The Int'l Journal of Logotherapy/Existential Analysis 6/1 (1998): "Man Alive"



	The following is the transcript of a television interview given to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1977; the host was Mr. Roy Bonisteel. We thank CBC for giving permission to print the text here. A videoclip containing large passages of this interview is here. MAN ALIVE ... VIKTOR FRANKL INT: Dr. Frankl, you spent 3 years in 4 concentration camps during the War, can you describe to me how you found meaning in life, how you found life worth-while after that kind of experience. FRANKL: My American publishers are used to come up with the story that I came out of Auschwitz with a new brand of psychotherapy, with a new system and the like. There is a mistake involved: I entered Auschwitz with my first book's full length manuscript hidden in my pocket. And in this this very manuscript - which later was published in America under the title The Doctor and the Soul - I developed the idea of the unconditional meaningfulness of life. So the idea that life is meaningful and remains meaningful under any conditions was something I had got prior to my concentration camp experiences. So I might say, this idea, this conviction of the unconditional meaningfulness of life was retained, it survived the camp experience, it is still a conviction, in spite of the suffering and all the dying around us in the concentration camp. And the concentration camp itself was serving, functioning as it were, merely as a testing ground to confirm - experientially and experimentally as it were - the justification of my conviction. INT: So it confirmed your conviction. But you saw people in there who obviously didn’t have meaning in their lives? Tell me about the ones who survived and the ones who were different - how did it confirm your theory? FRANKL: The lesson you could learn in Auschwitz and in other concentration camps, in the final analysis, was: those who were oriented toward a meaning, toward a meaning to be fulfilled by them in the future, were most likely to survive. And this has been confirmed afterwards by American Navy and Army psychiatrists - in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, in North Korean prisoner-of-war camps, recently in North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camps. At U.S. International University in San Diego, California, I had last year during the winter quarter, when I was serving on the faculty, as it happened, those three American Officers who had been for the longest period of time in North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camps - up to about 7 years. And we improvisingly set up a panel; and they really confirmed what I had said in my report on the concentration camp experience, Man's Search for Meaning - they reconfirmed it in essence: that the orientation toward the future - toward a task, a personal task, waiting for them to be fulfilled in their future; or another person whom they were loving, to be met again, to be reunited with again in the future - this was what was decisively upholding these people. The question was not just survival, but there had to be a why of survival. The question was survival for what; unless there was something or someone, a personal cause for whose sake to survive, survival was scarcely possible. INT: Most of us have never been in the concentration camp experience. We’ve never had to go through that horror and tragedy and so one would think that today it would be easier to find meaning in life - and yet, I sense that it’s more difficult in a sense today than it was in years past, do you think that? FRANKL: You are absolutely right. INT: Why is that. FRANKL: Because we are living in a society - either in terms of an affluent society or in terms of a welfare state as we in Austria are living in - anyway: these types of societies virtually satisfy, or at least they are out to satisfy and gratify each and every human need, except for one need - the most basic and fundamental need operant in man: the need for meaning. Consumer's societies, they are even creating needs, but the need for meaning - or, as I am used to referring to it, the will to meaning - remains unfulfilled. It is what I am used to calling recently the unheard cry for meaning. On the one hand, society is frustrating man’s will to meaning, on the other hand, psychology is neglecting this fact. If you go through the current motivation theories, you scarcely will find any reference to what is the most fundamental and basic concern of man: neither pleasure nor happiness, nor power nor prestige, but originally and basically his wish, his desire to find and fulfill a meaning in his life - or for that matter: in each single life situation confronting him. And if there is a meaning to fulfill, if he is aware, if he becomes cognizant of such a meaning - then he is ready to suffer, he is ready to offer sacrifices, he is ready to undergo tension, stress and so forth - without any harm being done to his health. But if there is no meaning available, no meaning in his visual field, then he takes his life. I was recently confronted with the statistics from an American university, regarding 60 students who had tried to commit suicide... INT: Very high... FRANKL: They were screened afterwards psychologically, and it turned out that 85 percent told the doctors the reason for their attempt was they couldn’t find a meaning in life. And among them, 93 percent were, obviously, psychologically and physically healthy; in good family relationships; in