Viktor Frankl was born on March 26, 1905 in Vienna, Austria and died in the same city on September 2, 1997. Frankl wrote the famous Holocaust testimony Man & # 39; s Search for Meaning and is widely recognized as the founder of logotherapy known / existential analysis, which is a form of existential counseling.
Logotherapy, sometimes also referred to as Frankl's Psychology, was named after Sigmund Freud's School for Psychoanalysis and Alfred Adler's School for Individual Psychology (Freud, Adler and Frankl were Jews, all three lived in Vienna, and for a while Adler lived across from Frankl's birthplace ). Just as Adler left Freud's school of psychoanalysis because of conflicts related to different theoretical perspectives, so did Frankl Adler's school of individual psychology. Frankl rejected Adler's doctrine of the “will to power” and Freud's “will to enjoy” as the main motivation in life and instead argued that the “will to meaning” was the main motivation of man.
The American Medical Society, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Psychological Association have officially recognized Frankl's Logotherapy as a scientifically sound school of psychotherapy. The Association for Humanistic Counseling, a division of the American Counseling Association, explicitly identifies Frankl (along with Adler, Carl Jung and Karen Horney) as a pioneer who had a decisive influence on the development of humanistic counseling.
This year marks the 75th anniversary of Frankls Man’s Search for Meaning. This acclaimed book tells of Frankl's experiences as a prisoner in the Nazi concentration camps during World War II. It also describes the concepts of logotherapy / existential analysis (like the other 38 books Frankl wrote). In a 1991 Library of Congress poll, American readers voted Man’s Search for Meaning one of the 10 most influential books of their lives. It currently appears on the “100 Books To Read In Life” list curated by the editors at Amazon Books. In 1997, when Frankl died, Man’s Search for Meaning had sold over 10 million copies and translated into 24 languages.
Yet few advisors and few other people understand the story of this bestseller. The purpose of this article, therefore, is to tell the story of this influential treatise and highlight Frankl's contributions to mental health counseling and logotherapy today as we celebrate the 75th anniversary of man's search for meaning.
The story of man's search for meaning
Because Man's Search for Meaning was Frankl's first book to attract national attention in the United States, many believe it was his first book. Likewise, many readers believe that Frankl developed the underlying principles of logotherapy during his 2.5 years (1942-1945) as a prisoner in four concentration camps, including Auschwitz. (Frankl's father, mother and brother were all murdered in concentration camps.)
In reality, the most important concepts of logotherapy / existential analysis were developed before the beginning of the Second World War. Between 1928 and 1930, while still studying medicine in Vienna, Frankl helped set up youth counseling centers because he wanted to serve young people. He specifically focused on youth suicide prevention. After Frankl had obtained his doctorate in psychiatry in 1930, he worked in the Steinhof Psychiatric Clinic (in Vienna), where he became head of the department for suicidal patients.
In 1940 Frankl joined the Rothschild Hospital in Vienna as head of the neurological department and worked on his first book, which outlined his thoughts and theories on logotherapy, which was then entitled "Medical Ministry". When Frankl moved to his first concentration camp in 1942, he attempted to smuggle a copy of his manuscript into the lining of his coat, but it was confiscated and destroyed. While suffering from typhoid and only had a pencil and a few stolen scraps of paper, Frankl focused on the future goal of getting his book published. During this time he began to reconstruct the basic ideas of the Medical Ministry in shorthand and was able to hide these notes until his release. This book, Frankl's first book, was published in German in 1946 and in English in 1955 under the title The Doctor and the Soul.
The first version of Man’s Search for Meaning, the book for which Frankl is best known, was also published in 1946 after Medical Ministry / The Doctor and the Soul. Frankl later stated that the book seemed to gush out of him about his experiences in the concentration camps. Originally it was supposed to be published anonymously. Only after much pressure from his friends did he associate his name with it and then add an explanation about logotherapy.
Logotherapy is based on the idea of recognizing the meaning of life and then imagining this end result or future goal and working towards it. Frankl in Man & # 39; s Search for Meaning reveals a time when he was depressed and in physical pain in a concentration camp and "forced" his mind to a future purpose where he put himself on the podium of a well-lit and enjoyable university lecture standing saw room. In front of him Frankl saw (in his imagination) an attentive audience who listened to him as he gave a lecture on the psychology of the concentration camps. Just as he found a future purpose in writing Medical Ministry / The Doctor and the Soul while enduring great suffering, Frankl also found a future purpose in writing Man’s Search for Meaning while enduring great suffering. The original title of the book, written in German, was A Psychologist Experienced the Concentration Camp. The title of the first English-language version, which was translated by Ilse Lasch in 1959, was From Death-Camp to Existentialism: A Psychiatrist’s Path to a New Therapy.
