine contemplation of an infinite glory." Spared to serve as a worker, he pleaded with the guards not to destroy a manuscript he had hidden in the lining of his coat. "Look, this is the manuscript of a scientific book. . . . I must keep this manuscript at all costs; it contains my life's work. Do you understand that?" . . . Yes, he was beginning to understand. A grin spread slowly over his face, first piteous, then more amused, mocking, insulting, until he bellowed one word at me in answer to my question, a word that was ever present in the vocabulary of camp inmates: "Shit!" At that moment I saw the plain truth and did what marked the culminating point of the first phase of my psychological reaction: I struck out my whole former life. The tone of Man's Search for Meaning is like this throughout: the reasonable, detached observer describing not only the radical evil around him but radical absurdity, stripped of everything "except, literally, our naked existence." The effect is to connect life at Auschwitz with life anywhere. We needed to stop asking ourselves about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life-daily and hourly. . . . Therefore, it was necessary for us to face up to the full amount of suffering, trying to keep moments of weakness and furtive tears to a minimum. But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer. Viktor Frankl had called in reply to my first letter that he would be glad to meet me, but would "strongly advise" that I read his other five books translated into English. Too many American interviewers come to Vienna, Frankl complained, having read only his one famous book. These other books (including The Will to Meaning) appeared in brisk succession after Man's Search for Meaning was translated in 1959. In great demand, Frankl spent twenty years in the United States, lecturing, appearing on TV, holding professor emeritus status at Berkeley, and occasionally saying controversial things, such as his suggestion in the seventies that America should erect on its West Coast a "Statue of Responsibility." Of a modern political ideologue, Frankl observed, "He doesn't have opinions; his opinions have him." I had resolved not to seem effusive or over-awed, like those fresh converts to logotherapy who, a colleague of Frankl told me, arrive at his door from all over the globe with offerings of gratitude. But it was not easy. Viktor Frankl, like Mother Teresa or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, is a person one can meet only over a chasm of moral experience. A casual enough opener had suggested itself when I passed by his study into the office. "I am absolutely convinced," Frankl had said in The Doctor and the Soul, "that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers." It was clear he regarded Freud as one such thinker. Why, then, did I just see a bust of the great man on the way in? He speaks of Freud with a kind of protective sympathy, a son happy the father was spared from seeing how all his dreams had worked out. Freud was a great man, "a genius," replied Frankl. So much that we know about the human psyche, we know because of Freud. But "even a genius cannot completely resist his Zeitgeist, the spirit of his time." And Freud's was a time of curiosity and excitement over the

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possibilities that lay hidden in the "basement" of human aspiration. He just forgot about the upper stories. "The point of logotherapy?" I asked. "Exactly! Logotherapy sees the human patient in all his humanness. I step up to the core of the patient's being. And that is a being in search of meaning, a being that is transcending himself, a being capable of acting in love for others. . . . You see, any human being is originally-he may forget it, or repress this-but originally he is a being reaching out for meanings to be fulfilled or persons to be loved." Frankl had heard of M. Scott Peck's Road Less Traveled, a popular book that declares, like Man's Search for Meaning, the hardness of life. In fact he had heard enough to wonder why the book and others like it pay no homage to the logotherapy of which they seem bland imitations. "But," he said with a dismissive wave, "it is no matter. Better that they should borrow from logotherapy than use their own nonsense." Had he, I asked, been following our "Politics of Meaning" debate back in America? He had. But the question raised an unhappy story from their 94th and probably last visit to the United States. It happened, Mrs. Frankl recalled, a year earlier in the very month of Mrs. Clinton's "Politics of Meaning" speech in Austin, Texas. Some American friends called the producers of Good Morning America. Would they like to have the author of Man's Search for Meaning on the show to discuss the First Lady's existential angst? But either they did not know the name or had already booked some more intriguing figure like Howard Stern or Dr. Ruth. "This is how America treats Viktor Frankl?" Mrs. Frankl asked. I wondered aloud whether this story might suggest a depressing possibility. As a general cultural drift, mustn't Freudian ideas, exactly because they validate the shallow in their self-absorption, inevitably triumph over Frankl and his more demanding message? This brought a ferocious rebuttal. "But how can you say this! Show me another book that has sold so far nine million copies, as Man's Search for Meaning did! What more empirical evidence do you need? And these letters-Ellie, how many do we receive each day?" "An average of twenty-three a day," said Mrs. Frankl. "Yes, you see, twenty-three letters every day-still. And most of them are from Americans. And do you know what they say? Most just write to say, 'Thank you, Dr. Frankl, for changing my life.'" "You see," he continued, "the intellectuals, the fashionable crowd, the high-brows, perhaps they do not care for it. Although I wonder. Sometimes they say, 'Of course it does not mean that we share the philosophical ideas of Dr. Frankl - but they use it. I don't give a damn whether they share my philosophical conviction! But it is satisfying, deeply, that they are using it for the benefit of patients. . . . The man on the street, he has always understood what I am saying. He sees that something is missing. He realizes that he is more than his id, more than his drives." This defensiveness was not only touching, but very odd. It turns out to be a complicated matter. There are those "high-brows" who believe that Frankl, however moving his personal testimony, is raising up all the old, unscientific notions of soul and conscience and guilt. Among these there is also a suspicion of religiosity, something I had made a note to bring up. But there are also critics with more standing who believe Frankl has always missed the unique evil of the Holocaust. This may explain why, for instance, one cannot find what after The Diary of Anne Frank is the second-most widely read Holocaust book in the bookstore of Washington's Holocaust Museum. "Here for instance," he explained, "the jury of Vienna is absolutely against me, because I'm too much for reconciling-very mean to me. They are fearing that I'm one who has forgotten the Holocaust. In my whole book Man's Search for Meaning, you will not find the word 'Jew.' I don't capitalize from being a Jew and having suffered as a Jew, you see? I ask them, Are you angry with me? Yes. Why are you angry with me? Perhaps because I am too much of a reconciling spirit? Yes. So is it bad to be reconciling?" The argument went back to the concept of collective guilt, to which Frankl is "strictly, 100 percent opposed." "I could adopt the concept if I were a National Socialist, because this is absolutely a concept in the framework of National Socialists, see? That it made no difference between Jews, one Jew and another Jew, Jews were absolutely Untermenschen, subhuman beings. And this concept justified them, as they thought, for all kinds of atrocities. But I start on the ground that guilt is, a priori, personal guilt. I can be judged guilty only for something I have missed, failed to do. But in no way can I be regarded as guilty for something an uncle of mine has done, or a grandmother of mine has done. This is 100 percent nonsense!" It was this conviction, Frankl explained, that led him from Auschwitz back to Vienna, rejoining the very neighbors who had watched or participated in his persecution. "People forget what it meant at that time to join the resistance. More or less, it meant at any moment being caught, being arrested, and sentenced to death, as my best friend at the time was sentenced to death. And all the more we have to admire the heroism of these people." "But my point," he continued, "is that heroism ultimately can only be demanded or expected of someone-of only one person. You are never entitled to place the demand of heroism on any one else, not unless you have been in the same position, facing the same decision, the same way facing death as punishment. But anyone who had immigrated to the United States and, viewing the situation in the past from that place, is not entitled to tell anybody who had remained in Germany that he should have joined the resistance, unless he himself has done so, facing all the risks, facing the question of whether his responsibility toward his whole family had allowed him, because he would have thrown his own family into the concentration camps." It was almost time to go, so I raised the question of his own spiritual convictions. Readers, Frankl told me, are invariably curious to know whether he himself believes in God. And indeed the first thing one notices entering the apartment is a sizable crucifix in the hall. (Mrs. Frankl is a Catholic.) "The crowning experience of all for the homecoming man," he wrote in Man's Search, "is the wonderful feeling that, after all he has suffered, there is nothing he need fear anymore-except his God." Always his arguments take us back to the "soul," "the higher part of man," "the religious impulse," "the Unconscious God." Should we take these as metaphors, projections, and mythic archetypes, or when he said "God" did he mean God? What distinguishes logotherapy from other schools of psychology is the humble recognition of an objective order that simply is and moral facts about the universe that are beyond our power to escape, modify, or reinvent. Frankl himself warned in The Doctor and the Soul against a strutting "nothing-but-ism" that declares our spiritual longings are nothing but instinctual drives and God nothing but a creation of the id. Without a Creator, I asked, wouldn't any notion of "spirit" collapse back into instinct and logotherapy fall apart? Not quite, he answered, but in any case his own calling was to heal the soul, not save it. "I do not allow myself to confess personally whether I'm religious or not. I'm writing as a psychologist, I'm writing as a psychiatrist, I'm writing as a man of the medical faculty. . . . And that made the message more powerful because if you were identifiably religious, immediately people would say, 'Oh well, he's that religious psychologist. Take the book away!'" "You see," he added, "I don't shy away, I don't feel debased or humiliated if someone suspects that I'm a religious person for myself. . . . If

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you call 'religious' a man who believes in what I call a Supermeaning, a meaning so comprehensive that you can no longer grasp it, get hold of it in rational intellectual terminology, then one should feel free to call me religious, really. And actually, I have come to define religion as an expression, a manifestation, of not only man's will to meaning, but of man's longing for an ultimate meaning, that is to say a meaning that is so comprehensive that it is no longer comprehensible. . . But it becomes a matter of believing rather than thinking, of faith rather than intellect. The positing of a supermeaning that evades mere rational grasp is one of the main tenets of logotherapy, after all. And a religious person may identify Supermeaning as something paralleling a Superbeing, and this Superbeing we would call God." Dr. and Mrs. Frankl walked me out, pausing at the mementos in the study. There was a framed letter from his friend Martin Heidegger (the philosopher, it turns out, whose words audiences had confused with the schizophrenic). Next to that was a charmingly incongruous picture and letter from Mamie Eisenhower, an avid admirer of Frankl after President Eisenhower died. Then he showed me a certificate declaring him an honorary citizen of Austin, Texas, where he lectured in 1975. "And when they conferred this on me, I said to the Mayor, 'Mr. Mayor, it would be more appropriate if I appointed you an honorary logotherapist.' 'Because,' I said, 'unless soldiers coming from America, among them certainly some youngsters coming from Texas, had not risked their lives in order to get us out of the camp, there would not have been any Viktor Frankl from the 27th of April of 1945, even less any logotherapy or books or anything.'" And last on the tour, a painting of Auschwitz done after liberation by an inmate named Bruno, who, Frankl explained, was allowed to live so that the guards might have their own private portraitist. "And this corner here is the place where the ceremony of burial has taken place, and these are recycled coffins. And in one of these coffins, at this very place, I saw the body of my father who died there." "You asked me earlier, Do I still think of these things? Not a day goes by when I do not! And in a way I do pity those younger people who did not know the camps or live during the war, who have nothing like that to compare [their own hardships] with. . . . Even today, as I lose my sight or with any severe problem or adverse situation, . . . I have only to think for a fraction of a second and I draw a deep breath. What I would have given then if I could have had no greater problem than I face today!"

CHAPTER 9: VIKTOR FRANKL'S RECOLLECTIONS: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY: PERSEUS PUBLISHING: (2000)

Hypnosis: I admit to an early interest in hypnosis and, at age 15, was able to use it correctly. (p 53) In my book Psychotherapie fur den Alltag [Psychotherapy In Everyday Life], I describe how, as an intern in the department of gynecology at Vienna's Rothschild Hospital, I had to perform a narcosis in preparation for a surgery. My supervisor and head of the department, Dr. Fleischmann, gave me the honorable but not very promising order to hypnotize a small, old woman who could not take a regular narcotic for her surgery. For some reason, a local anesthetic was also not possible. Thus I tried to keep the poor woman pain-free through hypnosis. The attempt was successful. But an unexpected surprise awaited me. For, mixed in with the praises from the physicians and the thanks of the patient were the most bitter and vehement reproaches by the nurse who had handled the surgical instruments during the operation. She let me know with her rebuke that she had had to use every bit of her willpower to fight off sleepiness during the entire procedure. My monotone suggestions had had their effect not only on the patient. Another time, as a young doctor in the Maria Theresien Schlossel Neurological Hospital, I experienced the following. My supervisor, Dr. Josef Gerstmann, had asked me to induce sleep in a patient who suffered from insomnia and was staying in a two-bed room. Late in the evening I quietly stole into the room, sat near his bed, and repeated for at least half an hour the hypnotic suggestions: "You are calm, very calm, pleasantly tired. You are getting more and more tired. Your breathing is calm, your eyelids are becoming heavier and heavier. All your worries are far, far away. Soon you'll fall asleep." But when I tried to slip out of the room quietly, I was disappointed to see that I had not helped the man. How surprised I was, however, at the enthusiastic welcome when I entered the same patient room the next day. (p 54) "I slept wonderfully last night. A few minutes after you started talking I was in a deep sleep." But it was the roommate of the man I had been sent to hypnotize. (p 53-55)

CHAPTER 10: NOTES FROM EVERYTHING TO GAIN: A GUIDE TO SELF-FULFILMENT THROUGH LOGOTHERAPY: JAMES C. CRUMBAUGH.. NELSON-HILL. CHICAGO. 1973:

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James Crumbaugh Everyone wants to be Somebody. Everyone needs to find a personal identity , a meaning for existence, a place in life, a worthwhile cause. Today we Americans have more to live with than most people ever dared dream of, but many of us are not sure of what we are living for. The pressures of life have increased in proportion to its abundance. Many of us are able to keep going only through a combination of tranquilizers, alcohol, and escapist entertainment - we are escapees from ourselves. Nothing produces emotional breakdown quicker than a feeling that we are trapped in a competitive rat race that drains our energies but gives us no real feeling of accomplishment. No feeling crushes like the awareness of being a nothing, a nobody. And no feeling lifts like the sense of a meaning or purpose in life that makes us Somebody important, Somebody to be reckoned with, a unique person. Do you sometimes wonder who you are, why you are living, and what makes life worth living? Do you often wish you could find something that would bring meaning to your life and cause others to regard you as a special Somebody? You can find this meaning; you can become the real person you want to be. (p ix) We are all struggling to be Somebody. But most of us haven=t found the way. To illustrate this point, the following statistics are offered: 1. It is estimated that 30 percent of all patients entering general hospitals and 50 percent of all patients going to physicians in general practice are suffering from emotional or mental illness. 2. One-tenth of the general population is, has been, or will be hospitalized for mental illness. This is an increase of 100 percent during the past generation. 3. One-third of the general population is estimated to be in need of psychotherapy or counseling in some area. 4. Nearly one-third of marriages now end in divorce. Fifty percent of married Americans do not consider their marriages happy. Half of those who do feel they are happy still consider themselves inadequate as mates. 5. Fifty thousand people in the United States were addicted to hard narcotics even before the avalanche of users of marijuana, amphetamines, LSD, and heroin of the last few years. 6. Americans spend $800 million a year on tranquilizers, Sixty percent of all prescriptions written are for tranquilizers. Forty percent of the adult population of the United States took them last year . 7. There are five million problem drinkers and nearly three million chronic alcoholics in our land. 8. About seventeen thousand people commit suicide in this country every year . 9. Americans consume about sixteen million pounds - or eighteen billion five-grain tablets - of aspirin each year . More statistics could be given, but I think, the facts are clear. Many of us are constantly trying to escape from ourselves. We are bored and our lives are empty because we lack any real meaning and purpose in our life. Many people to compensate by flight into material pleasures and by emphasizing material achievements as the only values. They try to rise above the competition by any means available. In industry unfair merchandising, dishonest advertising, and shoddy products are the result. Witness the amazing industry-wide frauds uncovered by the dynamic consumer advocate, Ralph Nader . Most people seem to feel that they are hopelessly caught in the trap of their daily lives. If they must compromise their principles in order to receive material rewards, they feel they have to do so. But if they had a meaning for living other than merely making a living, their lives would be different. Do you sometimes wonder what life is really all about? A lot of people do these days. Many are saying such things as: "1 don't seem to have a place in life," "there's nothing left that is worth living for," "I don't know who I am," or "the whole world seems to have gone crazy, and there's nothing but trouble." Yes, a lot of people are talking like that today. Life has lost meaning for them. They don't see any purpose in it. The things they used to believe in have changed, and they haven't found any new values to make up for the loss. When a special problem comes along, they can't cope with it. It may be family trouble - a divorce or trouble with the children. Perhaps it is the loss of a job, failure to get a promotion, or some other disappointment. It might be financial reverses, the pressure of unpaid bills, or any one of a million other things. But whatever the complication may be, a person has no inner (p 7) resources to fight back if he has already decided that his life has little meaning. He decides that the situation is hopeless. He wonders why his is the victim. He can't help feeling angry about it and resenting the unfairness. Do you recognize yourself in the above situations? Do you sometimes fell caught in a trap? Do you thing about all the things that have gone wrong in your life and wonder why they happened to you? Do you often feel left out of life? Is your live empty of meaning and purpose? Many people have such feelings, especially in this computerized age where it is to get the feeling that you are nothing but a number in a filing cabinet. This is what it means to be nobody. (p 8) Developing Special Techniques: In order to fulfill this process and validate these principles, we must develop special techniques or procedures. There are two basic special techniques that, when practiced consistently, will enable us to reach this goal. They are designed

