Man needs meaning, more than he needs pleasure or status.

According to Sigmund Freud, one of the basic instincts in human beings is to pursue pleasure and to avoid pain. According to Alfred Adler, people derive their self-worth from social relationships and therefore seek status. Labeling Freud’s view “the will to pleasure” and Adler’s “the will to power,” Frankl maintains that the deeper drive in human beings is the “will to meaning”—that is, the hunger for a purpose in life. Lack of meaning, leading to boredom and despair, is a common condition, a characteristic ailment of nihilistic modern culture. There is no single, correct formula for meaning in one’s life, any more than there is a single, universal best move in chess. “One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment.” However, there are three broad categories of meaning: (1) meaning found in creating something grand or achieving something impressive; (2) meaning found in an experience (of goodness, truth or beauty) or in an encounter with another person—that is, in love; and finally, (3) meaning found in suffering, either by enduring it in order that someone else may be spared it, or else simply as an ordeal to be faced bravely and with dignity. A patient of Frankl’s found encouragement in the thought that because his wife died before him, she did not have to experience the grief afflicting him. And a young American who broke his neck in a diving accident became an inspiration to others by living out the motto “I broke my neck, it didn’t break me.”

One is always free to choose how to respond to one’s circumstances.

Frankl rails against the modern view of human beings as mechanisms whose behavior is determined by biological, psychological, and sociological forces. “The existential vacuum which is the mass neurosis of the present time can be described as a private and personal form of nihilism; for nihilism can be defined as the contention that being has no meaning.” Frankl regards this view as a frequent cause of unhealthy boredom and of depression. Frankl’s antidote for this condition is the realization that human beings always remain free to choose how they will respond to their circumstances. Once cannot predict how this or that person will decide. Frankl relates that among the Capos in the camp there were a few who retained some capacity for kindness, and there was even a camp commandant whose humane dealings with inmates led some of them to protect him when the war ended. Someone who first chooses evil may later choose good. Frankl gives an example of this, as well: a man who was virtually Satanic in his treatment of mental patients during the war became, by the time he died in a Soviet prison, one who encouraged others, and was remembered as “the best of comrades” to his fellow prisoners. In Frankl’s view, the freedom to choose one’s response to circumstance endows human beings with innate moral worth. “Therefore, a residue of freedom, however limited it may be, is left to man in neurotic and even psychotic cases. Indeed, the innermost core of the patient’s personality is not even touched by a psychosis. An incurably psychotic individual may lose his usefulness but yet retain the dignity of a human being.”

Some things can be achieved only when they are not consciously attempted.

Frankl believes that Freud’s pleasure principle is self-defeating, a “fun-spoiler,” because “Pleasure is, and must remain, a side-effect or by-product, and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it is made a goal in itself.” Frankl offers sexual fulfillment as a case in point: focusing on one’s own performance and pleasure generates anxiety, which diminishes the likelihood of sexual satisfaction. (Frankl does not consider other pleasures, such as those of music and other artistic pursuits, where conscious effort is essential.) Frankl’s term for the self-defeating character of certain intentions is “hyper-intention.” Its therapeutic flip side is paradoxical intention, by which something is won through the effort to achieve its opposite. Paradoxical intention is frequently prescribed in logotherapy as a form of treatment for neurotic disorders. Frankl offers case histories as evidence for the success of this approach. One patient achieved orgasm by focusing on her partner’s pleasure. Another patient was cured of excessive, involuntary sweating by resolving to sweat as much as possible. A third patient was able to relieve career-threatening writer’s cramp by trying to write illegibly. A fourth person (not a patient of Frankl’s), who suffered from a severe stutter, once tried to stutter to elicit sympathy and found that he could not do it. Finally, Frankl used paradoxical intention with a woman who suffered from crippling obsessive-compulsive disorder. Her symptoms were not entirely relieved, but her anxiety lessened enough to enable her to joke about her obsessive thoughts when they arose.

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