good economic conditions; and with satisfying academic records and grades and so forth.. INT: This is what I hear; I spend quite a bit of time with young people, in their teenage years, and a lot of them say they’re just simply bored. They’re bored with school, they’re bored with their parents, they’re bored with life, and what .. - I guess you would say what is the meaning of life. FRANKL: Neither parents nor school teachers are courageous enough to challenge them: don’t arouse tensions, don’t create tensions; don’t put stress on them. But even Hans Selye, the man in Montreal who created the concept of stress, recently has published a paper in which he says, stress is the salt of life, man needs tensions - I would say more cautiously what he needs is a sound amount of tension. Not too great tensions, not too little tension, but a dosage, a sound healthy dosage of tension, such as that tension which is established in a polar field in which one pole is represented by a man and the other pole by that unique and specific meaning which is waiting for him to be fulfilled by him, and exclusively by him. INT: So we shouldn’t be too upset about all the stresses and anxieties in our life. We shouldn’t... well, presume I come and say, look, doctor, how do I deal with all the anxieties and stress of my life? FRANKL: Can you imagine a situation for a human being which is more full of stress than Auschwitz? - And yet virtually all neurotic symptomology disappeared in Auschwitz. And the degree to which suicide took place, in Auschwitz and Dachau was astonishingly, surprisingly low, according to whoever wrote books - psychiatrists writing books on the psychology and psychopathology of concentration camp life. And on the other hand, in the welfare state of Austria a teacher showed me a list of questions his students, his pupils were allowed to ask him, written up without any inhibition, without giving their names thereon, absolutely anonymously. And the spectrum of questions ranged from the question, "does life exist on other plants or not" up to drug addiction, sexual problems and so forth. And you know what was top ranking on the list, as to the frequency of the questions? - Suicide! Among youngsters of 14 to 15 years of age, in a welfare state such as Austria - suicide! There were virtually no stress or tensions, because they are pampered, nobody allows himself to challenge them. What young people need are ideals and challenges, personal tasks and - in the first place - examples, personal examples; but not the cowards, the cowardly people who don’t venture to confront them with anything because they might become angry, because they are challenged. INT: I did an interview last year with Metropolitan Anthony Blum of London and he said exactly the same thing as you’re saying. He was a doctor during the... and he administered to survivors of concentration camps. He had a very rough life. And he said the only time in his life, his personal life he ever considered suicide was afterward, when he became rather well-off and affluent. FRANKL: This is well known, I have compared this with deep sea fish which, when they are brought up to the surface of the sea, are deformalized as it were. And this is also the greatest danger to divers, they must very slowly be brought up to an area of less tension, of less pressure. It is well known among neurologists and psychiatrists that placing too high demands on people is even less dangerous than placing too little demands on them. People are today not overdemanded, they are underdemanded. INT: Another thing that occurs to me though is that we can always find meaning in some of the traditional institutions we have going for us, the church for example; or the family. And these institutions seem to be diminishing. They have less importance, it seems to me, in our lives today. And this would frustrate our search for meaning, it seems. FRANKL: You are right in several respects. First of all, what I have described already 30 years ago, and predicted and foreseen, I might say: the emergence - and today the presence - of what I call the existential vacuum; the feeling of meaninglessness; the feeling of emptiness; a sense of futility which now takes over the place of inferiority feelings; the existential frustration which now takes over the place of sexual frustrations in contrast to the times of Sigmund Freud. Now, this mass neurosis, meaninglessness, is to be explained, as I see it, mainly in two directions. First, in contrast to an animal, man is not told by drives and instincts what he simply must do. Furthermore, in contrast to man in former times, today he is no longer told by the traditions and traditionally and universally held values what he should do. Now neither knowing what he must do nor what he should do, he sometimes seems no longer to know what he basically wishes to do. And what is the consequence? Either he just wishes to do what other people are doing - this is conformism; or else he just does what other people wish him to do - and this is totalitarianism. Now this is the origin of the existential vacuum. But you see, since traditions are on the wane, traditions are crumbling - there is a decay of traditions, not only in the field of religion, but generally - those people who are most affected by this loss of traditional values are naturally the youngsters. And this can be evidenced. There are four tests, logotherapeutic tests, developed by former students of mine. With these you can measure the degree of meaning orientation, the