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to bring out the creative abilities that we all have in much greater degree than we usually realize, but which we don't learn to use. These techniques are as follows: 1. Expanding conscious awareness, and 2. Stimulating creative imagination. Let us consider each of these and how it works. First, expanding conscious awareness: This means that we must become more aware of the world about us and what goes on in it. For example, if I ask you to look out of the window and tell me what you see, you may reply, "It is a sunny day, and a car is passing by, and there are two children playing in the yard." But if I ask you to take a second look and tell me what else you see, and if I add to your motivation by offering you a reward for each additional thing you can report, you will undoubtedly notice much more than you did the first time. That is the way it is with our problems. If someone asks us what is wrong, we give a short answer and think that we have said all there is to be said. We don't like to talk about it in the first place, so we say a few words and try to leave it at that. But only by digging into the minute details - by expanding our conscious awareness of the vital and significant implications of the problem - can we hope to work out anew solution to it. The truth is that this is exactly what many young people are talking about and trying to do when they blow their minds with (p 23) various harmful drugs. They want to expand their conscious awareness and to see more of life than they have ever been able to see before. And their aim is a good one; the error is in their methodology. Their techniques lead to disastrous side effects and after effects. And in the long run the drugs don .t accomplish their goals: They only give a false feeling that you have had some great insights into some new aspect of life; but when the drug effects wear off, these insights are gone. There is, however, a safe and effective way to expand conscious awareness, and many of the exercises to be given later in the book are directed toward this end. Second, stimulating creative imagination: This is the process of using the creative capacity we all have in potential form. After we have expanded our conscious awareness to become more perceptive of what goes on around us, we need to use these new perceptions creatively. This means that we must put all of our experiences together in new ways, in order to find new meanings in the total pattern of life. When we have analyzed our problems in greater detail and have become aware of all of the aspects we may have previously overlooked, we then must relate all that we have found to the totality of our life experience. This will suggest something new about where we should go from there. In other words, we use our creative capacities to imagine new solutions to old problems. We do this through relating the new aspects of these problems ( of which we have now become aware) to other areas of life ( of which we have now also become newly conscious ). Such a process puts our problem in anew light and gives us new hope for the future. And then, without realizing just how it happened, we find ourselves in possession of anew lease on life, anew meaning and purpose, in place of the old feelings of hopelessness and despair: We have achieved the goal of logoanalysis. The exercises given in this book for both of our two basic techniques will guide you in applying logoanalysis to your particular problems. But first let's turn to an analogy that will illustrate how it all works. Imagine that your entire life is represented by a large picture like a jigsaw puzzle. You have been trying to put the picture together and have succeeded in properly placing most of them, but there are a number of missing segments. These pieces represent missing elements of your life. That is, they are the failures, conflicts, and troubles with which you are now faced. In some cases you may be able, at a later date, to find at least a portion of the missing segments. But right now, you don't know where they are, and you see no hope of locating them. In other words, as you view your present troubles, they seem to leave gaps or holes in your life, and you are unable to conceive of any way of filling them. What if you are never able to find the missing pieces? You may be tempted to draw the conclusion that your life is hopeless and meaningless and that you have nothing left to live for. When you are faced with a severe problem, you will be concentrating on it so completely that you will ignore all of the other aspects of life, even though you may have some very good things going for you. (p 25) Thus, you will forget about all of the hundreds of pieces of your life that do fit together and give a real meaning and purpose to the overall picture. You will find it difficult to see the overall picture, although you may be looking right at it, because you are wrapped up in the little segment that represents some current problem. When the problem is severe, you don't think about anything else at the time. This is very similar to what you would experience in looking at the jigsaw puzzle through a long cardboard tube. Suppose you are looking through such a tube at the part of the picture that is circled and that represents your most severe problem. The tube is like the emotional upset that keeps your attention focused on this area of trouble. Since you can't see anything else except your current trouble, you get the feeling that this is all there is to your life. If this were really true, it would be logical for you to give up in despair, for there would be too many missing pieces to allow you to find much meaning in the few remaining segments in this area. As long as you are looking through the cardboard tube at this one area of your life, as it were, there doesn't seem to be much hope for you. Seeing the Whole Picture: But suppose someone comes along and knocks the tube out of your hand. Suddenly you see the whole picture of your life at once. Obviously you now see new elements of experience that remind you of important things to live for in spite of your difficulties. You sense a new meaning and purpose in your life as a whole. By comparison, the missing pieces within the circle which had loomed so large when you were focusing only on this area - now take on far less significance. You wonder how you could have become so wrapped up in this little area of your life that you ignored all of the successes, the hopes and ambitions, and the assets in the rest of it. Unfortunately , in reality no one can knock this tube out of your hand so that you can see the whole of life at one glance. At the moment, you are forced by circumstances to peer in despair only at the few pieces that can be seen through the tube. How, then, can you work out

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of this apparently hopeless situation? There is only one way. That way is to move the tube slowly around, gradually scanning the total picture segment by segment, so that finally you can put all of the parts together and perceive the meaning of the whole. It is a slow process, and you may become discouraged if you do not always remember the final goal. Some of the segments you will look at will have little meaning within themselves, but it is only by relating each segment to every other one that the overall significance of the total picture can at last be perceived. In other words, when you look at the little slice of life represented by your immediate problem, it seems overpowering and meaningless until you move by association to another area of your past experience, and to another, and to still another. In the long run you will see your successes, your strong points, and your assets - all of which give a new meaning to the whole, anew hope for the future, and minimize the present failures. When you begin to gain anew perspective on the total pattern of your life, you will begin to grasp a total meaning and purpose in life. Thus, you can use the present difficulty as a stepping stone toward a new tomorrow. A failure can be turned into an asset in the long run when it is seen as a learning experience that helps you attain a future goal - a goal you may not have been prepared to achieve without the prior failure. In this sense, misfortunes can turn out to be blessings in disguise. But to make use of them, you have to explore their relationship to all of the other experiences you have had, and only then will you see what they are supposed to teach you in relationship to your future goals. This process of "moving the tube around " over the whole picture of life illustrates the two basic techniques of logoanalysis. That is, moving the tube is a matter of expanding your conscious awareness of all that has occurred in your past experience and of stimulating your creative imagination to put together these segments of past experience in anew and meaningful way. Using these techniques will suggest an ultimate direction or goal that can be achieved. (p 27) The exercises of logoanalysis to be presented in this book are designed to help you explore your life experiences in relation to your present situation. U sing them will enable you to find the meaning of the total picture of your life. When you have found it, you will be able to go on from there, in spite of whatever handicaps and difficulties you may face, and to live your life in away that will give you an identity as Somebody. This does not mean that only those who have serious problems can profit from logoanalysis. Life may be going well for you, but you may still sense a need to improve, to find a fresh meaning, a higher purpose. If so, logoanalysis can help you do it. You may be looking down the cardboard tube, as it were, at a merely boring present situation. Exploring this situation in relation to the many other segments of your total life experience can give you a new perspective. In the succeeding chapters we will discuss examples of how others have put logoanalysis into practice. You will see that, by following the exercises, you can achieve similar success. (p 28) Devising the content. The meditation that leads to areal encounter with the Supreme Intelligence has both a thoughtful and an emotional side, and neither aspect can be neglected. The thoughtful side requires attention to the words we use, while the emotional side represents a feeling of reverence for the universe and for all human life as well as a personal reaching out to the Supreme power. The elements which the meditation should contain. An important key to success is what you want to achieve. As a guide, you can profitably examine - regardless of your particular faith - the prayer of Jesus known as the Lord's Prayer: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done On Earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread; And forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive those who trespass against us; Lead us not into temptation, But deliver us from evil. Jesus has just exhorted his followers to avoid, when praying, the repetitious use of the same words over and over again, as is done by the "heathen," who fancy that through using many pious words they will get a hearing from God. This we might call the "prayer-wheel effect." Then He gives the example of what prayer should be like. While these words have become the most frequently repeated of any prayer in the Christian world, and usually in a routine, unvaried fashion in which they come from the lips without passing through the brain, all that Jesus probably intended was to furnish a framework around which the elements could be varied. Let us examine these elements: Worship: Praise and respect for the Supreme Being. (Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven. ) Request for: Material needs. (Give us this day our daily bread.) Forgiveness of our own mistakes. (Forgive us our trespasses.) Fulfillment of our own obligation to show charity in order to gain it ourselves. (As we forgive those who trespass against us. ) Protection against danger both from the outer world and from inner selfish motives which may cause new mistakes. (Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.) We may incorporate these basic elements in thousands of (p 121) different ways. To this outline we can add our own specific problems,

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the problems upon which we wish to concentrate. We can repeat this outline with constantly new and spontaneous variations of wording hat will prevent monotony and a loss of the meaning. There are great values in sticking to the framework of content, both for the added strength that follows repetition, and for emergency situations where the content may have to be given under emotional pressure. In the latter case we always revert to what we know best, and in extreme situations the unvaried wording of The Lord's Prayer (for the Christian) or the Sh'ma Yisrael ( for the Jew) will serve well. In instances where daily routine is upset but where an emotional crisis is not at hand (as, for example, in traveling on a train), you will find that having the outline firmly in awareness will enable you to maintain your schedule and to continue developing these elements without falling prey to the "prayer-wheel effect. " For this reason, it is a good idea to place on 3"x5 " cards a written outline of the elements, in order that they will be always available under all circumstances. The framework represented by these key factors is intellectually set, whereas the spontaneous additions which should be improvised upon them are emotionally determined. The mark of spiritual encounter is the point where meditation passes from the underlying intellectual element to the emotional experience of reaching out for help in an attitude of submission to a Higher Power. This occurs simultaneously with the experience of strength received from this Power, and with consequent confidence in your ability to meet problems. The following represents a good basic model for content, an expansion of the elements of The Lord's Prayer: Reverence. Respect for the Supreme Being. (Same or similar to the introduction to The Lord's Prayer. ) This should include an inventory of your assets and thanks for them. It is helpful to list these as they occur to you in order that you may become ever aware of them, and it is desirable to mention them specifically. They are: Desire for increased faith In the Supreme Intelligence. Awareness of the good things in your life helps to increase faith. Desire for aid in overcoming or dealing adequately with liabilities. Here (p 122) you should think of your weaknesses and areas of failure just as you did the assets. These shortcomings are habits of personality which interfere with meeting life problems rather than the problems themselves (which will be dealt with later). For example, the tendency to try to bluff your way through a difficulty rather than admitting the insecurity you feel and thereby dealing with the cause of the insecurity . Both assets and liabilities will change from time to time, and you must remember to keep your lists in Exercise 1 current. As the effects of meditation become evident, the asset list will grow longer and the liability list shorter. There may well be periods, however, during which the reverse appears to occur, and an important factor in the success of the whole method lies in your ability to stick it out through such periods of discouragement. If you anticipate these and prepare for them, you will make it. In this connection, the question arises as to how to handle feelings of guilt for mistakes. Contrary to the opinions of many psychotherapists, a sense of guilt is a very desirable and potentially healthy sign. When we have violated our own values ( and we all do ), we should be aware of guilt - or in theological terms sin. All of the major religious faiths teach that we are all sinners, and that we cannot expect perfection of ourselves. But we can and should be aware of where and why we have failed, and of how we may be forgiven or absolved of our guilt. Different religious faiths have different requirements for this, but they always include ( a) facing and accepting the responsibility for wrong doing, (b) being sorry for it, and ( c resolving to try our best to do better in the future. It is not a sense of guilt that harms our mental health, but a failure to face the guilt, to gain insight into how we may be released from it, to do our best under the circumstances to profit from past mistakes. We know we may fail again, perhaps in the same area. Meditation should contain, first, a full confession of these areas of failure, and second, an earnest request for guidance and insight in using our full capacities to overcome the failures. Then - and this is a fundamentally important factor - it should ) contain a plea for the assistance of the Supreme Power in going I beyond our own abilities. This is the element of grace described by (p 123) the theologians; and it is the real key to the success of spiritual encounter, for the letter takes place only upon awareness that this factor has entered our lives. From time to time you will - if you watch for such events - experience good fortune that seems to come gratuitously and unexpectedly, without your having done anything to cause it. Then you will know hat this important factor in spiritual encounter has occurred, and you will be ready for the next phase. (p 124) What you cannot expect from spiritual encounter. It is important not to expect help in the form of the supernatural - that is, in having things done for you as if by magic. Rather you should look for guidance in doing for yourself, in making the human decisions that face you, in (p133) gaining insights as to how to proceed. This is not away of obtaining something for nothing. To get, you have first to give. It is not only hard work, but also requires the follow-through of soul-searching effort to do your best in growing emotionally and spiritually, and in thereby drawing upon your finest potentials for the handling of problems. It must be obvious that the method cannot be used to guarantee material welfare, to further one's own selfish ends, or to manipulate physical nature to serve personal whims. In many cases, a number of good things do come quickly; others will come eventually. The object, however, is not to change in any direct way the world without, but to change the world within. As that happens, we are able to utilize our full abilities to influence this outer world; and when our capacities have been reached after every sincere effort, the external conditions that limit us may also change. You cannot expect easy solutions even to problems of the internal life. A spiritual encounter is not likely to change your basic personality. If you began as an introvert, you will probably end as one. But the world has jobs for which introverts are needed as well as work for extroverts. This new method will not make you emotionally stable if you have a lifetime of instability behind you. It can, however, help you immensely to maintain a reasonable degree of emotional control. There probably are not only environmental factors but also hereditary physical causes in temperament. It is not likely to change the physical causes, although such changes may in some instances take place. Complete faith in a Power greater than man dictates, as we have said, that this Power can change natural events, but common sense shows that it usually does not do so upon request. We must accept our limitations and that our abilities are set by these boundaries. But this is no cause for depression. We are free to make of ourselves what we will within these limits, and regardless of how tightly the circle is drawn, there are still areas of service that can make our lives meaningful and worthwhile. To take advantage of these, however, we must will to do so and accept the often great difficulties that lie in the path. We may not always be able to achieve the material goals we want, but we can always become the kind of person we

