Viktor Frankl. Early life
Viktor Frankl was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1905. He was psychiatrist and founder of a new psychotherapeutic method called logotherapy. Logotherapy belongs to psychotherapeutic school called “humanistic psychology“. From an early age, Viktor was very curious and intelligent. At the age of four, he already knew that he wanted to be a doctor.
Viktor’s tremendous curiosity about people ignited his desire to study psychiatry. At the age of 28, Frankl was in charge of the large suicidal ward at the Psychiatric Hospital, with many clients presenting every year. At 32, he started in Vienna his own practice for psychiatry and neurology. Just a few months later, Hitler’s army occupied Austria.
Nazi camp imprisonment and loss of the family
In September of 1942, newly-married Frankl, his wife, his brother, father and mother were arrested by Hitler’s soldiers in Vienna and taken to a concentration camp in Bohemia. Frankl’s experiences as a prisoner there and at three other concentration camps led him to discover the importance of life meaningfulness. His father, mother, brother, and wife died in the concentration camps.
In the concentration camp of Auschwitz, Nazi soldiers found and destroyed Frankl’s manuscript for The Doctor and the Soul. His wish to complete the book and his hopes that he would be reunited with his wife and family helped him survive. He kept himself active by rebuilding his manuscript on stolen slips of paper. In April 1945, after the liberation of the camp, Frankl returned to Vienna. Sadly, he found out there about the demise of his loved ones.
Moving on. Professorship, awards, accomplishments
Heartbroken and lonely, he took a role of a director of the Vienna Neurological Policlinic–an assignment he held for 25 years. He finally recreated and published The Doctor and the Soul, attaining a teaching position at the University of Vienna Medical School.
Shortly, Frankl meets Eleonore Schwindt, who encourages him to re-establish the world and himself. They married in 1947 and welcomed a daughter Gabrielle.
In 1948, Frankl obtained his PhD in philosophy and, shortly, became an associate professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Vienna.
After being promoted to full professor at the same university, he became famous outside Vienna. Frankl received many awards, including a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize and the Oskar Pfister Prize from the American Society of Psychiatry.
Frankl attained his aeroplane pilot’s license when he was 67! He was an enthusiastic mountain climber and continued to teach at the University of Vienna until he was 85.
In 1997, Frankl issued his last work, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning. Altogether, he wrote 32 books, which were translated into 27 languages.
Theory
Viktor Frankl’s theory rests on his experiences in Nazi death camps. Watching who survived in the death camp, he acknowledged and appreciated Friedrich Nietzsche’s words:
“He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how”.
(Nietzsche, as cited in Frankl, 1963, p. 121)
Frankl observed that individuals who had longings for reuniting with loved ones or who had tasks they needed to accomplish or those having tremendous faith, tended to have better chances to survive than those who had lost their purpose of life and their hope.
Frankl developed a form of psychotherapy called Logotherapy. The name is derived from the Greek word logos, denoting God, meaning, spirit or study. It is the meaning that Frankl concentrates on.
Therapy
Comparing himself with other renowned Viennese psychiatrists, Adler and Freud, Frankl pointed out that Adler essentially suggested a will to power as the root of all human motivation and Freud the will to pleasure. His logotherapy represents the will to meaning.
Viktor Frankl is well known for his overall approach to psychotherapy and also for certain clinical elements. One of these elements is the paradoxical intention, which helps discontinue the vicious cycles of anxiety. Paradoxical intention is wishing for the very thing you are afraid of.
One more element is called dereflection. Frankl suggests that many troubles derive from an overfocus on oneself. Diverting that concentration away from oneself and onto others often resolves difficulties.
The existential vacuum
Searching for meaning can be rather frustrating, and this frustration can result in noögenic neurosis, what others might know as existential or spiritual neurosis. Many people experience their lives as aimless, purposeless, meaningless, and empty and seem to be reacting to these experiences with behaviours that harm themselves, society and others.
One of Frankl’s favourite concepts is the existential vacuum. If meaning is what we wish for, then meaninglessness is an emptiness, a hole in our lives.
According to Frankl, aggression, addiction and depression are the mass neurotic triad. He refers to a study that reveals a strong relationship between purposeless life and criminality.
Origins of psychopathology
Frankl provides us with an insight into the origins of various psychopathologies. For instance, anxiety neuroses stem from existential anxiety. A person not realizing that their anxiety is due to a lack of meaning in life focuses that anxiety on some troubling detail of life.
The hypochondriac, for instance, focuses their anxiety on some terrible illness. The agoraphobic focuses their anxiety on the world outside their door. Thereby, the anxiety neurotic makes sense of their misery.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder works likewise. The obsessive-compulsive individual lacks the sense of completion that most people have. The obsessive-compulsive person needs a perfect certainty that is, eventually, elusive. Ultimately, both the anxiety neurotic and the obsessive-compulsive individual must find or rediscover the meaning of life to unchain their lives from anxiety (Frankl, 1973).
Like most existential psychologists, Frankl recognizes the significance of physiological and genetic influences on psychopathology. For example, he sees depression as based on the depreciation of physical energy. On the psychological level, he associates depression with the inadequacy we sense when we face tasks beyond our mental or physical capacities.
From the perspective of spirituality, Frankl regards depression as a conflict between what the individual is and what they desire to be (Frankl, 1973). Such an individual becomes appalled with himself and projects that appal onto others or the whole world.
Finding meaning
So how do we find or create meaning? Frankl suggests three comprehensive approaches or sources of meaning:
- Finding or creating meaning through experiential values, that is, by experiencing something – or someone – we appreciate and value. The best example of experiential values is the love we have towards another. By means of our love, we can facilitate the development of meaning in another. And enabling that creates our meaning, too!
- Finding or creating meaning through creative values. Itis the conventional existential view of discovering meaning through engagement in one’s projects. It includes creativity containing writing, music, art and similar virtues.
- The third source of meaning is attitudinal values,which comprise virtues such as bravery, compassion, and humour but also suffering. Creating or finding meaning through attitudinal values also includes “transcending limitations”, as, for example, turning a tragedy into a triumph (Breitbart, 2017).
- One more source of meaning is the historical values of our life as a continuum. It comprises the legacy you pass and the legacy you are given (Breitbart, 2017).
Frankl asserts that meaning cannot be given, and people must find or create meaning of life themselves.
Frankl’s most notable example of attaining meaning is through suffering.
He presents a case of one of his patients: a physician who suffered terribly as his wife had passed away. Frankl pointed out that the patient spared his wife that suffering. And now the patient had to pay the price by outliving her and grieving. For the physician, this view added meaning to his wife’s demise and to his own pain. With meaning, his suffering became something more, and he could bear it with dignity.
In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl remarks that everything can be taken from a person but not the last of human freedoms, which is choosing the own attitude in any situation (Frankl, 1963).
Conclusion
Viktor Frankl was one of the greatest minds of the XX century and developed logotherapy. He made significant contributions to the development of existential therapy. The crucial point of his existential therapy was the recognition that meaning in life is a fundamental motivating power of human behaviour and the essential attribute of the mankind as a species.