degree of one's will to meaning dominating one's life, and on the other hand also the existential frustration, the frustration of his will to meaning, his feeling of meaninglessness. And it was evidenced by several empirically-based, statistically-based research projects that youngsters in fact are most afflicted by the sense of emptiness and meaninglessness. So you were right on intuitive grounds, as has been tested by my students. INT: But in terms of our traditional values and our religious institutions on the wane as we say - can one find meaning in life without a faith in God? FRANKL: You see, I said before, there is an unconditional meaningfulness of life. I’ve not yet had an opportunity to buttress... INT: Go ahead... FRANKL: ...this my personal conviction. But anticipatingly, I would like to say that meaning can be found by each and every person, also by a person who is not religious. I would concede personally that it is easier to find meaning in life if you are a religious person. But on the other hand I would have to add, to push forward immediately by adding, that you cannot command, you cannot order anyone to believe. INT: I see.. FRANKL: Belief, or faith, must grow within yourself - organically. You have to let it grow; you just shouldn’t contribute to the repression of faith. But in principle each and every person can find a meaning in life. And this again has been empirically corroborated. I have at home a list of 17 authors, people who have written their dissertations on this subject - among them two, as it happens, from the University in Ottawa . And to sum up what has been evidenced empirically by tests and statistics as I said before is: that meaning can be found by each and every person, irrespective of his age; irrespective of his sex; irrespective of his educational background; irrespective of his IQ; irrespective of his personal character structure or psychological makeup; even irrespective of environment - just think of Auschwitz, of prisons, and of people who are very successful and get bored. And finally, it turned out that meaning is available to man in principle irrespective of whether or not he is religious - and if he is religious, to which denomination he belongs. And remarkable enough: the last findings mentioned by me - we are indebted for them to priests who were empirically making research in psychological university departments. INT: Let’s explore just for a moment, how we find that meaning. Let’s say that I’m just an average sort of chap, I have never been through the concentration camp, so I haven’t been tested through suffering. For example, I live a very comfortable life; perhaps I don’t have a belief in God, maybe I’m bored with my job, maybe I’m bored with my family. But you say I can still find meaning in my life. And it’s important I find it. Where do I find it? What do I latch on to. I mean, I’m just suggesting we may have viewers who’re going through this ... FRANKL: I am tired of repeating and saying again and again: there are three main avenues, as it were, leading up to meaning fulfillment. The first way, the first road on which you may arrive at meaning to find and to fulfill, is through work, through creating a work or doing a deed. Second, through love, through experiencing someone in his very uniqueness - and this means loving. Love is more than just sex; on the contrary, human sex is more than mere sex - precisely to the extent to which it serves as a bodily incarnation, I may say, a mode of expression, the physical mode of expression, of one’s love, of a personal togetherness, of getting hold of another person in his very uniqueness. And seizing the uniqueness of another person is equivalent to, is the very definition of love. - Anyway, you may enrich your inner life through experiencing something - culture, nature, art or whatever; through research, through experiencing something or encountering someone in his very uniqueness - in other words, through love. Work and love are the main avenues leading up to meaning - but: If need be - if you are confronted with a fate you no longer can change, if you are confronted, say, with an incurable disease, with an inoperable cancer: even then you may find a meaning. You may even find the deepest possible, the highest conceivable meaning, because you then have an opportunity to bear witness of the human potential at its best. Of the most human of all human capacities, which is: to turn a tragedy into a personal triumph, to turn your predicament into an achievement on the human level. In other words, life is potentially meaningful literally up to one’s last breath, to its last moment. Even in extremis and in ultimis, as the theologians would put it; this means: in extreme life situations - just think of Auschwitz, and up to the last moment. Let me quote no more or less than just the title of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' latest book, ”Death, The Final Stage of Growth.” So life is potentially meaningful under any condition. The American Journal of Psychiatry once wrote up a review on a book of mine; and there you find this sentence: "Dr. Frankl’s message is the belief, the unconditional faith, in the unconditional meaningfulness of life." - Right, but it's more than faith. When I was 15 years of age, I got this glimpse, this insight, just intuitively. But lately it has been corroborated on firm and solid empirical grounds, through factorial analysis of many thousands of questionnaires, of subjects being screened psychologically, the data being