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want to be. (p 134) What you can expect from spiritual encounter. If you are beset with anxiety, worry, depression, physical symptoms that have no medical cause, mental anguish, and feelings of futility , the greatest blessing you could ask is peace of mind and soul. This reward can be yours through the method presented herein. Some problems it will help you to solve; all problems it will enable you to face with confidence. " Lincoln said, "I am not bound to win, but I am bound to live u to what light I have." When we can accept this, we can accept ourselves; and when we can accept ourselves, we can feel accepted. And when we can gain this feeling of acceptance, we can live usefully and therefore meaningfully; we can deal effectively with whatever befalls us. And then we find the peace we have sought; we know that we have become Somebody. In gaining this end, it is essential to get new insights into ways of handling problems. Here the method shines, although you must carefully watch for the thoughts that reveal these insights. They may come in dreams, daydreams and off-guard flashes ( often at moments when it is difficult to stop and write them down) and they tend to disappear as quickly as they came. Sometimes they are overpowering impressions, but more often they are weak and fleeting, and they will elude you if you are not looking for them. Of course, it is easy to mistake the first impression that pops into your mind for a deep insight proceeding from the unconscious and dictated by the Supreme Intelligence, especially when you are emotionally wrought and in deep need of help. You should accept each potential insight cautiously and with reservation, suspending final judgment until you have had time to reflect upon it and to devise means of testing it tentatively. Sometimes you cannot be sure until you have given the idea a thorough, practical trial. Often it is necessary to examine it apart from the immediate situation, after sufficient time has elapsed to view it in relationship to the rest of your life. A given impression may come strongly into your mind, but it may still be erroneous. The only way to evaluate it is by careful tentative sifting of its implications to determine whether or not it will hold up in the light of all related facts, and by diligently weighing it on the scales of reason, justice, and good judgment. Often this may (p 135) require the passage of some time so that new evidence yet undiscovered can give you the final answer . Should you take this partner in marriage? Is this the job for you? Will this investment work out? Just as we must look slightly to one side of an object to see it more clearly in twilight (because the fovea or central area of the eye's retina is less sensitive to dim light than the outer portions ), so in the twilight of the unconscious we perceive most clearly by thinking temporarily "away" from the point at hand. After an interval, return to the problem; you will find the matter has gained better perspective. This is a warning against snap judgments. In some instances there is a time limit on the decision; but until you are sure, take all of the time you can. Do not, however, allow the temptation to avoid a decision to cause you to put it off beyond the point where action is reasonably required. It is usually better to do something even if it is wrong than to do nothing. The culmination of your struggle will be finding yourself - a place to put your life, a set of values or a cause which makes your existence worthwhile, a purpose or mission to which you can devote your full energies because you believe wholeheartedly in it. In Anna and the King of Slam or the musical version, The King and I), the widowed teacher, alone and at a loss for a reason to go on, is not attracted to the offer of teaching Siamese children until the king's emissary convinces her it would be a good "place to put your life. " This is the fervor that characterized the early Christians, but it has been almost altogether lost in the present era. It is the light that was seen by Saul of Tarsus on the Damascus road as he journeyed to stamp out the cause that soon would become the central theme of his own life. His newfound mission so completely changed him that he became as a different person. He could no longer be represented adequately even by the same name; now he was Paul the Apostle, a man with a purpose, with a reason to go on, with a place for his life and a personal identity that made his suffering worthwhile. To find this meaning, this cause for which to live, this identity that makes personal existence intelligible, is the ultimate aim of Spiritual encounter. Once found, it results in anew lease on the life that you may have all but given up. (p 136) No matter who you are, there is a challenging job in the world that needs and awaits you. It may play the role of a vocation or of an avocation; it may be full or part time; it may be where you now are or on the other side of the earth. But it is waiting for your discovery. Find it and you will fulfill the greatest of all human needs, the need to be needed. Pursue diligently the method of spiritual encounter as outlined, step by step, and you should find it. There are millions who are anxiously groping for away to gain help in dealing with the problems of what has become a meaningless and futile life. When you begin to feel that you have found your own way through the method of spiritual encounter, why not carry it to at least a few of them? What greater fulfillment of the need to be needed could anyone find? (p 137) Three Types of Values: You'll find that in Frankl's logotherapy the significance of these terms is as follows: Values: The meaning in life that are experienced by a group or culture as a whole. For instance, patriotism has traditionally been a (p 156) value in most societies. A meaning is an individually desired goal; a value is an objective sought by the group as a unit. A particular person might not accept patriotism as a personal meaning, although it might be generally regarded as very important in the group. Logotherapy teaches that we must each find our own personal meanings in life - the goals that can give our individual existence a sense of direction and worth, and through which we can receive a feeling of identity as Somebody. In order to do this, we must explore all of the values of our own as well as of other cultures, so that from them we may glean the ones we can incorporate into our personal life. This is not to say that we can take off on our own with no respect for cultural or social approval, but rather that we must choose the forms of culture and society that are in harmony with our individual life meanings, and that we must find within them expression of these personal meanings. Creative values: Those values which result from some type of creative activity . Such values may range from the procreation of children to the collection of garbage. Not only the fine arts ( such as music, painting, and literature ), but also the most mundane of everyday activities may serve as a creative outlet for some people. Experiential values: Those values gained by experiencing the creative work of others, as well as by communing with nature, and all activities that represent a human experience that brings enjoyment or a sense of significance in life. Attitudinal values: Those values that still remain when we experience a hopeless situation we cannot change creatively or experientially. This involves our human freedom to choose how we will meet an unalterable fate, such as a terminal illness. The attitude we take toward

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the conditions that we are forced to face will determine whether we incorporate them into our experience as a significant part (p 157) of the purpose of our life, or whether we fall beneath their weight in a fit of hopeless despair. If we have succeeded in finding an unconditional value in all human life, through the perception of man's uniqueness in relation to the universe, we are in a position to fend off despair in the wake of an apparently meaningless fate by choosing the attitude that this fate is itself an integral part of our unique personal worth. You are now ready to start the systematic search for your personal meanings among the wide panorama of human values. To help you, we will survey together a variety of activities that will bring you in contact with these values. Some of the activities you may not be able to carry out in your particular circumstances; but everyone can participate in a sufficient number to gain perception of a breadth of values, and from them he can find some that are meaningful to him. First read the following suggestions for general exploration of the three types of values. Then take part in as many of them as you possibly can. Often several can be conducted at the same time. When the activities presently to be suggested can be recorded in the form of an exercise, the appropriate exercise and directions for completing it will be referred to at the point where the activity is presented. (p 159) The search for happiness. Notice that we have not spoken of any' values in relation to happiness, for happiness is not the goal of the resent search. This may surprise and perhaps disappoint you, but if happiness is your chief goal, you are not likely to find it through reading this book. Or any book. Or in any conscious and deliberate effort. For happiness, as Frankl has pointed out, is not something that can be gained as you would acquire a job or a wife; it is rather a by-product which comes of successful striving toward goals that give ultimate meaning, purpose, and direction to your life. It is produced by movement toward significant ends rather than by achieving ends in themselves. It has been said that happiness is like a butterfly: If you chase it, it flitters away; but if you ignore it, it is likely to settle upon your shoulder. Soren Kierkegaard, the great Danish theologian of a century ago who unwittingly developed the existentialist movement, said that the door to happiness opens to the outside. That is, happiness is inside a little room, and the harder you push inward as you try to enter its door, the tighter you close the door. Happiness can be found, but it cannot be sought; it can be had, but it cannot be bought. So, if you would acquire it, your best bet is to forget it, and to think instead of how you can make your life worthwhile through fulfilling values that will make you Somebody. Happiness is the enjoyment of the hunt rather than the conquest of the hunted. And this is the objective of the methods we have described, methods that can aid you in the search for your own system of values. Happiness consists in becoming, not in being. ,1 Therefore, as long as you are striving, as long as you are on the road to becoming that which you wish to be, you are moving toward the only happiness that can be achieved. (p 167) Basic Concepts of Logotherapy: In order to see what really happened in this case, we must review and summarize the basic concepts of Frankl's logoanalysis is based on the same ideas. Since it is a means of personality. (p 119) development, we will look at Frankl's view of the primary human motive in the shaping of personality . But first we need a definition of the term, "personality." The word comes from the Latin persona, meaning mask. In the ancient Roman and Greek plays, the actors portrayed a given character by wearing a distinctive mask. They could thus play many roles, simply going off stage and changing masks to represent another character .Therefore, a person is an individual with a role to play in society, and personality is the sum total of all of the patterns and characteristics of behavior that make up his particular role or "style of life, " as psychiatrist Alfred Adler expressed it. Now, there are a number of different views of the dominant factor in personality. In order to understand Frankl's view, let's compare it with some others. Sigmund Freud, the famous Viennese psychiatrist who founded psychoanalysis around the turn of the century , felt that the basic motive in human personality was the tendency to seek self-satisfaction. This is known as hedonism, or what Freud called the "pleasure principle. " He considered all pleasure directly or indirectly rooted in sex, but sexual energy was for him a much broader concept than we usually think of it. He would, for example, include the creative energy of building a bridge just as much as that involved in the begetting of children. But, for Freud, man was always motivated in one way or another by what might be called the "will to pleasure." Alfred Adler, another Viennese psychiatrist, was a contemporary of Freud, although younger, and he was also instrumental in the early development of psychoanalysis. Adler departed from Freud in some basic ways, however, and his point of view became known as the "second Viennese school of psychiatry" (the first being that of Freud). Adler, like Freud, felt that all human motivation could be basically traced to one underlying principle, but he differed with Freud as to the nature of this principle. Whereas Freud thought in terms of sex, Adler took his lead from the German philosopher Nietzsche and said that man primarily strives to achieve power or mastery over the environment. Nietzsche believed that only the strong should survive and that the weak should perish, and in this way a super race would be created. (p 220) Whereas Freud had thought that human conflicts result from the failure to keep pleasurable goals in realistic balance ( the "reality" principle controls excesses of the "pleasure" principle ), Adler said that our difficulties arise when our need for mastery is not properly fulfilled through our other innate need of "social interest." When we do not direct normal mastery needs into socially useful channels, we usually run into conflict and failure. As a consequence, we feel inferior; and Adler gave us the term, "inferiority complex," to represent the resultant neurotic state. For him, then, all of man's behavior shows in some way the operation of what might be called the "will to power." In common with these two views of personality, Viktor Frankl (whose school of thought is sometimes called "the third Viennese school of psychiatry," since he, too, is Viennese) also holds that all of man's behavior is influenced by a unitary principle. He further agrees that we do see in human life a lot of pleasure-seeking and power seeking behavior. But he holds that these are distortions of the real underlying human need. The truly universal human urge, he says, is to find a meaning and purpose in life that will furnish one an identity, that will give him a reason to go on under whatever circumstances he must endure. Frank loves to quote Nietzsche on this one point, although he has little in common with most of Nietzsche's philosophy, which is usually considered a very pessimistic view of life. Nietzsche did say, however, "He who has a why for his life can stand almost any how." In other words, a person who has a real reason to live can put up with almost any living conditions. This is Frankl's main point. Frankl holds that power-seeking behavior is the method by which one attempts to reach the goal of finding meaning in life: If we can manipulate and control others, we can find an identity for ourselves, and we can use the power to achieve a meaningful and purposeful

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goal. However, if we fail, we then try to drown our pain in temporary immediate pleasures, and thereby we exhibit behavior that fits Freud's concept of personal pleasure as the main human need. Thus, going beyond Freud's "will to pleasure" and Adler's "will to power," Frankl has set the "will to meaning" as man's primary motive. (p 221) All three views are correct to some degree. Man seeks, as the psychologist L. A. Averill put it, to "project the ego." (Ego, the Greek word for I, is Freud's term for the inner core of personality or the "self.") This translates into somewhat the same thing as Adler's mastery need and the "self-actualization" need spoken of by the late, great psychologist Abraham Maslow. And it can also be seen even in Freud's "pleasure" principle, when the latter is tempered by the "reality" principle or by the seeking of realistic, socially efficient goals ). In other words, the basis of human motivation is that we all want to be Somebody, to find a personal identity that will make our lives meaningful and worthwhile. The advantage of Frankl's "will to meaning" is that it points directly to this need and makes more explicit what is actually going on in man's universal struggle. To understand how he arrived at this view of human motivation, we need to take a brief look at his own unique life experiences. His fascinating story is recorded in his best-selling book, Man's Search for Meaning. You will enjoy reading this along with the present book. Following it, you will also profit by his The Doctor and the Soul and also by Joseph Fabry's The Pursuit of Meaning, a popularized version of logotherapy . ( See bibliography for these references. ) Viktor E. Frankl was born in 1905 and educated at the University of Vienna, from which he received both a Ph.D. degree in philosophy and an M.D. degree. Before the outbreak of World War 11, he had become a neuropsychiatrist and was teaching at the University of Vienna Medical School. When Hitler entered Austria, Frankl knew that, being Jewish, he was in danger. He had obtained a visa to America for himself and his bride of about a year, but he could not get visas for his aged parents or his brother and sister. For this reason he decided to stay in Vienna. He and his family were incarcerated in the concentration camps. Family members were not allowed to remain together, and Frankl did not know until the end of the war and liberation by the allies whether his bride or any other member of his family was still alive. They were not. When he got back to the University of Vienna, he began to formalize the system of logotherapy, which had been growing in his (p 222) mind long before the war and which he tested in his three years in the concentration camps. He concluded that it takes one thing to survive under life's most trying circumstances: An unwavering faith that life always has a meaning and purpose and that each person has a job to do right up to the last breath. A prime illustration of this process [Frankl's "will to meaning"] is that of a well-born Jew who lived in the days when the Hebrews were still under Roman rule. His story has been mentioned in Chapter 7, but it is also very important here. He was a man of position and education, and he enjoyed Roman citizenship and occupied a place of prominence among his people. This resulted in a special assignment: In order to help maintain the faith of their fathers, he was to aid in stamping out a small, unruly and threatening cult that was beginning to be a problem to both the Jews and the Romans. Little bands of these zealots were to be found in many of the leading cities - in Antioch, Corinth, Damascus, and others, in addition to the capital Jerusalem. This man took to his assignment with enthusiasm, and earned quite a reputation for efficiency at the job. After some time he headed for one of the outlying groups in the distant city of Damascus. The journey was long and monotonous, and on it he had a lot of time to contemplate this assignment, to think about what it meant. And the more he thought about these little congregations of believers in anew religious approach, the more he remembered their happiness and hope in the face of adversity and suppression. Here was something that offered a real cause to these people. Something they could believe in with a complete dedication. This made it possible for them to withstand whatever pressures were placed upon them and to come back bravely for more. Not often had he seen such faith. It had given these people something worthwhile to live for, a real sense of mission and identity , a purpose that made the pressures worth withstanding. The more the traveler thought about this, the more he (p 223) questioned whether it was right to stamp this movement out. In fact, the followers seemed to have something in life much better than he had to offer . Then all at once it came to him: The real meaning and purpose in his own life was not in suppressing these groups, but in joining them. This realization struck him as a great and blinding flash of light, and from that moment on the light of this new life and its meaning never left him. It changed his remaining years quite radically; it took him from a life of comfort and security to a piecemeal existence of danger and suffering. In the end, it lead to his execution. But never once did he regret the decision to change, for it gave him a dynamic sense of meaning and purpose which he had never before known. And so great was the success of his new life on behalf of this struggling little religious sect that now, after nearly 2,000 years, he is regarded as one of the most influential figures in history. His name? No doubt you have already recognized it; he was Saul of Tarsus, who, after the light that changed his life, became Paul the Apostle. And of course the religious sect was the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, who came to be called Christians. Paul always had a why for his life, a cause for which to live, and, when the time came, for which to die. This kind of why for one's life has been found by different people in an endless variety of causes. (p 224) Finding Meaning for Yourself: Now you are ready to examine the means by which logotherapy explores life experiences in search of the unique meaning of one's personal life. We will now describe the areas of search as presented by Frankl. This process of finding meaning is a process of exploring all human values for those that will fit best with your own unique life experiences and that you can most profitably pursue as a source of this meaning. Here we must understand the difference in the terms "meaning" and "value" as used by Frankl. In logotherapy, a "value" is a culture wide source of motivation, whereas a "meaning" is a source of motivation that is effective for a particular individual. For example, patriotism is a concept that motivates large numbers of people in our society as a whole, and we think of it as a social value. But for John Doe as an individual, patriotism may have little or no motivating effect, in other words, it is not for him a meaning. In the present period many people are no longer able to find personal meaning in many of the traditional culture-wide values. It is