The most important precursor to the publication of Man’s Search for Meaning took place in 1957 when the Religion in Education (RIE) Foundation sponsored Frankl as part of a lecture tour to American universities. RIE director Randolph Sasnett and his wife Martena arranged a meeting where Frankl met Gordon Allport of Harvard University, a prominent psychologist who is now considered the founder of personality psychology. Sasnett persuaded Beacon Press to publish Frankl's book, but it was Allport's support that gave a big boost to the book's printing. When Frankl was revising his book for Beacon Press in 1962, its title was changed to Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy.
Allport wrote in the foreword that one of Frankl's great contributions to psychosocial counseling was asking clients: “Why don't you commit suicide?” Based on her answer, Frankl helped customers find their logo (a Greek word for "meaning") and based therapy on it. Allport also noted that, unlike many European existentialists, Frankl was not pessimistic. Allport noted that Frankl, a person who had experienced so much suffering, had a remarkably hopeful view of people's ability to overcome their predicament and predicament.
Frankl's experiences in the Nazi concentration camps, which he described in Man's Search for Meaning, were a confirmation of the concepts of logotherapy that he wrote about in Medical Ministry / The Doctor and the Soul. Essentially, the camps consisted of qualitative research and field observations on the three basic principles of logotherapy. First, that meaning exists and is discernible among even the most overwhelming and depressing life events. Second, the will to meaning is the main human motivation for life and a more robust and healthy motivator than the will to pleasure and the will to power as suggested by Freud and Adler, respectively. Third, nobody and nothing can take away human freedom to find meaning. Regardless of the circumstances, people can change their attitude (reframe) to an unchanging fate (e.g. the choice of dying and modeling when a person has an incurable disease).
After the end of the Second World War, Frankl was appointed head of the neurological department at the polyclinic in Vienna. During this time he did his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Vienna (second) as a doctor of philosophy. His dissertation dealt with the relationship between psychology and religion. In it, Frankl encouraged the use of Socratic dialogue (self-discovery discourse) with clients to help them interact with their noetic (spiritual) unconscious. This dissertation was finally published in German in 1948, the English version appeared in 1975 as The Unconscious God: Psychotherapy and Theology.
Frankl continued his professional and academic work in logotherapy throughout his life. He was rooted in a scholar / researcher-practitioner model, one foot firmly on science and research and another foot as a psychiatrist and counselor working with clients. Frankl wrote nearly 40 books and was the first non-American to receive the prestigious Oskar Pfister Award from the American Psychiatric Association for important contributions to religion and psychiatry. He was visiting professor at Harvard, Stanford and many other American universities.
Contributions to the modern era of mental health
Frankl's outstanding contribution in the field of mental health is the development of logotherapy, which postulates that people are motivated by a will for meaning or an inner urge to find and discover meaning in life.
Three basic principles of logotherapy are:
1) Life has meaning under all circumstances, including the most miserable.
2) The main motivation in life is our will to find meaning in life.
3) People are free to find meaning in what they do and what they experience, or at least in the attitude they take in a situation of unchanging suffering.
As Frankl noted in many of his writings, lectures and presentations, people can discover the meaning of life in three ways:
1) Through creativity – by creating a work or performing an act
2) By experiencing something or meeting someone
3) Through their attitude towards life and inevitable suffering
As Frankl outlines in Man’s Search for Meaning and justifies it in his concentration camp horror, everything can be taken from a person, only one thing – the ability to choose one's own attitude under all circumstances. Frankl called this the last of human freedoms.
Although Frankl cautioned against “prescribing” meaning to customers and was criticized by both Rollo May and Irvin Yalom for being too authoritarian towards customers (possibly an intercultural misinterpretation between the American and European cultures of May and Yalom), his work has continued to provide insights for those seeking meaning. In his writings, Frankl emphasized that counselors could help clients imagine three future areas in which meaning can be discovered.
The first area is creative activities that can occur in work, leisure and volunteer spaces. Frankl listed hobbies and centripetal leisure time – leisure values that lead a client to core values and meaning – as untapped resources to preoccupy meaning. Second, experiences in life such as encounters with art, nature and other people (especially people you love and who love you too) can reveal meaning. Throughout his life, Frankl has often written about his love for nature, both his quiet time in nature and his serious hobby of mountaineering. Third, attitudes toward unchangeable fate, often referred to by logotherapists as "attitude change intervention," can make sense. Essentially, this is a type of attitude reframing based on finding meaning in the moment and finding meaning in future actions.