computerized and so forth. So this is not something philosophical, suspended in the air. These are solid facts and these are burning problems, problems burning under the fingernails of our youngsters. INT: So we can find meaning in three ways, through work, love,... FRANKL: ... and potentially in suffering. But only in suffering if need be - you remember: I said 'if need be'. To shoulder one’s cross unnecessarily, to endure suffering which is unnecessary - this doesn’t yield any meaning. If you can change a situation you will have to. If you can make surgery on a cancer you have to undergo or perform surgery. But after all, man is a mortal being. We have to die, and before dying we have ineluctably to suffer sometimes - as a medical doctor I must confess this. So there is certainly no one who is spared unchangeable situations. It could be, perhaps for a couple of months, unemployment - and still life retains a meaning. In the Thirties, at the time of the world-wide economic crisis I dealt extensively with youngsters caught in unemployment situations, and I found out: unemployment itself is not what was weighing heavily on their souls; but it was the mistake they had fallen prey to, the mistake that having no job means having no meaning, means being useless! At the moment I had these youngsters turn to some organizations - such as Father Tom’s Youth Corps and so forth -, they had a meaning to fulfill - even without getting one cent -, and the depression was gone! In other words, what we need, you see, is not bread alone. And what the unemployed need is not welfare alone, they need a meaning - and a meaning can be found everywhere, in the smallest hut. On the other hand you find people who are millionaires and billionaires and they have no meaning, they kill themselves. My former assistant during a teaching period at Harvard, Rolf von Eckhartsberg, could show in his dissertation that people 20 years after graduation at Harvard, having made wonderful careers, being very successful, didn’t find a meaning in their lives. - And on the other hand I can present you heaps of letters which due to unknown reasons I always get from American prisons, letters to the effect: only here in prison, a few hundred yards from the electric chair, I have found, at last found meaning in my life, only here! And even more: people say, I am happy, I have made peace with myself and my life, right here in prison, under these conditions! So that now we might understand how come that I was justified in saying: meaning can be found irrespective even from the environmental situation, of a given situation; it depends on yourself. And it depends on whether or not you are exposed to an indoctrination - on American campuses or on analytic couches - an indoctrination to the effect that man is nothing but a mechanism, man is nothing but the outcome of conditioning or psychodynamic processes, that man is nothing but just a computer. If you indoctrinate people along these lines, small wonder if they are purged from any enthusiasm or idealism. I recently had to address as guest speaker the annual meeting of the International P.E.N. club - the international club of writers, novelists, playwrights and poets. And I implored these authors of novels and dramas and so forth... - I implored them: if you are not capable of immunizing your readers against nihilism and despair, please at least refrain from inoculating them with your own cynicism. INT: This is, seems to me, part of the problem we face today in this age we live: the media and the writers of drama that we watch on TV, read in the papers, they’re not really using the kind of language that deals with what you are speaking of. They are using a language that’s a surface, a kind of ephemeral language. We don’t talk about this enough, do we? FRANKL: You don’t venture to confront people with their own inner vacuum and emptiness and meaninglessness. And instead of making your mass media - and all the facilities and potentialities inherent in them, available in them - instead of making them a therapy, you use them as the reflection of your own symptoms. And also, you think low, you think small of man, you see? What is necessary is to think great of man. At my age of 72 now, a couple of years ago I started taking flying lessons, whenever I was in California . And once my flight instructor told me: if you are starting here and wish to land there, and you have a cross-wind condition, you will fall prey to a drift and land south of that place. So you have to intend compass direction north of the place of destination; you have to embark on what we pilots call crabbing. And the same with man. If you see man only that high, you are corrupting him. He will deteriorate; he will become worse, he will drift, as it were, morally. But if you think of him high, then you make him arrive where he can be. In other words: "If we take man as he is, we make him worse. On the other hand, if we take him as he should be, we help him become what he can be." - But this is no longer something my flight instructor has told me, but this is a verbal, literal quotation from Goethe. INT: I’d like to ask you once more about suffering. I’m glad to hear that you feel we don’t necessarily have to suffer in order to have meaning. Because in an interview I did with Elie Wiesel... FRANKL: We just can make the best of suffering, if need be. INT: ... I was interested that Elie Wiesel said that suffering is contrary to his Jewish upbringing. He does not see suffering as a necessary part of life, as a