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unfortunate, from the standpoint of social survival, that we as a people do not today have a number of clearly stated values that can give us a sense of unity and direction. This is an age of individuality, and Frankl teaches that only by the process of education and by our acceptance of full responsibility for our personal choices of meaning can we build an integrated personality with a special life task that will give a direction and sense of purpose to our own existence. In order to do this we must explore all of the areas of traditional value and pick those values that can have special meaning to us. In this age of individuality, everyone is, in popular jargon, trying to "do his own thing," to "find his own bag." Because we are not only in many respects different from each other, but also in other respects alike or similar, we will in this process reestablish group or cultural values, in that many of us will find similar meanings and consequently band ourselves together in an effort to fulfill them. But finding the special means that can make our personal existence worthwhile is still an individual process. Although the logotherapist cannot do this for us, he can guide and (p 238) help us by pointing to and exploring with us the areas of value that have typified man's search for meaning throughout history. Frankl points out three basic types of human values that we must explore in order to find our own meanings. They are ( 1) creative values, ( 2) experiential values, and ( 3) attitudinal values. Let's look in detail at what he means by each of these. 1. Creative values. These are the values involved in producing something. Here production covers a wide variety . of functions. It might represent a job - a profession, trade, or business activity. On the other hand, it might involve a hobby, or some cause that you believe is worthwhile and are willing to invest time and effort to advance. Being a housewife, creating a home and family, represents fulfillment of creative values to large numbers of women, while others turn to a career for creative fulfillment. Different people find creative values in different sources, but there is a creative source for everybody except under extreme and unusual circumstances. The extreme circumstances In which creative fulfillment is not possible are much rarer than you might suppose. For example, if you were paralyzed from the neck down as a result of polio and had to spend most of your time in an Iron lung, you might feel that any further creative achievement in life was hopeless. If you had been an artist, you would probably assume that any further work of this type was Impossible. But there is a woman In Florida named Ann Adams who has faced this identical situation and still creates artistically: She paints by holding the brush between her teeth. Her work is lithographed and placed on Christmas and greeting cards, and she still continues to earn her own living by creative work in her chosen field in spite of what would appear to be an utterly impossible handicap. Consider also the case of Christy Brown. He has been a cerebral palsy victim since birth and is confined to a wheelchair, having full use of only his left foot. He also has a speech impediment that makes it difficult to understand him. If we were in this position, we would probably wonder just what we could do creatively. If we wanted to be a writer, and yet could not control our hands to write or our voice for effective dictation, we would likely feel that we might as well give up. (p 239) But Christy Brown Is a Successful novelist, typing out his work through the use of his left foot. So, creative values are often attainable even when we would usually assume that they are out of reach; but In order to utilize our potential to find and develop them, we have to make a systematic search. Now Adler's "will to power" when governed by his "social Interest" need, becomes a need to fulfill creative values. Frankl's "will to meaning" goes beyond It to the reason why values are fulfilled In the first place. 2. Experiential values. These are the values we attain through experiencing the good things of life. For some people this may represent the fine arts, music, literature, art, and the like. For others It may mean going out Into the country on a Sunday afternoon and "communing with nature." For still others It may Involve going to Lincoln Park In Chicago, Washington Square In New York, Jackson Square In New Orleans, or the Haitght-Ashbury district of San Francisco, and talking to all kinds of people. Different types of human experience hold value for different types of persons, but anyone can find Some type of human experience that Is meaningful to him. Experiential values are helpful to us, even though we may also at the same time be fulfilling creative values very successfully. In the rare circumstances to be described In which creative values are not possible, we may still find meaningful outlets through experiencing the creative work of others. If, for example, Ann Adams and Christy Brown had not found creative outlets In spite of their handicaps, they might still have continued a meaningful life through experiencing the art and literature created by the geniuses of these fields throughout history . Besides realization of creative and experiential values, there remains one other source of meaning in life: 3. Attitudinal values. When everything else falls, and we seem faced with a hopeless situation, we may still make our life meaningful by the attitude we take toward the conditions Imposed upon us. Even In he most hopeless situation, we still have a freedom of choice as to (p 240) how we will face our fate. We can become angry, resentful, and go Into a deep depression of hopelessness and despair. Or we can take the attitude of facing the situation with dignity and courage, In the faith that, as Frankl feels, all life has unconditional meaning and purpose regardless of circumstances, and that we have been given this circumstance as apart of the total meaning of our life. In either case, we will still have to meet the situation, but the first case results in the desperation and despair of meaninglessness, while the second offers hope and courage. Attitudinal values enabled Frankl to survive three years In Nazi death camps. We have already sketched his experiences there, and we can easily see that under the desperate conditions of these camps, both creative and experiential values would have been largely impossible to fulfill. Frankl observed that under these conditions only those survived who were able, like himself, to maintain the attitude of unconditional faith In the unconditional meaning of all human life In even the most hopeless circumstances. The way in which one faces his fate, the attitude he takes toward It, Is often the determining factor In survival. Because Frankl had a faith that there Is a meaning In human life that transcends all conditions, he was able to go on where many others, who might have made It had they possessed such a faith, gave up. Few of us are called on to face such desperate conditions in life. But there are some circumstances that may unexpectedly Occur and leave us little chance to fulfill creative or experiential values. Here our attitudinal values offer the only hope of meaning and purpose In life. For example, suppose your doctor told you that you had cancer, that It had metastasized (which means that the malignant cells have spread throughout the body, and that surgery Is hopeless ), and that you had only a few weeks at most to live. Now, you might find In your remaining days fulfillment of some Important creative and experiential values. But most likely you would find that this news had caught you short, that you were not prepared to use this final time creatively, and that the anxiety over the approaching end of life would diminish any experiential values you might seek to fulfill. Theoretically, according to existential philosophy, this might be a great opportunity to telescope a lot of the (p 241) most meaningful experience of your life into a short time. But in practice, without any external help, you probably wouldn't do this:

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You would probably become deeply depressed, as do most people who face this kind of situation. Then it would be a matter of whether you found, either through your own resources or through external help, a positive attitudinal value in the situation. The value is always there, and you always have the choice of whether to take a positive or a negative attitude. If you took the positive attitude, you would come out of the depression and use your remaining days constructively, and die in the faith that an unconditional meaning in all human life had enabled you to fulfill your own personal destiny. Or, if you took the negative attitude, you would remain depressed and in hopeless despair. In either case, you would die. But you would have had the choice of two ways to face death. The operation of attitudinal values under these conditions is well illustrated by one of Frankl's most famous cases, which he used as a teaching case at the University of Vienna Medical School, and which I have paraphrased below: * The patient was an eighty-year-old domestic, suffering from a metastasized terminal cancer. Because she knew this meant death she was deeply depressed. In demonstrating to his medical students the application of logotherapy, Frankl first made the patient question the meaning of her life on the conscious level, rather than repressing her doubts. Having never married, and being without a family or relatives, she felt extremely lonely and said that she had nothing to show for her life. She had had some meaningful experiences, some high points, but she felt that they were now all for naught. Patient: "I had a good life. . .but now it all ends . . . ." Frankl: "But can anyone undo the happiness you've had - can anyone erase it?" Patient: "No, Doctor, it's true that they cannot." Frankl: "Can anyone blot out the goodness. . . or the accomplishment . . . or what you have bravely and honestly suffered?" Patient: "No. . . and I have had so much to suffer, which I thought was God's punishment. . . ." Frankl: "But perhaps God wanted to see how you would stand it? Cannot suffering be also a challenge? Can anyone remove such an achievement and accomplishment from the world?" Patient: "No, it remains always." Frankl: "You have made the best of your suffering, and I congratulate you. Your fellow patients have been encouraged by the fact that in spite of your depression you have still been able to go on and they have seldom had an opportunity to witness such an example. (To the medical school class) Ecce homo! (The class burst into spontaneous applause. ) Your life is a monument which no one can remove from the world, and you can be justly proud." Patient: (Weeping) "What you have said, Dr. Frankl, is a consolation and comfort. I have never had a chance to hear anything like this." Frankl emphasized the fact that, in spite of her depression, she had faced her situation much more courageously than most of the others on the terminal ward, and that the attitude she would now take toward her death could have a deep meaning: It could be the fulfillment of her destiny through her influence on the others through the courage she could give them to face their own deaths. She saw the point and reacted favorably to this; she found the attitudinal value that enabled her to live her remaining days in pride and faith, without depression. She had found meaning even in unalterable suffering. When she died a week later, her last words were: "My life is a monument, so Professor Frankl said to the whole audience, my life was not in vain. . . ." Notice that there are three steps Frankl followed in this therapy: 1. He first made the patient face her real feeling of despair and hopelessness in the present situation. 2. He showed her that her life up to now had not been in vain she was more successful than she thought. She had accomplished things the world could not take from her. (p 243) 3. He showed her that her future life - even the remaining short few days - had a meaning and purpose in a job to be done: The way she faced the end, her attitude, would give courage and meaning to others. And thus it is with us all: Logotherapy teaches that in every circumstance we can find one or more of the three types of human values that give meaning and purpose to this circumstance and enable us to face life with courage and hope. This, in summary, is the logotherapy of Professor Viktor E. Frankl. It represents (1) a philosophy of life, (2) a theory of personality, and (3) a technique of treatment of emotional problems. Therefore, it touches many aspects of the human scene, and its concepts are important to philosophers, educators, clergymen, mental health specialists, and, most of all, to everyday people. Logoanalysis as explained in this book is simply a special application of logotherapy. (p 244)

CHAPTER 11: NOTES FROM THE QUEST FOR ULTIMATE MEANING: REUVEN P. BULKA. Philological Library. 1979:

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May and Frankl agree that psychotherapy is not value-free. In May's words, "values are presupposed at every point m the counseling process." Frankl says that "there can be no medical practice untouched by values or ethical assumptions. "Every school of psychotherapy has a concept of man, although this concept is not always held consciously." The philosophy of the therapist, conscious or unconscious, has great bearing on the direction therapy will take; whether it is toward release from tension or relief from an anxiety, or whether it is toward the fulfillment of the self or meaning in the world. For May, "our chief concern in therapy is with the potentially of the human being. The goal of therapy is to help the patient actualize his potentialities." Logotherapy, m Frankl's view, is geared to "helping others to see meaning in life." Is there any distinction between helping the patient "actualize his potentialities" and helping others "to see meaning in life?" In terms of end goals, May and Frankl probably are similar. They differ, however, on how best to achieve these goals. Superficially, the difference between the two is implicit in the titles of books they wrote. May's is titled Man's Search for Himself, Frankl's is titled Man's Search for Meaning. May and. Frankl walk similar paths, but they part company at a precise fork m the road. Philosophically, the world-views of May and Frankl orient around the notion of freedom. For Frankl, freedom is the first fundamental assumption of logotherapy. In clinical terms, "the progress of therapy can be measured in terms of the progress of 'consciousness of freedom.'" According to May, the patient at the beginning of therapy presents a (p 6) picture of one who lacks freedom. The patient speaks of being driven, of being unable to know or choose, and thus unable to experience authentically. It is necessary to increase the patient's capacity to realize the extent to which he or she can be aware and can move in the world; or, in a word, to experience freedom. Freedom, for May and Frankl, is not anarchy or arbitrariness. Freedom can never be separated from responsibility. And, freedom "Must be interpreted in terms of responsibleness." May and Frankl take almost identical approaches to the free will vs. determinism problem. For May "the patient moves toward freedom and responsibility in his living as he becomes more conscious of the deterministic experiences in his life. . . . Freedom is thus not the opposite to determinism." Frankl sees deterministic forces not only as enlarging the scope of freedom, but as a basic requisite for free will. "Freedom without destiny is impossible; freedom can only be freedom in the face of a destiny, a free stand toward destiny. Certainly man is free, but he is not floating freely in airless space. He is always surrounded by a host of restrictions. These restrictions, however, are the jumping-off points for his freedom. Freedom presupposes restrictions, is contingent upon restrictions." According to May, freedom requires the ability to accept, bear, and live with anxiety. To run away from normal anxiety is to surrender one's freedom. The flight from anxiety capitulates to the anxiety, and impedes the individual's ability to move in the world. Instead of the individual having the anxiety, the anxiety has the individual. May's notion has its counterpart in the logotherapeutic view of suffering. (p 7) In Frankl's words, "there is a suffering beyond all sickness, a fundamental human suffering which belongs to human life by the very nature and meaning of life." Frankl calls this type of suffering, which emanates from a frustration of man's quest for meaning, a human achievement, a "positive achievement in the highest sense of the term." The human being who has normal anxiety, who suffers the self into a better person, exhibits a truly human phenomenon. May and Frankl agree that administering drugs to alleviate this anxiety or suffering tranquilizes away the individual's capacity to grow. May and Frankl perceive freedom as a potential to be actualized, rather than something which just is. Freedom is seen as a dynamic concept, as a "freedom toward" as opposed to the static concept of freedom as "freedom from." In the same sense, anxiety is viewed as "anxiety toward" rather than "anxiety from," suffering is "suffering toward" instead of "suffering from. " Though there are several obvious similarities, it should be clear that the concepts of freedom in May and Frankl are not identical. For May, freedom seems to orient around the patient's confrontation with the self, around the concept of awareness in its distinctively human form, consciousness. May's system emphasizes the meaning of an individual's guilt for the individual. "Our discussion of freedom indicates, however, that we should not as therapists and counselors transfer our guilt and our value judgments to the counselee and patient, but endeavor to help him bring out and confront his guilt and its implications and meaning for him." For Frankl, freedom links to the present and future. The patient is awakened to the freedom which inheres in everyone to take a stand toward instinct, heredity, environment, and suffering. (p 8) The individual is shown the possibilities of transcending the present dilemma or predicament through taking a positive, optimistic, and in some cases humorous attitude to the situation or condition. In other instances, the sense of frustration from lack of meaning, the emptiness which Frankl terms the "existential vacuum," is countered through encouraging the patient to focus on the meanings and values waiting to be actualized out there in the world. Logotherapy is a future oriented philosophy which focuses on the value world and does not try to look into the past or dig into the self. The patient is linked with values rather than with the self. May and Frankl walk similar paths, but they part company on the issue of self-fulfillment. May focuses on awareness, on consciousness, on the finding of. one's self. May s ideal society is one which gives the maximum opportunity for each individual to realize the self. His ethics are, in effect, an ethics of inwardness. May asserts: An ethical act, then, must be an action chosen. and affirmed by the person doing it, an act which in an expression of his inward motives and attitude. . It is honest and genuine in that it would be affirmed In his dreams as well as his waking states. . . . one has endeavored to act as nearly as possible from the "center" of himself." In contrast, Frankl speaks of the objective world of meaning and values. Frankl rejects the valuation which is a "mirroring of processes

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which go on in the individual in an impersonal way or merely as projections and expressions of the inner structure of the subject. . . . We have to take into account the objectivity of the world which alone presents a real challenge to the subject. (p 9) According to Frankl, meaning is not invented, it is detected. He states quite clearly that by "objective values" he means that these values "are necessarily more than a mere self-expression of the subject himself." They stem, in Frankl's words, from a sphere beyond man and exist independent of the person. Philosophically, "objective values" seems to imply a revealed set of values, but Frankl uses the term "objective" to indicate that values exist, unconditionally, and that no person could ever be deprived of the possibility for actualizing values. The notion of "objective values," in the logo therapeutic view, is a clinical necessity. For Frankl, cognition is founded on a polar tension between the objective value world and the subjective world of the person.25 This dynamic process he calls "noodynamic." In regard to the matter of self-actualization, Frankl claims: "The true meaning of life is to be found in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. By the same token, the real aim of human existence cannot be found in what is called self-actualization. Human existence is essentially self-transcendence rather than selfactualization. Self-actualization is not a possible aim at all, for the simple reason that the more a man would strive for it, the more he would miss it. For only to the extent to which man commits himself to the fulfillment of his life's meaning, to this extent he also actualizes himself. In other words, self-actualization cannot be attained if it is made an end in itself, but only as a side-effect of self- transcendence." Self-actualization is not negated by Frankl. He claims that the best way to achieve it is through orienting around the objective value world. In practical terms, intending self-fulfillment is self-defeating. The objective value world is the best means of achieving this fulfillment. One must be careful to actualize the values for their own sake, and not for (p 10) the gain it may bring, for this reduces values to a tool and technique. Frankl thus radically rejects subjective self-express ion. The notion of an objective value world around which the person orients is a vital philosophical and clinical notion in logotherapy. Philosophically, there can be no situation in which the finite individual could complete the infinite, objective tasks of life. The human being is in a perpetual process of becoming, by definition. If value-saturation were possible, it would suspend meaning and deny the person the opportunity for human achievement. Clinically, this means there is no situation in life which must be relegated to meaninglessness. The possibility of realizing meaning is a basic fact of human existence. Even if creativity and the experience of life are closed off, the possibility of value realization remains. "But even a man who finds himself in the greatest distress, in which neither activity nor creativity can bring values to life, nor experience give meaning to it-even such a man can still give his life a meaning by the way he faces his fate, his distress. By taking his I unavoidable suffering upon himself he may yet realize values. Thus, life has a meaning to the last breath. For the possibility of realizing values by the very attitude with which we face our unchangeable suffering-this possibility exists to the very last moment." Values are objective and meaning is unconditional as well as realizable at all times. The logotherapist who treats someone suffering from existential despair will open up to the patient the infinite value world. (p 11) What is a paradox? It may be described as a proposition which is seemingly self-contradictory or absurd, but in realty expresses a possible truth. It is absurd to think that a suicidal reaction can be a saving one, or that going along with the direction of a skid instead of fighting it is the rescue mechanism. These are paradoxes, and they are by no means the only examples of paradoxical intention. Paradoxical intention is a term corned by Viktor E. Frankl the father of logotherapy, to describe an ingenious techniques used by logotherapist and intuitive common-sense therapists in clinical and extra-chemical situations. Logotherapy is generally referred to as the third Viennese school of psychotherapy, following the Freudian and Adlerian schools. Logotherapy is recognized as belonging, at once to the humanistic and existential streams of psychology: It has developed specific clinical techniques, unlike other existential modes of psychotherapy. Paradoxical intention (PI) is one of them. Let us now follow Frankl's own description which he gives in his paper titled "Paradoxical Intention and De-reflection," and enlarged upon ill his book The Unheard Cry for Meaning. A given symptom evokes a fearful expectation that the symptom might recur. Fear often carries with it a prophetic quality, in that the individual is likely to bring to realization the very object of fear. Anticipatory anxiety is likely to trigger precisely what the person fears. This sets off a vicious circle syndrome; the symptom evokes a phobia, (p 22) the phobia induces the symptom, and the recurring symptom reinforces the phobia. A feedback mechanism is established and the patient is caught in a cocoon. In cases of obsessive-compulsive neurosis, the patient fights against obsessions and compulsions, as opposed to phobias, which are characterized as flight from fear. In the case of the obsessive-compulsive, the fight strengthens the obsessions. Again, the patient is locked into a vicious circle of pressure inducing counterpressure, and counterpressure increasing the primary pressure. It is the therapist's task to break the vicious circle. In PI, the phobic patient is encouraged to do that which is feared, and the obsessive compulsive is urged to wish the very thing which is feared. The therapy is very clear and direct. A claustrophobic patient whose fear extended to flying, going in elevators, trains, buses, theaters, restaurants, any confined space, who feared, in fact, that she would choke or die, was told not to run away from the phobic situations. (There were precious few places left to run to, anyway.) Instead, she was to try to suffocate and die right on the spot, and to exaggerate her physical symptoms. Soon she was able to negotiate all these confined places, and to remain free of her previous symptoms. The case of this patient was a phobia. The patient was urged to do that which was feared, to seek out the confining places, to meet the phobia head-on rather than fleeing from it. In obsessive-compulsive situations, the patient is encouraged to wish what is feared. A patient with a washing compulsion so severe that it was necessary to start toileting at four in the morning in order to make a noon appointment was told and taught to wish that everything would be as dirty as possible. Gradually, the washing and dressing time was reduced until after a month's treatment in hospital the patient was able to resume regular professional duties. So far, Frankl's report. (p 23) PI can work instantly, but at times it takes more than a session or two to put the patient on the right track. Generally, acute cases of anxiety and obsessional neurosis respond within 4-12 sessions. Patients with disorders of several years duration will normally be cured with in a year. Much depends, of course, on the therapist and the patient. There is, for instance, the story of a museum guard who could not remain on the job for fear that someone would steal a valuable painting. He was advised, "Tell yourself they stole a Rembrandt yesterday and today they will steal a Rembrandt and a Van Gogh." The guard exclaimed, "But that is against the law!" PI did not. work In

