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Better living through logotherapy: A few key ideas

We don’t create the meaning of our life, as Sartre claimed—we discover it. We each have a unique reason for being, which can be adjusted or transformed many times over the years.
Just as worry often brings about precisely the thing that was feared, excessive attention to a desire (or “hyper-intention”) can keep that desire from being fulfilled.

Humor can help break negative cycles and reduce anxiety.
We all have the capacity to do noble or terrible things. The side of the equation we end up on depends on our decisions, not on the condition in which we find ourselves.
In the pages that follow, we will look at four cases from Frankl’s own practice in order to better understand the search for meaning and purpose.

C ase study: Viktor Frankl

In German concentration camps, as in those that would later be built in Japan and K orea, psychiatrists confirmed that the prisoners with the greatest chance of survival were those who had things they wanted to accomplish outside the camp, those who felt a strong need to get out of there alive. This was true of Frankl, who, after being released and successfully developing the school of logotherapy, realized he had been the first patient of his own practice.
Frankl had a goal to achieve, and it made him persevere. He arrived at Auschwitz carrying a manuscript that contained all the theories and research he had compiled over the course of his career, ready for publication. When it was confiscated, he felt compelled to write it all over again, and that need drove him and gave his life meaning amid the constant horror and doubt of the concentration camp—so much so that over the years, and especially when he fell ill with typhus, he would jot down fragments and key words from the lost work on any scrap of paper he found.

C ase study: The American diplomat

An important North American diplomat went to Frankl to pick up where he left off with a course of treatment he had started five years earlier in the United States. When Frankl asked him why he’d started therapy in the first place, the diplomat answered that he hated his job and his country’s international policies, which he had to follow and enforce. His American psychoanalyst, whom he’d been seeing for years, insisted he make peace with his father so that his government and his job, both representations of the paternal figure, would seem less disagreeable. Frankl, however, showed him in just a few sessions that his frustration was due to the fact that he wanted to pursue a different career, and the diplomat concluded his treatment with that idea in mind.
Five years later, the former diplomat informed Frankl that he had been working during that time in a different profession, and that he was happy.
In Frankl’s view, the man not only didn’t need all those years of psychoanalysis, he also couldn’t even really be considered a “patient” in need of therapy. He was simply someone in search of a new life’s purpose; as soon as he found it, his life took on deeper meaning.

C ase study: The suicidal mother

The mother of a boy who had died at age eleven was admitted to Frankl’s clinic after she tried to kill herself and her other son. It was this other son, paralyzed since birth, who kept her from carrying out her plan: He did believe his life had a purpose, and if his mother killed them both, it would keep him from achieving his goals.
The woman shared her story in a group session. To help her, Frankl asked another woman to imagine a hypothetical situation in which she lay on her deathbed, old and wealthy but childless. The woman insisted that, in that case, she would have felt her life had been a failure.
When the suicidal mother was asked to perform the same exercise, imagining herself on her deathbed, she looked back and realized that she had done everything in her power for her children—for both of them. She had given her paralyzed son a good life, and he had turned into a kind, reasonably happy person. To this she added, crying, “As for myself, I can look back peacefully on my life; for I can say my life was full of meaning, and I have tried hard to live it fully; I have done my best—I have done my best for my son. My life was no failure!” have done my best—I have done my best for my son. My life was no failure!”
In this way, by imagining herself on her deathbed and looking back, the suicidal mother found the meaning that, though she was not aware of it, her life already had.

C ase study: The grief-stricken doctor

An elderly doctor, unable to overcome the deep depression into which he’d fallen after the death of his wife two years earlier, went to Frankl for help.
Instead of giving him advice or analyzing his condition, Frankl asked him what would have happened if he had been the one who died first. The doctor, horrified, answered that it would have been terrible for his poor wife, that she would have suffered tremendously. To which Frankl responded, “Y ou see, doctor? Y ou have spared her all that suffering, but the price you have to pay for this is to survive, and mourn her.”
The doctor didn’t say another word. He left Frankl’s office in peace, after taking the therapist’s hand in his own. He was able to tolerate the pain in place of his beloved wife. His life had been given a purpose.