matter of fact it’s a bad part of life, but you see value in suffering - a certain extent .. FRANKL: First: the potential value; a value offer, a meaning offer you have to use. Second: not in each and every kind of suffering. There is a famous Jewish philosopher - who, incidentally, was the best and greatest friend of Franz Kafka, and has to be credited for the fact that Franz Kafka’s works had not been destroyed after Kafka’s death - I speak of Max Brod. And Max Brod, in a relatively unknown philosophical book transpiring Jewish philosophy - specifically Jewish philosophy -, was differentiating between noble and unnoble suffering. Noble suffering is suffering that you are not spared and cannot change. Then you have to transcend it, you have to make the best of it, as I said before in trivial terms; you have to turn it into an achievement; and this achievement then - if you have succeeded in bringing it about... this personal achievement... is the highest possible achievement of a man. No animal can do anything like this. No animal asks the question of whether its life has a meaning or not. No animal is even capable of turning a predicament into an achievement - man alone. But if he so does, then he has reached the peak of whatever man is capable of. INT: Doctor, you very much underline the theme of our series: the title of the show is Man Alive, and it seems to me for man to be fully alive he has to find the kind of meaning that you’re talking about. And yet there are people who go through life feeling, "well, I can make out in this life, I can exist in this life, I can make do, because there is an afterlife, there is something better I’m going to." - Yet he’s not really living to his fullness here, is he? FRANKL: Certainly not. But I would like to argue with such an individual. And I wouldn’t on a priori grounds dismiss the justification of such a belief. But let me instead in more positive terms react to your question, by pointing out that as I see it, we have to try to maintain the potential meaningfulness of life in spite of its transitoriness. So many patients have confronted me with the question: "But, Doctor, after all, everything will be over. Everything is transitory. And then, what meaning will remain?" And as I am used to saying: what is transitory are only the potentialities; are only the opportunities: to fulfill a meaning, be it by doing something, be it by loving someone, be it by shouldering courageously and honestly a suffering you cannot avoid; and even facing your death in a dignified manner - in your style as it were. But once we have actualized such a transitory potentiality, once we have used the opportunity to do a deed, to love someone, to give ourselves to a task or to another person, once we have used the opportunity to transcend our predicament into a human achievement, then we have rescued all this meaning, we have rescued it into the past; we have safely delivered and deposited it in the past. Nobody can deprive and rob us of what we have put into the past. The deed done; a love loved; a suffering honestly gone through is something indelible. We usually see only the stubble field of the past. But what we don’t see, what we overlook, is the full barn, are the full granaries into which we have rescued our past, our deeds, our experiences, our sufferings - the harvest of our lives. I found a formulation for this in the Book of Job, where it says: you are going to your grave as a shock of corn is brought in, in its season. So the past is the safest form of being. It is over, but in the past everything remains, we have eternalized everything. And rather than looking for a future life or an afterlife I would say what is important is the sense of personal responsibleness; the feeling that I am responsible for what I am putting into the past - and then, after I have succeeded in so doing, nobody can undo what I have done. - I wonder if I could make myself understood... INT: I understand. One other area though, that you talked earlier about, about the involvement with each other, for caring for another person, which would give meaning to life - loving another person: we see in our society today that we’ve become very individualistic, very materialistic. There’s also a society, and I’m thinking of the Chinese society, where they are concerned about each other, they work for the community, for the state, so perhaps this is how they find meaning. FRANKL: For the future of the nation... INT: For the future of the nation. Is this a preferable system? FRANKL: You see: many years ago, I once was lecturing at one of the American universities, and a Freudian stood up in the question and answer period and told me: "Dr. Frankl, I just returned from Moscow. And I must say I now understand what you mean: in America we are too much concerned - we are, as it were, cultivating our neuroses, and we are idolizing psychoanalysis. The incidence, the occurrence of neurotic illness behind the Iron Curtain is much lower; and I think this is due to the fact that they over there have tasks to complete." And then, a year later, I was lecturing behind the Iron Curtain myself, at a Communist university, among Communist psychiatrists. I told them this story, and they were smugly smiling - but I told them, please don’t smile too early. It's true, you might here have more tasks to complete, but, you know: the Americans have retained their freedom to choose their tasks. - How beautiful would it be to synthesize, to combine having a task and the freedom to choose one’s