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this instance and there are other instances In which it does not work. In psychotherapy there are no panaceas and, as Frankl says, his logotherapy is no exception to this rule, but PI is very successful. A success rate of about 90% was reported by Dr. Hans O. Gerz, one of the foremost practitioners of PI as Clinical Director of the Connecticut Valley Hospital. Often it succeeds where long-term psychotherapy failed. As with behavior therapy, skeptics conjectured that symptom substitution would occur with PI. In 1972 Solyom et al. conducted experiments to investigate the efficacy of PI. They chose two symptoms of equal .importance and frequency to the patients, and had the patient apply PI to one leaving the other symptom as the control. In a relatively short time span ( 6 weeks) , there was a 50% improvement in the target thoughts, and no new obsessive thought replaced the eliminated obsession. As Joseph. Fabry,. a leading thinker in logotherapy, once put it, using William Menninger's observation, it is not absolutely necessary to know the cause of the fire in order to extinguish it. Recently, L. Michael Ascher has come up with a controlled experimental validation of the cinical effectiveness of PI. Some of his findings are reported In the first Issue of The International Forum for Logotherapy. (p 24) PI is particularly useful as a self-help technique. Part of the reason why a therapist need not take so long when using PI is that once the patient picks up the knack, the rest is downhill. If often takes much encouragement and reassurance, but once the patient has amalgamated PI unto the self, it can be used by the patient almost independently. For the general population, PI is a useful approach for a suddenly appearing symptom. Sometimes, PI is used without the user being aware it is PI. Sparky Anderson, the successful manager of the two-time World Champion Cincinnati Reds and their Big Red Machine, used PI prior to the fifth game of the exciting 1975 World Series with the Boston Red Sox. His target was Tony Perez, a major cog in the big red machine who had gone hitless in the four previous games. "Doggie," said Anderson to Perez, "do yourself a favor and don't get a hit for the rest of the World Series. You know those little boys of yours, Victor and Eduardo. If you don't get a hit, they can tell their kids someday grandpa set a World Series record that nobody else ever touched. Whatd'ya say?" It is a matter of record that in the fifth game of the 1975 World Series, subsequent to Anderson's PI, Perez hit two home runs and batted in four runs, enabling Cincinnati to win, 6-2! But PI is still not a panacea. PI is useful for everyday situations we sometime take as normal. A speaker about to address a gathering is nervous, legs fidgeting, mouth jittery. The natural inclination is to fight the nervousness. Next time you or a friend are confronted with such a situation, take the reverse approach. Say to yourself, and mean it-they have had speakers before, who have surely been nervous. But if they think they have seen nervousness, wait till they see me. I will knock my knees together so loudly the noise will be deafening. My mouth will be so jittery I will say at least 5 "uhs" for every intelligent word! The PI motto would be-if you cannot beat the symptom, join it. (p 25) The three basic assumptions upon which logotherapy is founded are (1) freedom of will. (2) will to meaning, and (3) meaning of life. Freedom of Will - Humans are always free to act according to their volition. It is acknowledged that certain factors in and around us are determining influences, but these determinants only prescribe boundaries, or what may be termed destiny. Within the circumscribed destiny that is shaped by instinct, heredity, and environment, we are forever free to take a stand for or against conditions, mainly through our attitude toward them. Whether we use our cunning to become a thief or a lawyer, or our just to spill blood to become a surgeon or a murderer, are attitudinal decisions which can be made in the freedom of our situation. "Man ultimately decides for himself!" Will to Meaning - We will to meaning rather than to pleasure or power. As deciding beings, we will our actions, rather than are driven by an inner force or urge. Existential persons are concerned with meanings as opposed to pleasure and power. Seeking pleasure as an ultimate goal is self-defeating, for the more one strives for pleasure, the more pleasure will exclude one. The futility of this approach is most obvious in the sexual neuroses that develop out of one's focusing on the pleasure aspect of the sex act, instead of concentrating on the meaning aspect of fulfilling one's partner . As for power, experience shows that power is only a means for the more important task of meaningful accomplishment. Those who lust for power for powers' sake are usually denied It. The primary thrust of one's endeavor is towards finding a meaning in life, with pleasure a natural result of meaningful fulfillment, and power a means to meaning. Meaning of Life - There is an objective value world a world filled with meaning. This meaning is beyond us in our subjective situation and exists outside and independent of us. This is the concept upon which is built the notion of the unconditional meaningfulness of life, in spite of all conditions (p 36) and in all situations, including suffering and death. If meaning were subjective, it would be dependent on subjective judgment, thus possibly suspending the meaningfulness of a situation and destroying the unconditional meaningfulness of each moment. The meaning, as objective, is thus outside of us. To actualize meaning, we must reach beyond ourselves, transcend ourselves into the meaning dimension. Only when we focus beyond ourselves do we achieve the meaning which in the process provides automatic, albeit tangential, self-fulfillment. There is thus a constant tension between the subjective "I am" and the objective "I ought," with the values of the cosmos eliciting from persons a transcending response urging a meaningful expression.9 To be sure, there are times when one might be frustrated by what one feels is the meaninglessness of one's situation. Frankl's notion of objective meaning merely asserts that "a" meaning is there to be detected. The conviction that every situation has its own unique meaning is the first premise of logotherapy, the underlining statement upon which logotherapy is built. Our inability to find the meaning does not negate the existence of a meaning, and part of the task of the logotherapist in a situation of existential despair is to help the patient discover meaning. Beyond this, having ostensibly discovered the meaning, one never really knows if the meaning one has discovered is the meaning that is meant. Frankl often quotes Allport's assertion that one can at the same time be half-sure and wholehearted. One thus continually strives for an elusive, objective, quasi-mystical meaning, never knowing if one has reached it. Frank] speaks of three types of values: ( 1) creative values, or what one gives to the world in terms of one's own positive contributions; (2) experiential values, or what one takes from life in terms of one's experience; and (3) attitudinal values, or the stand one takes toward an unchangeable aspect of one's existence. Frankl does not feel obliged to answer such questions as what is the source of the objective values. (p 38) The notion of freedom of will asserts that the human being is free to search for and find meaning, at all times and (p 47) in all circumstances. Instinct, heredity, and environment are factors which shape human destiny, but do not dictate it. "The person has instincts but instincts do not have the person." They are part of the shaping process, the restrictions within which human choice is reasonable and possible.

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Frankl argues quite forcefully that freedom without destiny is impossible; "freedom can only be freedom in the face of a destiny, a free stand toward destiny. Certainly man is free, but he is not floating freely in airless space. He is always surrounded by a host of restrictions. These restrictions, however, are the jumping-off points for his freedom. Freedom presupposes restrictions, is contingent upon restrictions." Logotherapy here very subtly introduces a dialectic approach in which the problem itself is seen as the solution. It all depends on the human attitude to specific situations. Even regarding restrictions the person remains free to decide what attitude to take to these restrictions. In "self-detachment" one is able to accept or reject. The spiritual aspect of attitude, or human choice, is the key factor. Free will, to be sure, is, ill Frankl's view, merely a potential. Human beings who do not exercise free will indeed do not have it, but the potential to use it is always there. "Freedom is not freedom from conditions," says Frankl, "instead, it is freedom to take a stand toward whatever conditions may confront us." This leads to the second essential notion the will to meaning, which may be seen as the mediating principle between the human being, the "subject," and the world of values the "object." The individual who is free and exercises humanness wills toward meaning. The human being is not driven toward meaning, else this entire process would be devoid of choice (p 48) and lacking true spiritual content. The will to meaning is a spiritual act, again spiritual in Frankl's sense of the term. Pleasure, Frankl claims, is not the prime goal of the human being because as such it is self-defeating and elusive. He illustrates this with the correlation between sexual neuroses, even impotence, and the "hyper-intention" on the pleasure in sex instead of the human aspect of fulfilling the other . Clinically, logotherapy would suggest an approach which dereflects from pleasure and orients toward "dedication to a cause greater than oneself or to a person other than oneself," as Frankl recently put it in a lecture. It is immediately apparent that logotherapy does not moralize. There seems to be a two-way-street between the world of philosophy and the world of the clinic, in which clinical experience gives birth to a philosophical notion which is reinforced by its clinical efficacy. The concept of pleasure is a prime example of how logo therapy relates the spheres of philosophy and psychology. Power, as Frankl asserts, is not an end in itself, it is rather a means for fulfillment, again validated by the self-defeating nature of the power which is sought. Even self-realization is not an end in itself; it is rather aside effect of "self-transcendence," to introduce this logotherapeutic concept. In striving for values and meaning, the actualization comes on its own, as a tangential side-effect. In other words, in Frankl's own words, "like pleasure, also 'self-realization' cannot be pursued, it must ensue." The frustration of the will to meaning leads to what Frankl calls "existential frustration," and having no meaning leads to the "existential vacuum" and the development of "noogenic neuroses." The emptiness that becomes readily apparent the first Sunday after the football season is over or in situations of unemployment are prime examples of this neurosis. Indeed, there exist "Sunday neuroses" and "unemployment neuroses." Added to this, James C. Crumbaugh's Purpose-in-Life test which measures individual sense of purpose shows a definite relationship between low P-I-L scores and drug involvement, (p 49) alcoholism, and criminality. Lacking meaning and purpose, one is likely to seek artificial or aberrant thrills. If the individual wills towards meaning, then there must be a meaning of life, which is the third essential notion in logotherapy. There is, according to logotherapy, an unconditional meaningfulness of life in any and all circumstances. Meaning is realized through values and it bridges the gap between the subjective "1 am" and objective "1 ought." In freedom, the human being chooses and wills to actualize the objective meaning. By objective is meant the proposition that meaning is not human invention, but a matter of discovery, or, as Frankl is used to saying, "meaning cannot be given, but must be found, and it has to be found by oneself." According to logo therapeutic teachings, there are creative values, or "what one gives to the world," experiential values, or "what one takes from the world" in terms of experience, and attitudinal values, or "the attitude one takes" to a specific predicament or unchangeable fate. Value realization can never be suspended, else the essential dynamics which are necessary for human beings to exercise their humanness would, at some point in time, be cut off from human experience. The values therefore cannot be subjective, rather they must be objective and independent of any subjective state. Values and meaning are often used interchangeably. Values are "meaning universals"; that is to say, "the unique meaning of today is the universal value of tomorrow." If I values are out there in the world, then it is the obligation of the individual to respond to the demand implied in the existence of value. In the spiritual condition of the individual, it is life which confronts and demands value realization. One is not to ask what life can give, instead one is obliged to ask what can be given to life. (p 50) "Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life. To life he can only respond by being responsible." Again, this is a philosophical notion validated by the clinical and meta-clinical evidence which indicates that those who commit themselves to life, do not ask life to give them anything in particular and instead give to life meaning and value, find that life relates positively to them and brings them the benefits of fulfillment. The human approach is extended to various life situations, with special emphasis on suffering, death, love, and work. (p 51) A key technique introduced by Frankl as early as in 1939 is paradoxical intention, which also emanates from the "self-detachment" capacity of the human being. Paradoxical intention may be used to correct anything from hiccups to insomnia. It concerns itself with the obsessive compulsive patient, who fights against obsessions and compulsive patient, who flees from fear. In paradoxical intention, the phobic patient is encouraged to do that which is feared, and the obsessive compulsive is urged to wish the very thing which is feared. A claustrophobic patient who (p 54) fears flying, elevators, trains, and buses, and fears choking might result, is told to try to suffocate and die right on the spot. The obsessive compulsive with a washing compulsion is taught to wish that everything be as dirty as possible. The human ability to laugh at one's predicament is mobilized in paradoxical intention. The other logo therapeutic technique, "dereflection," is used, as has been previously mentioned, in cases of sexual neurosis. The insomniac, too, can use dereflection, by reflecting away from sleep toward another activity such as counting sheep or reading a book. Human choice, attitude, and control are key elements in this approach. (p 55) Id, Ego, and Superego are familiar terms to any student of the behavioral sciences. Besides being psychological construct, they also relate quite pointedly to the developmental aspects of Viennese psychotherapy. The first Viennese school of psychotherapy is, of course, Freudian psychoanalysis, which, in Freud's own words, relates to the basement of the edifice. The second Viennese school is that of Alfred Adler and the third Viennese school of psychotherapy is Viktor Frankl's logotherapy. Freud and the Id, Adler and the Ego, Frankl and the Superego--these seem to suggest, on a superficial level at least, an evolutionary pattern in the Viennese circle.