This was demonstrated by Frankl when he "forced" his thoughts on abuse in the Nazi concentration camps for a future purpose (e.g. imagining giving a future lecture on the psychology of concentration camps at a university) and when he was seriously ill with typhus (e.g. while working on his future book Medical Ministry / The Doctor and the Soul). For this reason, Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning that logotherapy focuses on the future or the meanings that have yet to be fulfilled by the client. For this reason, he also asked his clients the specific question “Why don't you commit suicide?” And from their answer locate their meaning and then build therapy around future efforts related to that meaning. For this reason, Frankl had his customers write their eulogy or view themselves from their deathbed so that they could survey their lives in an imaginary state in order to discover meaning or future goals.
In connection with the development of logotherapy, Frankl also pioneered theoretical frameworks and interventions that have contributed to the broader professions of counseling and psychotherapy. For example, Frankl's academic focus on self-transcendence, explained in his book Will to Meaning, helps in helping clients surpass self or go. Frankl defined self-transcendence as the human ability to go beyond oneself in order to fulfill a purpose, to love and serve people. Today the idea of serving something greater than self, which can lead to an abundance of positive emotions, is a core axiom of positive psychology. Frankl suggested this more than 50 years ago, before there was positive psychology.
In connection with self-transcendence, Frankl also wrote about self-distancing, i.e. the ability to distance oneself from ourselves and to look at ourselves from the outside, such as using humor and laughing at ourselves instead of too seriously to be above ourselves. Frankl is also a pioneer in creating the paradoxical intent intervention, which he described as the technique of self-distancing. During a paradoxical intention, a counselor amplifies the client's emotional state and dysfunctional behavior to help the client understand the irrationality of the behavior or emotional response. This may include, for example, a client with insomnia staying up all night or asking a client with a pleasant personality to overdo it in a role-play with the counselor or assistant to please other people (sometimes in humorous Wise). Homework.
In the 1980 book Existential Psychotherapy, considered a classic for existential counseling students, and his most recent memoir, Becoming Myself, Irvin Yalom Frankl outlines fundamental and groundbreaking contributions to existentialism in connection with therapy. More recently, logotherapeutic concepts, sometimes referred to as "meaning-centered counseling," have been incorporated into cognitive behavioral therapy and positive psychology (see the research by Paul TP Wong, President of the Meaning-Centered Counseling Institute in Canada and editor of the International Journal of Existential Positive Psychology).
Seventy-five years after Frankl wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, his influence is still felt worldwide, with logotherapy training centers in Canada, Israel, Great Britain and Vienna. In the United States, the Viktor Frankl Institute of Logotherapy (based in Texas) offers continuing education hours and training courses that can lead to academic staff, diplomatic clinicians, or diplomats in logo philosophy (outside of health care) (see viktorfranklinstitute .org / Education).
Conclusion
At the end of the preface to Man’s Search for Meaning, Gordon Allport called the book a "jewel" and wrote that it provided a compelling introduction to the most important psychological movement of the era. As mentioned earlier, Allport commented that Frankl, a person who has seen so much suffering, has a remarkably hopeful view of people's ability to overcome suffering and pain. For this purpose and not to trivialize the suffering and dying suffered, we end this article with a hopeful thought about which Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning:
“One evening, when we were already dead tired, with soup bowls in hand, on the floor of our hut, a fellow prisoner rushed in and asked us to run to the meeting place and see the beautiful sunset. … After minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to the other: "How beautiful could the world be!"
In addition to the books mentioned in this article, information was obtained from the following sources:
Stephen Kalmar's “A Brief History of Logotherapy”, from Analecta Frankliana: Proceedings of the First World Congress of Logotherapy, 1982
Robert Leslies "The Story of a Bestseller", published in The International Forum for Logotherapy, 1990
Website of the Viktor Frankl Institute for Logotherapy in America (viktorfranklinstitute.org/about-viktor-frankl)
Jorm S / Shutterstock.com
****
Rodney B. This is a licensed mental health advisor and a certified therapeutic recovery specialist. He is Professor in the Department of Health, Recreation and Community Services and an Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Counseling at the University of Northern Iowa. Contact him at [email protected].
Cynthia Wimberly is Vice President and lecturer at the Viktor Frankl Institute for Logotherapy. She is a licensed professional counselor in Texas, a state certified counselor, and a state certified school counselor. Contact them at [email protected].
Counseling Today provides an overview of unsolicited articles written by members of the American Counseling Association. For writing guidelines and tips for accepting an article for publication, visit ct.counseling.org/feedback.
****
Opinions and statements in articles appearing on CT Online should not be construed as the opinions of the editors or guidelines of the American Counseling Association.