task. Anyway: you have rightly put your finger on the fact that what an individual, a human being needs is what I’m used to calling self-transcendence. That is to say: being concerned with oneself or one’s own prestige, or one’s own happiness, is self-defeating. Forgive my contradicting the American Declaration of Independence, in which you find the phrase ".. pursuit of happiness". I deem that 'pursuit of happiness' is a contradiction in terms. Because happiness can never be really be pursued. Happiness must ensue; happiness is a side effect, happiness is a byproduct and must remain a byproduct of meaning fulfillment, of your dedication to a task, a cause greater than yourself, or a person other than yourself. And this becomes most conspicuous in sexual neurosis, where precisely to the extent to which someone is hunting, chasing, pursuing sexual happiness or pleasure - he is doomed to failure. Be it a male patient who wishes to demonstrate his sexual potency - to the same extent he is likely to wind up with impotence. A female patient, precisely to the degree to which she wishes to demonstrate to herself that she is fully capable of orgasm - precisely to that extent is winding up with frigidity. On the other hand, the more you give yourself, the more you forget yourself, in love or in work, for the sake of a cause to serve or a person to love, to the very extent you will become happy - precisely by not caring for happiness, precisely by overlooking and forgetting whether you are happy or not. It is the same with our eyes. Our eyes’ capacity to do their job, which is to perceive visually the surrounding world, ironically enough is contingent on the eye’s incapacity to see itself. When does my eye see itself, or anything of itself? - When I’m afflicted with a glaucoma, I am seeing rainbow halos around the lights: then my eye perceives its own glaucoma. If I am suffering from a cataract, I see a cloudiness: this cloud is something which my eye sees, perceives of itself. Normally an eye doesn’t see itself, but the world; and the more it sees, really sees of itself, the more its visual function is impaired. It’s the same with man. Man becomes himself, man is actualizing his self, man is human precisely to the extent to which he is not concerned with himself or anything within himself, but living out his self-transcendence - in that he is serving a cause, fulfilling a meaning, or loving another human being. INT: Well, you know Doctor, I’m not a psychiatrist, nor am I a theologian. And yet it seems to me that there is an awful lot of religion in this logotherapy that you talk about. What is the difference between logotherapy and religion? FRANKL: A great difference. Because the aim of any psychotherapy, as a secular methodology, is to offer mental health; while the aim of the pastor, priest or rabbi is not primarily any mental hygiene; but even at the price of arousing more tensions he will wrestle, like Jacob did with the angels, with that person for the sake of salvation or whatever you call it. There is a lot of difference! And you must understand that as the one who happens to have created that system called logotherapy and as a psychiatrist I have to see to it and stick to it that, say, logotherapy be available to each and every person and patient; that it be available to the religious patient as well as to the irreligious one. And more than that: that it be usable in the hands of each and every doctor or therapist, the agnostic as well as a religiously oriented person. Because otherwise I would contradict the Hippocratic oath that I had to swear, to the effect that I am available for each and every suffering being. And so I cannot discriminate between religious and irreligious people. INT: No, it is just that you use so many religious terms as you talk, not necessarily language, but your phrases have a religious connotation.. FRANKL: For instance? INT: Well, that you have to care for the other person, not yourself, that you don’t pursue happiness - it’ll come to you ... FRANKL: This is something human, this is an anthropological fact, not a theological issue! I made it explicit that to the extent to which you are forgetting yourself by giving you are human. Now is it a religious issue if I evidence this in cases of male impotence or female frigidity? INT: (laughs) No. FRANKL: Small wonder; why shouldn't the theologians for several thousand years have become cognizant and aware of human fact. - But still they are human facts. The theologians put them in a broader view; they add another dimension. But the religious dimension is something we psychiatrists are not allowed to enter. We would immediately weaken our message, because people would say, now he starts preaching. But as long as I can corroborate my conviction in the way of confirmation on empirical grounds, you cannot just dismiss it and do it away as inspirational thinking or writing. And this is very important today. It might be religious in the long run, but implicitly and unintentionally - all the better for religion, for both religion and psychotherapy! But the distinction has to be made; one must not confound the dimensions. There are so many theologians dabbling in the field of psychiatry that I wouldn’t like to contribute to such confusion by starting dabbling in the field of theology. INT: (laughs) FRANKL: And you, on this continent, you are guru-fying psychiatrists. You expect them to have the answers. We psychiatrists don’t have the answers. The meaning of one’s life has to be determined by each individual