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In Frankl's words, Freud's system may be broadly characterized as emphasizing the will to pleasure, Adler's the will to power, and logotherapy the will to meaning. Logotherapy, as the third Viennese school, does not reject the contributions of Freud and Adler, but rather sees itself as the dwarf standing on the shoulders of the giant, who is therefore able to see even further. Logotherapy takes the human being as is, without reducing human behavior to id or ego expressions. Instead, logo therapy is a system which asserts that the primary motivational force in the human being is the striving to find meaning in life. Logotherapy is a clinical approach which tackles problems of dis-ease, existential despair, "noogenic neuroses" and even certain forms of depression, by opening up the world of meaning for the patient Logotherapy's clinical approach is based on a distinct philosophical attitude and approach to the human being. (p 63) In a word, Frankl admits the existence, even the necessity, of horizontal restrictions, but denies the existence of vertical restrictions. Man is conceived as having positive vertical vector, to be impeded by horizontal factors only as much as he allows. Freedom, for Frankl, demands no special proof. It belongs "to the immediate data of his experience." Freud once said: "Try and subject a number of very strongly differentiated human beings to the same amount of starvation. With the increase of the imperative need for food, all individual differences will be blotted out, and, in their place, we shall see the uniform expression of the one unsatisfied instinct." The concentration camps, in Frankl's view, proved Freud wrong. The camps proved that man cannot be reduced to a function of heredity and environment, for at the same time that some inmates of the camp degenerated into the innate camp bestiality, others exhibited the virtues of saintliness. A third variable, found only in the spiritual animal, man, is the decisive factor in human behavior, choice or decision. "Man ultimately decides for himself." The experiences of the concentration camps as proof of man's free will demand further explanation. Is not the skeptic likely to claim that those who behaved as bestially as their environment were compelled by conditions? As for the exceptions who attained saintly status, perhaps they possessed saintly instincts. Why derive from the few that man is free when the actions of the many indicate he is not? The response to this is that freedom of the will in Frankl's view, is not a necessary component of behavior, but a potential to be realized; (p 88) "For in every case man retains the freedom and the possibility of deciding for or against the influence of his surroundings. Although he may seldom exert this freedom or utilize this opportunity to choose-it is open to him to do so." Man will be shaped by his environment as long as he does not pause and confront himself with life. Man becomes free the moment he detaches his self from himself and analyzes the meaning of his life vis-a-vis where life is carrying him, or the moment he becomes human. The prisoner of biology, sociology, or psychology is ultimately the man who has allowed these forces, by his passivity, to impede his humaneness. The notion of free will as developed by logotherapy invites some interesting comparisons. Because logo therapy is conceived as a secular discipline, the problem of free will vs. Providence is extraneous to the logotherapeutic framework. The theological ingredient in Judaic free will is lacking in logotherapy, so that any comparison must make dimensional adjustments. Sforno, commenting on the words ". . . He formed him in the likeness of God," explains this as meaning man is master of choice. Free will is here seen as a Divine ingredient in man. The ultimate resolution of the free will vs. Providence problem appears to be a matter of faith. The Talmudic recognition of this problem comes in the form of a succinct statement stating the problem whilst at the same time using the problem as the solution. "Everything is foreseen but the right ( of choice) is granted." The solution is the problem itself. All is foreseen, but not in a causative manner. God's foreknowledge and man's free will are not mutually exclusive. There is no attempt in this statement to solve the dilemma. Rather, it tends toward the idea that faith in God as the all powerful and all-knowing Creator is what gives life purpose, what gives man faith in his own existence. Having faith in meaningful existence and in purposeful creation are (p 89) inseparable concepts, and, as faith, have value in spite of seeming incomprehensibility. Without free will, however, life itself loses meaning, so that meaningfulness, and faith in same, are predicated on free will. Logotherapy too, which postulates the notion of the unconditional meaningfulness of human existence, has as its first philosophical principle the existence of free will. The Franklian notion of freedom as dependent on destiny is a striking parallel to the Talmudic statement "everything is in the hand of heaven except the fear of heaven." Rashi, in elaborating, explains that whether a man is tall or short, poor or rich, wise or stupid, depends on pre-destination; the only choice left for man is whether he will be righteous or wicked. As the logotherapist would interpret it, man's environment, his social condition, his biological makeup, are of necessity predetermined, but the attitude of man to his condition remains untouched by determinism. His social condition may prevent him from attaining certain vocational objectives, his biological makeup may restrict his social development, but no factor impedes man in his quest to realize meaning in his life situation. Frankl's reference to the twins with cunning, one of whom became a lawyer, the other a criminal, has its parallel in the following Talmudic passage; "He who is born under Mars will be a shedder of blood. R. Ashi observed: Either a surgeon, a thief, a slaughterer, or a circumciser." The mazzal man is born under, his destiny, is not a negation of the idea of free will. According to logotherapy, man's freedom can only be understood in the face of some destiny. (p 90) REELECTIONS ON PAST AND FUTURE: The two words characteristic of the most prevalent human moods are hope and despair. Hope, an optimistic frame of mind, is generally associated with the future; despair by contradistinction is a sense of futurelessness, either because of the feeling of emptiness that no future can rectify, or because of the inevitableness of death. Existentialism, focusing on the here-and-now of woes and predicaments, has popularized numerous pessimistic terms, such as dread, sickness unto death, nausea, anxiety, crisis, etc. Although identified with existentialism, logotherapy, the analytical method developed by Viktor E. Frankl, is unique in its optimistic approach to life. Logotherapy is future oriented. It emphasizes hope and meaning rather than despair . It accentuates the positive of future promise and not past failure. Judaism, too, is future-oriented. It knows that while humans are finite and imperfect, and therefore liable to err and sin, we are also capable of self-perfection to a certain degree. Judaism does not explain sinfulness as a "spur of the moment reaction," "haphazard occurrence," or an act caused by "temporary insanity." Indeed, the Talmud asserts that "a person does not sin unless a spirit of folly (shetut) enters into him," but this is not intended to condone misbehavior or punishment. Rather this talmudic statement is expressive of Judaism's optimism. If one sins, it is because some foreign ingredient-a spirit of folly-has taken possession of him. As Judaism sees it, if transgressors want to mend their ways, they need only divest themselves of "the spirit of folly" and return to their selfhood.

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One of the Hebrew terms for sin is averah, derived from a root meaning "to pass" and linked to "the past." It is not overindulgence in homiletics to equate the Jewish concept of wrongdoing with the past; that is, sin, after being committed, (p 105) is a thing of the past which need not determine the future. Judaism rejects the notion that sin constitutes an eternal burden of guilt, that one's future is doomed because of the past. Repentance (teshuvah) can erase the past if implemented by good deeds in the future. This conviction is expressed as follows: "If you see a scholar who has committed an offense by night, do not cavil at him by day, for perhaps he has done penance. 'Perhaps,' say you?-Nay, rather, he has certainly done penance. Even if we have witnessed wrongdoing, we should assume that the wrong has been righted and that, as a result, the past has been deprived of power. We can always mend our ways: "Even if one has been completely wicked all his life but repents at the end, he is not reproached for his wickedness. I have heard many, almost hostile, reactions to this talmudic passage. It is not right, it is argued, that a rascal should get away with last minute repentance. But the Sages referred to sincere repentance. The Sages refused to concede that the human situation is ever hopeless. Retrievement is always possible. There is no hopeless situation. Viktor Frankl sets the same optimistic tone in logotherapy. He stresses that the endeavor to find meaning in life is the primary human motivation. Frankl insists there is always meaning in life - to the very end. He does not acknowledge the inheritableness of the consequences of inherited disposition or environmental coercion. He emphasizes the human ability to exercise free choice despite circumstances, and asserts that we can surmount any and every situation. As (p 106) proof he cites the many, including himself, who retained hope and trust in meaning in the Nazi death camps. Logotherapy focuses on the future, both in the clinical and meta-clinical situations. In Frankl's words: "But man cannot really exist without a fixed point in the future. Under normal conditions his entire present is shaped around that future point, directed toward it like iron filings toward the pole of a magnet." In the Nazi concentration camp, Frankl tried to alleviate the despair of fellow-sufferer by finding some task in the future that called upon their inner resources. He challenged those who despaired to struggle and survive in order to fulfill that future task. Frankl never lost faith and hope, and he instilled that faith and hope in some of his fellow prisoners. Logotherapy asserts that man can bear suffering if he can see beyond it, however remotely, into the future. This insight is based on Frankl's own experience. But there are situations when finding a meaning seems futile. But even then, Frankl writes, "A human being, by the attitude he chooses, is capable of finding and fulfilling meaning in even a hopeless situation." The faith in the unconditional meaningfulness of life enables one to elicit a positive response in all situations. Thus, a nurse suffering from a terminal illness was told that her attitude to pain would go a long way in helping the many patients in her care. This give her a meaning in suffering. Facing death is the main challenge to the meaning-orientation of logotherapy. It is the sorrow and agony of the person who is facing his end, as well as of those who suffer a tragic loss. In trying to meet this challenge, logotherapy is compatible, if not consistent, with Jewish thought. "Actually, the only transitory aspects of life are the potentialities; as soon as we have succeeded in actualizing a potentiality, we have transmuted it into an actuality and, thus, salvaged and rescued it into the past. Once an actuality, it is one forever. Everything in the past is (p 107) saved from being transitory. Therein it is irrevocably stored rather than irrecoverably lost. Having been is still a form of being, perhaps even its most secure form. Frankl therefore concludes: "This leads to the paradox that man's past is his true future. The dying man has no future, only a past. But the dead 'is' his past. He has no life, he is his life. That !t is his past life does not matter; we know that the past IS the safest form of existenceit cannot be taken away." There is a parallel to this approach in a Midrashic exegesis of and the day of death (is better) than the day of one's birth. As what can this be compared? To two ships laden with merchandise sailing the ocean, one coming in and the other going out, and the people praised the one coming in. Some people stood there and wondered: 'Why are you praising this one and not the other?' They replied to them: 'We are praising the ship that came in, because we know that she went out in peace and has returned in peace. As to the one now going out, we do not know what her fate will be.' Thus when a man is born we do not know what the nature of his deeds will be, but when he departs this world, we already know of what nature his deeds are. Here, as in Frankl's thought, there is a balanced attitude to the future: While both Judaism and logo therapy concern themselves with the manifold possibilities of the future, they do not become obsessed with it. After all, is not every future moment destined to become part of the past? Past accomplishments are always better than future possibilities. On this logotherapy and Judaism are agreed. Logotherapy extends its affirmative attitude also to aging. Our culture s glorification of youth has induced fear of aging and envy of the young. Frankl writes: (p 108) "Even in advanced years one should not envy a young person. Why should one? For the possibilities a young person has or for his future? No, I should say that, instead of possibilities in the future, the older person has realities in the pastwork done, love loved, and suffering suffered." Logotherapy insists, as Judaism does, that even in the twilight of life man should not stop working and being active. The inability to do one's best in later years need not deter a person from trying. Here, too, the delicate balance between future promise and past accomplishment must be maintained. In his positive attitude to the past, Frankl also points to solace for the individual who has experienced a tragic loss. "Imagine what consolation the logotherapeutic attitude to the past would bring to a war widow who has only experienced, say, two weeks of marital bliss. She would feel that this experience can never be taken from her. It will remain her inviolable treasure, preserved and delivered into her past. Her life can never become meaningless even if she might remain childless." Indeed, memory is transient. Frankl properly asks who will keep the memory alive after the widow dies. He thinks that an appropriate response is the following: "To this one may answer, it is irrelevant whether anyone remembers or not; just as it is irrelevant whether we look at something, or think about something, that still exists and is with us. For it exists regardless of whether we look at it or think about it. While it is true that we can't take anything with us when we die, the totality of our life, which we have lived to completion and death, remains outside the grave, and outside the grave it remains. And it remains not although, but because, it has slipped into the past and has been preserved there." (p 109) The concept of a deed remaining in the world raises questions about the meaning of existence proper. Frankl comments: "Now it is my contention that man really could not move a limb unless deep down to the foundations of existence, and out of the depths of being, he is imbued by a basic trust in the ultimate meaning. Without it he would have to stop breathing. This ultimate meaning necessarily exceeds

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and surpasses the finite intellectual capacities of man; in logotherapy, we speak in this context of a supra-meaning." Frankl takes the daring step of suggesting that this world may not be the ultimate reality. "For all that man may occupy an exceptional position, for all that he may be unusually receptive to the world, and that the world itself may be his environment-still, who can say that beyond this world a superworld does not exist? Just as the animal can scarcely reach out of his environment to understand the superior world of man, so perhaps man can scarcely ever grasp the superworld, though he can reach out toward it in religion or perhaps encounter it in revelation." Logotherapy has a perspective of time totally differing from the time concepts of philosophy and psychology . The future is potential fulfillment and, moreover, it is extended beyond existence as we know it. Frankl has an elastic approach to time, which extends the future into the past as well as into a supra-world. The broad ramifications of logotherapy's meaning-orientation encompass all of life from past reality to all future possibilities. (p 110) LOGOTHERAPY AND THE TALMUD ON SUFFERING: CLINICAL AND META-CLINICAL PERSPECTIVES: Logotherapy, the unique school of psychotherapy fathered by Dr. Viktor E. Frankl, is a system of life which focuses on the meaning of human existence, the objective reality of meaning, and how the person relates to meaning by searching for it. Logotherapy asserts that "the striving to find a meaning in one's life is the primary motivational force in man." No one escapes suffering of one form or another. In one Talmudic view, even reaching into the pocket for three coins and only taking out two is considered a Divine visitation of suffering. There are different levels and intensities of suffering, but they usually involve despair, and sometimes even the questioning of life's meaningfulness. Life's meaningfulness cannot be divorced from suffering, even from the meaning of suffering. According to Frankl: "If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete." Without an adequate approach to the meaning of suffering, logotherapy itself cannot be complete. Logotherapy posits the notion of the unconditional meaningfulness of life, in any and all circumstances, and must come to grips with the problem of suffering. No one is more aware of this than Frankl himself. Frankl, in his writings, speaks of three types of suffering. They are (1) the suffering associated with an unchangeable fate, such as an inoperable cancer; (2) the suffering which (p 125) comes as a result of an emotionally painful experience, such as the loss of a loved one; and ( 3) the suffering which arises out of. the existential vacuum in one's life, through the frustration of one's attempt to find meaning in life. Frankl's concept of suffering is consistent with his concept of the person.. The human being is one who strives to find meaning in life by actualizing values, be they creative, experiential, or attitudinal. Life is that form of existence which affords the, person the opportunity to realize values and actualize one=s essence. The person's human vector receives its force and direction from the meaning of life. If any point in life lacked meaning, it would interrupt the human vector and suspend the dynamics of life. Frankl firmly believes the meaning and dynamics of life are never suspended short of death. Thus, every situation in life has potential meaning In It, even the various experiences of suffering. Frankl writes: "But even a man who finds himself in the greatest distress, in which neither activity not creativity can bring values to life, nor experience give meaning to it-even such a man can still give his life a meaning by the way he faces his fate, his distress. By taking his unavoidable suffering upon himself he may yet realize values. Thus, life has a meaning to the last breath. For the possibility of realizing values by the very attitude with which we face our unchangeable suffering-this possibility exists to the very last moment. . . . The right kind of suffering -f acing your fate without flinching - is the highest achievement that has been granted to man." However, Frankl explicitly refers to "unavoidable" suffering; that is, a suffering whose cause cannot be erased, otherwise the suffering would be unnecessary , meaningless, (p 126) and possibly masochistic. Attention is focused on the despair inherent in the suffering, for it is the ingredient of despair which obstructs the positive flow of human life. In this vein, Frankl asserts: "With special regard to suffering, however, I would say that patients never really despair because of any suffering in itself. Instead, their despair stems in each instance from a doubt as to whether suffering is meaningful. Man is ready and willing to shoulder any suffering as soon and as long as he can see a meaning in it." Frank! would not do away with suffering, rather he would erase the negative factor of despair to allow the individual's positive human expression to be actualized. The Nazi concentration camps of World War II are an indication, according to Frankl, of the importance of meaning in suffering. The will to survive in spite of the unbearable hardship of camp life needed the added will to meaning in order for actual survival to be realized, for this magnified the "will to survive" to an "ought to survive."6 It should be noted that we find Frankl arguing here for the meaning ingredient not from any philosophical viewpoint, rather from the view that it is conducive to the human condition and affords the capability to transcend a suffering situation. Truth here seems to be perceived in utility, and this approach is observable also in other areas of logotherapeutic endeavor. In the seemingly meaningless and futile atmosphere of the concentration camps, meaning could be elicited by giving the prisoner a future goal around which to orient. "It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future. . . . And this is his salvation in the most difficult moments of his existence, although he sometimes has to force his mind to the task." The meaning alluded to here is not a meaning to the suffering itself, rather a meaning beyond the suffering, a (p 127) meaning to be attained only through surviving the suffering. As such, this approach is partially reminiscent of the logotherapeutic technique of dereflection, in that the persons' thinking is oriented towards an event or task beyond the suffering. Frankl himself seems to search for the actual meaning of suffering. He recalls that most of the inmates of the concentration camp were concerned with whether they would survive the camp, else all the suffering was meaningless. For Frankl, the question was to be asked in reverse. "Has all this suffering, this dying around us, a meaning? For, if not, then ultimately there is no meaning to survival." Frankl insists, as has been previously mentioned, that there must be a meaning to suffering if there is meaning to life at all, since suffering is a component of life. One's attitude to suffering affords the chance to endow life with profound meaning. The individual may embody the

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virtues of braveness, dignity , and unselfishness, or may be reduced to bestial behavior. In its positive extension, one realizes values through suffering. Frankl does not really uncover the meaning of the suffering out of pain. Rather, suffering has been made a tool through which to achieve. It has been given utility, meaning has been attached to it. At most, suffering can be extended to manifest an existential corrective for spiritual myopia. The intrinsic meaning of the suffering would have to be determined by the extent to which a future meaning is made possible by the suffering. The person knows of a suffering which is entirely devoid of physical pain, an emotional suffering which stems from the loss of what was basic to life, such as a parent, spouse, or child. Frankl insists on extracting meaning from every life experience, even suffering born of mourning. He views this suffering as a healthful component of life." A sense of the meaning of emotional experiences is deeply rooted in human (p 128) beings." This is seen in patients who suffer from melancholia anesthetisa, or from the inability to be sad. Using the human model, this would indicate that there is nothing inherently wrong with sadness, or with being sad. Frankl gears himself towards erasing the deflating effect of this type of suffering. He would like to transpose the suffering from to a suffering to, to raise the person above suffering, to elicit meaning from the suffering. Frankl illustrates his approach with the following example: "An old doctor consulted me in Vienna because he could not get rid of a severe depression caused by the death of his wife. I asked him, "What would have happened, Doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?" Whereupon he said, "For her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!" I then added, "You see, Doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it is you who have spared her this suffering; but now you have to pay for it by surviving and mourning her." The old man suddenly saw his plight in a new light, and re-evaluated his suffering in the meaningful terms of a sacrifice for the sake of his wife." Frankl does not attempt to tranquilize away the pain. Neither does he attempt to reincarnate, in any way, the deceased. He redirects, through a change in attitude, the suffering factor from negative to positive. Suffering becomes a jumping-off point for meaning fulfillment rather than a life-choking experience. The cynic is likely to question Frankl insofar as his approach to the doctor is concerned. Could not all suffering have been avoided if the doctor and his wife had expired simultaneously? Such a question, however, misses the basic point of logotherapy's approach to suffering of this type. There is no attempt to advance pseudo-theological explications from the predicament. Instead the focus is affixed on the reality of the situation, how best to approach it, and how (p 129) best to retroactively invest the suffering experience with some meaning. It might be the meaning of sacrifice as it is the case of the doctor; in another case it might be through living the ideals of the departed. Either way, the suffering situation is taken as given, and approached futuristically rather than analytically. (p 130)

CHAPTER 12: NOTES FROM VIKTOR FRANKL THE UNHEARD CRY FOR MEANING: WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS: NY: 1985:

So, there is convergence in sequence. As to logotherapy, however, I for one have been teaching that it is not a panacea and therefore is open to cooperation with other psychotherapeutic approaches and open to its own evolution. It is true that both psychodynamically and behavioristically oriented schools largely ignore the humanness of human phenomena. They are still sold on reductionism, as this still dominates the scene of psychotherapeutic training, and reductionism is the very opposite of humanism. Reductionism is subhumanism, I would say. Confining itself to subhuman dimensions, biased by a narrow concept of scientific truth, it forces phenomena into a procrustean bed, a preconceived pattern of interpretation, whether this be along the lines of dynamic analysis or of learning theory. And yet each of these schools has made a valuable contribution. Logotherapy in no way invalidates the sound and sober findings of such great pioneers as Freud, Adler, Pavlov, Watson or Skinner. Within their respective dimensions, each of these schools has its say. But their real significance and value become visible only if we place them within a higher, more (p 15) inclusive dimension, within the human dimension. Here, to be sure, man can no longer be seen as a being whose basic concern is to satisfy drives and gratify instincts or, for that matter, to reconcile id, ego and superego; nor can the human reality be understood merely as the outcome of conditioning processes or conditioned reflexes. Here man is revealed as a being in search of meaning-a search whose futility seems to account for many of the ills of our age. How then can a psychotherapist who refuses a priori to listen to the "unheard cry for meaning" come to grips with the mass neurosis of today? (p 16) A literal translation of the term: "Logotherapy" is "therapy through meaning." Of course, it could also be translated as "healing through meaning," although this would bring in a religious overtone that is not necessarily present in logotherapy. In any case, logotherapy is a meaning-centered (psycho-) therapy. , The notion of a therapy through meaning is the very reverse of the traditional conceptualization of psychotherapy, which could rather be formulated as meaning through therapy. Indeed, if traditional psychotherapy squarely faces the issue of meaning and purpose at all-that is, if it takes meaning and purpose at face value rather than reducing them to mere fake values, as by deducing them from "defense mechanisms" or "reaction formations"-it does so in the vein of a (p19) recommendation that you just have your Oedipal situation settled, just get rid of your castration fears, and you will be happy, you will actualize your self and your own potentialities, and you will become what you were meant to be. In other words, meaning will come to you by itself. Doesn't it sound somewhat like, Seek ye first the kingdom of Freud and Skinner, and all these things will be added unto you? But it did not work out that way. Rather, it turned out that, if a neurosis could be removed, more often than not when it was removed a vacuum was left. The patient was beautifully adjusted and functioning, but meaning was missing. The patient had not been taken as a human being, that is to say, a being in steady search of meaning; and this search for meaning, which is so distinctive of man, had not been taken seriously at its face value, but was seen as a mere rationalization of underlying unconscious psychodynamics. It had been

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overlooked or forgotten that if a person has found the meaning sought for, he is prepared to suffer, to offer sacrifices, even, if need be, to give his life for the sake of it. Contrariwise, if there is no meaning he is inclined to take his life, and he is prepared to do so even if all his needs, to all appearances, have been 1 satisfied. All this was brought home to me by the following report, which I received from a former student of mine: At an American university, 60 students who had attempted suicide were screened afterward, and 85 percent said the reason had been that "life seemed meaningless." Most important, however, 93 percent of these students suffering from the apparent meaninglessness of life "were actively engaged socially, were (p 20) performing well academically, and were on good terms with their family groups." What we have here, I would . say, is an unheard cry for meaning, and it certainly is not limited to only one university. Consider the staggering suicide rates among American college students, second only to traffic accidents as the most frequent cause of death. Suicide attempts might be fifteen times more frequent. This happens in the midst of affluent societies and in the midst of welfare states! For too long we have been dreaming a dream from which we are now waking up: the dream that if we just improve the socioeconomic situation of people, everything will be okay, people will become happy. The truth is that as the struggle for survival has subsided, the question has emerged: survival for what? Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for. On the other hand, we see people being happy under adverse, even dire, conditions. Let me quote from a letter I received from Cleve W., who wrote it when he was Number 049246 in an American state prison: "Here in prison. . . there are more and more blissful opportunities to serve and grow. I'm really happier now than I've ever been." Notice: happier than ever in prison! (p 21) Or let me take up a letter that I recently received from a Danish family doctor: "For half a year my very dear father was seriously ill with cancer. The last three months of his life he lived in my house-looked after by my beloved wife and myself. What I really want to tell you is that those three months were the most blessed time in the lives of my wife and me. Being a doctor and a nurse, of course, we had the resources to cope with everything, but I shall never in my life forget all the evenings when I read him sentences from your book. He knew for three months that his illness was fatal . . . but he never gave a complaint. Until his last evening I kept telling him how happy we were that we could experience this close contact for those last weeks, and how poor we would have been if he had just died from a heart attack lasting a few seconds. Now I have not only read about these things, I have experienced them, so I can only hope that I shall be able to meet fate the same way my father did." Again, someone is happy in the face of tragedy and in spite of suffering-but in view of meaning! Truly, there is a healing force in meaning. (p 22) Take the typical welfare state of Austria, which is blessed with social security and is not plagued by unemployment. And yet in an interview our Chancellor Bruno Kreisky expressed his concern about the psychological conditions of the citizens, saying that what is most important and urgent today is to counteract the feeling that life is meaningless. The feeling of meaninglessness, the existential vacuum, is increasing and spreading to the extent that, in truth, it may be called a mass neurosis. There is ample evidence in the form of publications in professional journals to indicate that it is not confined to capitalist states but can also be observed in Communist countries. It makes itself noticeable even in the Third World. (p 26) THE WILL TO MEANING: Man is always reaching out for meaning, always setting out on his search for meaning; in other words, what I call the "will to meaning"* is even to be regarded as "man's primary concern," to quote from Abraham Maslow's comments on a paper of mine. t It is precisely this will to meaning that remains unfulfilled by today's society-and disregarded by today's psychology. Current motivation theories see man as a being who is either reacting to stimuli or abreacting his impulses. They do not consider that actually, rather than reacting or abreacting, man is responding-responding to questions that life is asking him, and in that way fulfilling the meanings that life is offering. One might argue that this is faith, not fact. Indeed, since I coined, in 1938, the term "height psychology" in order to supplement (rather than supplant) what is called "depth psychology" (that is, psychodynamically oriented psychology) I have again and again been accused of overestimating man, putting him on too high a pedestal. Let me here repeat an illustration that (p 31) has often shown to be didactically helpful. In aviation there is a business called "crabbing." Say there is a crosswind from the north and the airport where I wish to land lies due east. If I fly east I will miss my destination because my plane will have drifted to the southeast. In order to reach my destination I must compensate for this drift by crabbing, in this case by heading my plane in a direction to the north of where I want to land. It is similar with man: he too ends at a point lower than he might have unless he is seen on a higher level that includes his higher aspirations. If we are to bring out the human potential at its best, we must first believe in its existence and presence. Otherwise man will "drift," he will deteriorate, for there is a human potential at its worst as well. We must not let our belief in the potential humanness of man blind us to the fact that humane humans are and probably always will be a minority. Yet it is this very fact that challenges each of us to join the minority: things are bad, but unless we do our best to improve them, everything will become worse. Thus, rather than dismissing the concept of a will to meaning as wishful thinking, one could more justifiably conceive of it as a self-fulfilling prophecy. There is something to Anatole Broyard's comment, "If 'shrink' is the slang term for the Freudian analyst, then the logotherapist ought to be called 'stretch.' ,,* In fact, logotherapy expands not only the concept of man, by including his higher aspirations, but also the visional field of the patient as to potentialities to feed J and nurture his will to meaning. By the same token, (p 32) logotherapy immunizes the patient against the dehumanizing, mechanistic concept of man on which many a "shrink" is sold-in a word, it makes the patient,) "shrink-resistant ." The argument that one should not think too highly of man presupposes that it is dangerous to overrate him. But it is much more dangerous to underrate him, as has been pointed out by Goethe. Man, particularly the younger generation, may be corrupted by being underrated. Conversely, if I am cognizant of the higher aspirations of man -- such as his will to meaning - I am also able to muster and mobilize them. The will to meaning is not only a matter of faith but also a fact. (p 33) A MEANING TO LIFE: So there is a will to meaning in man; but is there also a meaning to life? In other words, having dealt with the motivational-theoretical aspect of logotherapy, we now turn to "logo-theory"-i.e., logotherapy's theory of meaning. And to begin with, let us ask ourselves whether a logotherapist can impart meaning. I would say that, in the first place, he should see to it that meaning not be taken away-because this is precisely what is being done by reductionism. (p 40) As meanings are unique, they are ever changing, But they are never missing. Life is never lacking a meaning. To be sure, this is only understandable if we recognize that there is potential meaning to be found even beyond work and love. Certainly we are used to discovering meaning in creating a work or doing a deed, or in experiencing something or encountering someone. But we must never forget that we may also find meaning in life even when confronted with a hopeless situation as its helpless victim, when facing a fate that cannot be changed. For what then counts and matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform

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a tragedy into a personal triumph, to turn one's predicament into a human achievement. When we are no longer able to change a situation-just think of an incurable disease, say, an inoperable cancer-we are challenged to change ourselves. This is brought home most beautifully by the words of Yehuda Bacon, an Israeli sculptor who was imprisoned in Auschwitz when he was a young boy and after the war wrote a paper from which I would like to quote a passage: " As a boy I thought: 'I will tell them what I saw, in the hope that people will change for the better. , But people didn't change and didn't even want to know. It was much later that I really understood the meaning of suffering. It can have a meaning if it changes oneself for the better." He finally recognized the meaning of his suffering: he changed himself. (p 43) As a human phenomenon, however, freedom is all J too human. Human freedom is finite freedom. Man is not free from conditions. But he is free to take a stand in regard to them. The conditions do not completely condition him. Within limits it is up to him whether or not he succumbs and surrenders to the conditions. He may as well rise above them and by so doing open up and enter the human dimension. As I once put it: As a (p 51) professor in two fields, neurology and psychiatry, I am fully aware of the extent to which man is subject to 5 biological, psychological and sociologic conditions. But in addition to being a professor in two fields I am a survivor of four campsconcentration camps, that is-and as such I also bear witness to the unexpected extent to which man is capable of defying and braving even the worst conditions conceivable. Sigmund Freud once said, "Let us attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly to hunger. With the increase of the imperative urge of hunger all individual differences will blur, and in their stead will appear the uniform expression of the one unstilled urge." In the concentration camps, however, the reverse was true. People became more diverse. The beast was unmasked-and so was the saint. The hunger was the same but people were different. In truth, calories do not count. Ultimately, man is not subject to the conditions that confront him; rather, these conditions are subject to his decision. Wittingly or unwittingly, he decides whether he will face up or give in, whether or not he will let himself be determined by the conditions. Of course, it could be objected that such decisions are themselves determined. But it is obvious that this results in a regress us in infinitum. A statement by Magda B. Arnold epitomizes this stat~ of affairs and lends itself as an apt conclusion of the discussion: " All choices are caused but they are caused by the chooser." Interdisciplinary research covers more than one (p 52) cross section. It prevents one-sidedness. Regarding the problem of free choice, it prevents us from denying, on the one hand, the deterministic and mechanistic aspects of the human reality, or on the other hand, the human freedom to transcend them. This freedom is not denied by determinism but rather by what I am used to calling pan-determinism. In other words the alternatives really are pan-determinism versus determinism, rather than determinism versus indeterminism. And as to Freud, he only espoused pan-determinism In theory. In practice, he was anything but blind to the human freedom to change, to improve, for instance, when he once defined the goal of psychoanalysis as giving "the patient's ego the freedom to choose one way or the other." Human freedom implies man' s capacity to detach himself from himself. I like to illustrate this capacity with the following story: During World War I a Jewish army doctor was sitting together with his gentile friend, an aristocratic colonel, in a foxhole when heavy shooting began. Teasingly, the colonel said "You are afraid, aren't you? Just another proof that the Aryan race is superior to the Semitic one." "Sure I am afraid," was the doctor's answer. "But who is superior? If you, my dear colonel, were as afraid as I am., you would have run away long ago." What counts is not our fears and anxieties as such but the attitude we adopt toward them. This attitude is freely chosen. The freedom of choosing an attitude toward our psychological make-up even extends to the (p 53) pathological aspects of this make-up. Time and again, we psychiatrists meet patients whose response to their delusions is anything but pathological. I have met paranoiacs who, out of their delusional ideas of persecution, have killed their alleged enemies; but I have also met paranoiacs who have forgiven their supposed adversaries. The latter have not acted out of mental illness but rather reacted to this illness out of their humanness. To speak of suicide rather than homicide, there are cases of depression who commit suicide, and there are cases who manage to overcome the suicidal impulse for the sake of a cause or a person. They are too committed to commit suicide, as it were. I for one am convinced that a psychosis such as a J paranoia or an endogenous depression is somatogenic. More specifically, its etiology is biochemical-even though more often than not its exact nature could not yet be determined. Yet we are not justified in making fatalistic inferences. They would not be valid even in cases in which biochemistry is based on heredity. In context with the latter, for instance, I never weary of quoting Johannes Lange, who once reported a case of identical twin brothers. One brother wound up as a cunning criminal. The other wound up as a cunning criminologist. Being cunning might well be a matter of heredity. But becoming a criminal or a criminologist, as the case maybe, is a matter of attitude. Heredity is no more than the material from which man builds himself. It is no more than the stones that are, or are not, refused and rejected by the builder. But the builder himself is not built of stones. (p 54) Being human has been defined as "being in the world." The world includes reasons and meanings. (p 57) But reasons and meanings are excluded if you conceive of man as a closed system. What is left is causes and effects. The effects are represented by conditioned reflexes or responses to stimuli. The causes are represented by conditioning processes or drives and instincts. Drives and instincts push but reasons and meanings pull. If you conceive of man in terms of a closed system you notice only forces that push but no motives that pull. Consider the front doors . of any American hotel. From inside the lobby you notice only the sign "push." The sign "pull" is visible only from without. Man has doors as does the hotel. He IS no closed monad, and psychology degenerates into some sort of monadology unless it recognizes his openness to the world. This openness of existence is reflected by its self-transcendence. (See Note 2 on p. 68.) The self-transcendent quality of the human reality in turn is reflected in the "intentional" quality of human phenomena, as Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl term it. Human phenomena refer and point to "intentional objects." Reasons and meanings represent such objects. They are the logos for which the psyche is reaching out. If psychology is to be worthy of Its name it has to recognize both halves of this name, the logos as well as the psyche. When the self-transcendence of existence is denied, existence itself is distorted. It is reified. Being is reduced to a mere thing. Being human is de-personalized. And what is most important, the subject is made into an object. This is due to the fact that it is the characteristic of a subject that it relates to objects. (p 58) And it is a characteristic of man that he relates to intentional objects in terms of values and meanings which serve as reasons and motives. If self-transcendence is denied and the door to meanings and values is closed, reasons and motives are replaced by conditioning processes, and it is up to the "hidden persuaders" to do the conditioning, to manipulate man. It is reification that opens the door to manipulation. And vice versa. If one is to manipulate human beings he first has to reify them, and, to this end, indoctrinate them along the lines of pan-determinism. "Only by dispossessing autonomous man," says B. F. Skinner, "can we turn the real causes of human behavior-from the inaccessible to the manipulable." I quite simply think, first of all, that conditioning processes are not the real causes of human behavior; secondly, that the real cause is something accessible, provided that the humanness of human behavior is not denied on a priori grounds; and, thirdly, that the humanness of human behavior cannot be revealed unless we recognize that the real "cause" of a given individual's behavior is not a cause but, rather a reason. (p 59) But reasons and meanings are excluded if you conceive of man as a closed system. What is left is causes and effects. The effects are represented by conditioned reflexes or responses to stimuli. The causes are represented by conditioning processes or drives and instincts. Drives and instincts push but reasons and meanings pull. If you conceive of man in terms of a closed system you notice only

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forces that push but no motives that pull. Consider the front doors . of any American hotel. From inside the lobby you notice only the sign "push." The sign "pull" is visible only from without. Man has doors as does the hotel. He IS no closed monad, and psychology degenerates into some sort of monadology unless it recognizes his openness to the world. This openness of existence is reflected by its selftranscendence. (See Note 2 on p. 68.) The self-transcendent quality of the human reality in turn is reflected in the "intentional" quality of human phenomena, as Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl term it. Human phenomena refer and point to "intentional objects." Reasons and meanings represent such objects. They are the logos for which the psyche IS reaching out. If psychology is to be worthy of Its name it has to recognize both halves of this name, the logos, as well as the psyche. When the self-transcendence of existence is denied, existence itself is distorted. It is reified. Being is reduced to a mere thing. Being human is de-personalized. And what is most important, the subject is made into an object. This is due to the fact that it is the characteristic of a subject that it relates to objects. DETERMINISM AND HUMANISM: Iit is a characteristic of man that he relates to intentional objects in terms of values and meanings which serve as reasons and motives. If self-transcendence is denied and the door to meanings and values is closed, reasons and motives are replaced by conditioning processes, and it is up to the "hidden persuaders" to do the conditioning, to manipulate man. It is reification that opens the door to manipulation. And vice versa. If one is to manipulate human beings he first has to reify them, and, to this end, indoctrinate them along the lines of pan-determinism. "Only by dispossessing autonomous man," says B. F. Skinner, "can we turn the real causes of human behavior-from the inaccessible to the manipulable." I quite simply think, first of all, that conditioning processes are not the real causes of human behavior; secondly, that the real cause is something accessible, provided that the humanness of human behavior is not denied on a priori grounds; and, thirdly, that the humanness of human behavior cannot be revealed unless we recognize that the real "cause" of a given individual's behavior is not a cause but, rather, a reason. "The expanding economy of the ‘affluent society' could not subsist without such manipulation. Only by manipulating humans ever more into Skinnerian rats, robots, buying automata, homeostatically adjusted conformers and opportunists can this great society follow its progress toward ever increasing gross national product. The concept of man as robot was both an expression of and a powerful motive force in industrialized mass society. It was the basis for behavioral engineering in commercial, economic, political, and other advertising and propaganda." (p 59) For a change, let us take up grief rather than anger and ask ourselves what might be the reaction of a person who is mourning a loved one and is offered a tranquilizer: "Closing one's eyes before reality does not do away with reality. That I fall asleep and am no longer conscious of the death of someone I love does not do away with the fact that he is dead. This is the only thing I care about: whether he is alive or dead-and not whether I am upset or not!" In other words (p 77) what he does care for is not whether he is happy or II unhappy but whether there is a reason to be happy or unhappy. Wilhelm Wundt's system has been criticized as a "psychology without psyche." This has long been overcome, but there is still around what I would call a "psychology without logos," a psychology which interprets human behavior not as being induced by reasons that are out there in the world, but rather as resulting from causes that are operant within one's , own psyche (or soma). But, as I have pointed out, causes are not the same as reasons. If you feel unhappy and have a whiskey it "causes" your unhappiness to disappear, but the reason to be unhappy will still remain. The same holds for the tranquilizer, which equally cannot change one's fate or bereavement. But again, what about changing one's attitude, turning a predicament into an achievement on the human level? There is certainly no place for anything like this in a psychology that divorces man from the world-the world in which alone his actions can have reasons, and in which even his suffering may have a meaning. A psychology that sees man as a closed system in which an interplay of dynamics is operant, rather than as a being reaching out for a meaning to crown his existence-such a psychology necessarily must deprive man of his capacity to turn tragedy into triumph. (p 78) Man is not, as predominant motivation theories would like us to believe (p 89) basically concerned with gratifying his needs and, satisfying his drives and instincts, and thereby maintaining, or restoring, homeostasis, i.e., the inner equilibrium. Rather, man is-by virtue of the self transcendent quality of the human reality-basically concerned with reaching out beyond himself, be it toward a meaning to fulfill, or toward another human being lovingly to encounter. Loving encounter, however, definitely precludes regarding or using another human being as a mere means to an end - as a tool for reducing the tensions created by libidinal, or aggressive, drives and instants. This would amount to masturbation, and in fact that is how many of our sexually neurotic patients speak of the I way they treat their partners: in fact they often say! they "masturbate on their partners." Such an attitude I toward a partner is a specifically neurotic distortion of human sex. (p 90) As I have elaborated elsewhere (Frank!, 1952, 1955) sexual neurotics usually ascribe what may be called a demand quality to sexual achievement. Accordingly, attempts to cure such cases have to start with removing this quality. I have developed a technique by which such a treatment can be implemented, and published it in English for the first time in the International Journal of Sexology (Frank!, 1952). All I want to point out here, however, is the fact that our present culture, due to the motivation outlined above, idolizes sexual achievement and further adds to the demand quality experienced by the sexually neurotic individual, thus further contributing to his neurosis. The Pill too, by allowing the female partner to be more demanding and spontaneous, encourages the male partners to experience sexual intercourse as something that is demanded of them. American authors even blame the woman's liberation movement for having freed women of old taboos and inhibitions to the extent that even college girls are demanding sexual satisfaction - demanding it from college boys. The result has been a new set of problems variously called "college impotence," or "the new impotence" (Ginsberg et al., 1972). (p 94) We observe something analogous on the subhuman level. There is a species of fish whose females habitually swim "coquettishly" away from the males who seek to mate. However, Konrad Lorenz succeeded in training a female to do the very opposite-to forcefully approach the male. The latter's reaction? Just what we would have expected of a college boy: a complete incapacity to carry out sexual intercourse! As to the Pill, we have discussed only a side effect, a negative effect. Looking at its positive side, we have to acknowledge that it is rendering an inestimable service. If it is true that it is love that makes sex human, it is the Pill that frees sex from its automatic connection with procreation and thus allows it to become, and remain, a pure expression of love. Human sex, as we have said, must never be made into a mere tool in the service of the pleasure principle. As we now see, however, neither should it be a mere means to an end that is dictated by the procreation instinct. The Pill has emancipated sex from such tyranny and has thereby made it possible to actualize its real potential. Victorian sexual taboos and inhibitions are on the wane, and freedom in sexual matters has been gained. What we must not forget is that freedom threatens to degenerate into mere license and arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. (p 95) I think we should stop divinizing psychiatry-and start humanizing it . To begin with, we must learn to differentiate between what is human in man and what is pathological in him-in other words, between what is a mental or emotional disease on the one hand, and on the other, what is, for instance, existential despair, despair over the apparent meaninglessness of human existence-indeed, a favorite topic of

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modern literature, isn't it? Sigmund Freud, it is true, once wrote that "The moment one inquires about the sense or value of life, one is sick"; but I rather think that one thereby manifests one's humanness. It is a human achievement to quest for a meaning to life, and even to question whether such a meaning is available at all. (p 98) PARADOXICAL INTENTION: To understand how paradoxical intention works, take as a starting point the mechanism called anticipatory anxiety: a given symptom evokes on the part of the patient the fearful expectation that it might recur. Fear, however, always tends to bring about precisely that which is feared, and by the same token, anticipatory anxiety is liable and likely to trigger off what the patient so fearfully expects to happen. Thus a self-sustaining vicious circle is established: a symptom evokes a phobia; the phobia provokes the symptom; (p 130) and the recurrence of the symptom reinforces the phobia. One object of fear is fear itself: our patients often refer to ..anxiety about anxiety." Upon closer scrutiny, this ..fear of fear" frequently turns out to be caused by the patient' s apprehensions about the potential effects of his anxiety attacks: he is afraid that they may eventuate in his collapsing or fainting, or in a heart attack, or in a stroke. But, alas, the fear of fear increases fear . The most typical reaction to ..fear of fear" is '.flight from fear" (Frank!, 1953): the patient begins to avoid those situations that used to arouse his anxiety. In other words, he runs away from his fear. This is the starting point of any anxiety neurosis: .'Phobias are partially due to the endeavor to avoid the situation in which anxiety arises" (Frankl, 1960). Learning theorists and behavior therapists have since confirmed this finding. It is the contention of Marks (1970), for example, that "the phobia is maintained by the anxiety reducing mechanism of avoidance." Contrariwise, ..the development of a phobia can be obviated by confronting one with the situation he begins to fear" "Flight from fear" as a reaction to ..fear of fear" constitutes the phobic pattern, the first of three pathogenic patterns that are distinguished in logotherapy (Frankl, 1953). The second is the obsessive-compulsive pattern: whereas in phobic cases the patient displays ..fear of fear," the obsessive-compulsive neurotic exhibits ..fear of himself," being either caught by the idea that he might commit suicide - or even homicide.- or afraid that the strange thoughts that haunt (p 131) him might be signs of imminent, if not present, psychosis. How should he know that the obsessive-compulsive character structure rather is immunizing him against real psychosis (Frankl, 1955)? While "flight from fear" is a characteristic of the phobic pattern, the obsessive-compulsive patient is characterized by his "fight against obsessions and compulsions." But alas, the more he fights them the stronger they become: pressure induces counter-pressure, and counter-pressure, in turn, increases pressure. Again, we are confronted with a vicious circle. How then is it possible to break up such feedback mechanism? And to begin with, how can we take the wind out of the individual fears of our patients? Well, this is precisely the business to accomplish by paradoxical intention, which may be defined as a process by which the patient is encouraged to do, or to wish to happen. the very thing he fears (the former applying to the phobic patient, the latter to the obsessive-compulsive. In this way, we have the phobic patient stop (p 132) fleeing from his fears, and the obsessive-compulsive patient stop fighting his obsessions and compulsions. In any way, the pathogenic fear now is replaced by a paradoxical wish. The vicious circle of anticipatory anxiety is now unhinged. Here only unpublished material is quoted, the first an unsolicited letter I once received from a reader. "I had to take an examination yesterday and discovered 1/2 hour beforehand that I was literally frozen with fear. I looked at my notes and my mind blanked out. The things I had studied so long looked completely unfamiliar to me and I panicked: "I don't remember anything! I will fail this test!" Needless to say, my fear increased as the minutes went by, my notes looked more and more unfamiliar, I was sweating, and my fear was building each time I rechecked those notes! Five minutes before the examination I knew that if it felt this way during the exam I would surely fail; and then your paradoxical intention came to my mind. I said to myself, "Since I am going to fail anyway, I may as well do my best at failing! I'll show this professor a test so bad, that it will confuse him for days! I will write down total garbage, answers that have nothing to do with the questions at all! I'll show him how a student really fails a test! This will be the most ridiculous test he grades in his entire career!" With this in mind, I was actually giggling when the exam came. Believe it or not, each question made perfect sense to me-I was relaxed, at ease, and as strange as it may sound, actually in a terrific mood! I passed the test and received an (p 133) A. P. S. Paradoxical intention also cures the hiccups. If one tries to keep hiccupping, he cannot. (p 134)

VIKTOR E. FRANKL, DEAD AT 92: Thursday, September 4, 1997: By ROLAND PRINZ: The Associated Press VIENNA, Austria -- Psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl, who transformed years of suffering in Nazi concentration camps into insights for his lifelong study of man's quest for meaning, has died at 92. Dr. Frankl had been suffering from heart problems, the Austria Press Agency reported, citing the Vienna Viktor Frankl Institute. He died in Vienna on Tuesday and his funeral was held immediately, the agency said. Dr. Frankl survived Auschwitz and three other Nazi concentration camps from 1942 to 1945, but his parents and other members of his family died in the death camps. Partly because of his suffering, Dr. Frankl developed a revolutionary approach to psychotherapy known as logotherapy. At the core of his theory is the belief that man's primary motivational force is his search for meaning. Dr. Frankl's teachings have been described as the Third Vienna School of Psychotherapy, after those of Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler. Chancellor Viktor Klima lauded the "great humanist, scientist, and world citizen," but expressed sorrow that Dr. Frankl's pioneering work had been "underestimated" for many years in his homeland. Klima was referring to the long postwar years when Dr. Frankl's native Austria virtually ignored him, even while his teachings were acclaimed in the United States and elsewhere. Dr. Frankl's 32 books have been translated into 26 languages. He also held 29 honorary doctorates from universities around the globe. In his most famous book, "Man's Search for Meaning," Dr. Frankl wrote that the his task was to help patients find meaning in their lives, no matter how dismal their circumstances. "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," he wrote.As a concentration camp survivor, he said, "I also bear witness to the unexpected extent to which man is capable of defying and braving even the worst conditions conceivable."

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Dr. Frankl wrote that one can discover the meaning in life in three different ways: "by creating a work or doing a deed; by experiencing something or encountering someone; and by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering." And he insisted: "We must never forget that we may also find meaning in life even when confronted with a hopeless situation." Born in Vienna on March 26, 1905, he earned a doctorate in medicine in 1930 and was put in charge of a ward treating female suicide candidates. When the Nazis took power in 1938, Dr. Frankl became chief of the neurological department of the Rothschild Hospital, the only Jewish hospital in Vienna at the time. But in 1942, he and his parents were deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp near Prague. In one of his later speeches, Dr. Frankl declared: "There are only two human races -- the race of the decent and the race of the indecent people . . . Every nation is capable [of the] Holocaust." In 1945, Dr. Frankl returned to Vienna, where he became head physician of the neurological department of the Vienna Polyclinic Hospital, a position he held for 25 years. Starting in 1961, Dr. Frankl took five professorships in the United States -- at Harvard and Stanford universities, as well as at universities in Dallas, Pittsburgh, and San Diego. He is survived by his wife, Eleonore, and his daughter, Gabriele Frankl-Vesely.

(Frankl enjoying his favorite pastime "mountain climbing". Frankl, through his Logotherapy = Meaning Therapy, has inspired many people to climb higher up the mountain of human potential)

VIKTOR FRANKL'S BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bulka, R. The Quest for Ultimate Meaning Crumbaugh, J. Everything To Gain; A Guide To Logotherapy Fabry, J. The Pursuit of Meaning Frankl, V. Doctor And The Soul Frankl, V. Man's Search For Meaning Frankl, V. Psychotherapy And Existentialism Frankl, V. Recollections: An Autobiography Frankl. V. The Unheard Cry for Meaning Frankl, V. The Will To Meaning Stern, A. The Search for Meaning Tweedie, D. Logotherapy Ungersma, A. The Search for Meaning

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