himself, nobody can take off his shoulders the "wrestling" with this question: what is the specific meaning of my life? He might be aided by his personal conscience - provided he is listening carefully to his conscience. But no psychiatrist can take this over, no psychotherapist is allowed and entitled to impose any value system or meaning direction on the patient. But there’s also no need - we psychiatrists don’t even know up to today, say, what the real cause of schizophrenia is - even less what the true cure for schizophrenia is. We are not omniscient. Even less are we omnipotent. The only divine attribute we may claim for ourselves is that we are omnipresent, we are on each show, we are on Man Alive shows and so forth; we are everywhere! But you, particularly - forgive me for speaking out -, but particularly you Americans should stop divinizing psychiatry, and you should rather start re-humanizing psychiatry. INT: Thank you very much! I realize, as you say it’s up to each and every one of us, no matter who we are, where we are or what conditions we are in. You’ve told us what we can do, and I thank you so much for being on our program. FRANKL: Thank you. INT: Dr. Frankl, young people today seem particularly to have trouble finding goals and purpose in life. Why this generation particularly of young people? And what would you say to them? FRANKL: First of all: this is no neurosis; this is no illness, but this is a manifestation of the best available in man, the best observable in man: intellectual honesty and sincerity. If one doesn’t simply take over, out from the hands of tradition, the answers to one’s question, 'what is the meaning of my life,' then this, after all, speaks in a certain sense in favor of this individual. But you see, if someone is not only questing for a meaning to his life but even questioning that there is such a meaning, he should, if he is courageous enough not to rely on traditions but to find an answer of his own, he should match this personal courage with patience. Rather than taking his life out of this despair he should be able patiently to wait until sooner or later, meaning might dawn upon him. But the aftermath, the side effects of this despair so much spread among youngsters is a crisis which sometimes is erroneously referred to in terms of illness or madness. I remember that once I was invited by the student body of an American university to speak to them; and they insisted that the title be, ”Is the new generation mad?”. - Now, I couldn’t change the title, so I had to take this challenge. And when I had to take a taxi to that university, the driver asked me, what are you going to speak on? I said ”Is the new generation mad?”. He was laughing. - "Don’t laugh," I said, "I make you a proposal. I take over your car and you take over my lecture." - "Oh, I couldn’t do that." I said, "I come from Vienna , and you certainly have your finger much more on the pulse of the psyche of the time than me." And he said, I still couldn’t do that. I then said, "Frankly tell me, what is your opinion, is the new generation mad?" - And you know what he said, as if it were shot out of a pistol? - "Of course they are mad - they kill themselves, they kill each other, and they take dope!" By this he had justly put his finger on the three aspects of the mass neurosis of today. They kill themselves: depression, up to suicide. Just consider the staggering suicide rates, particularly among the youngsters. In the United States today among students the suicide is, next to traffic accidents, the most frequent cause of death. First, depression; second, they kill each other: aggression. You have the staggering rates of juvenile delinquency of violence! Third, they take dope: and there you have, after depression and aggression, addiction. The "mass neurotic triad", as I am used to calling it. And there is evidence, empirical evidence, in the western and eastern world, and also in the southern world, there is evidence that all these things are basically due to the wide-spread, world-wide feeling of meaninglessness pervading our culture and particularly the souls of our youngsters. INT: Ok, you’re giving us the description, and the prescription is to get meaningful - to find meaning in your life. You mentioned earlier about getting out of yourself. And I would suspect this is something the teenagers could do, because they do tend to turn in, don’t they, they’re very self-conscious at that age - aware of themselves. How do they, and older people too, get out of themselves? FRANKL: You see, there is also empirical evidence to the effect that they are too much concerned with self-interpretation and self-actualization. Both of course are detrimental. They obviate what I call self-transcendence. You should, and may, actualize yourself. But you can actualize yourself only to the extent to which you turn outward! And even Abraham Maslow, the man who more than anyone else propagated and promulgated the concept of self-actualization, in his latest works before he died was conceding and agreeing with my criticism: that self-actualization can never be aimed at as a target. If you aim at it you are missing it. The same as with happiness, with pleasure and so forth. Now, you cannot tell any patient: please, forget yourself. You know how he will wind up? The same way as the greatest philosopher of history, Immanuel Kant did. Immanuel Kant once noticed that his servant was a thief, and he had to dismiss him. But he was very much accustomed to him, and so he wanted to forget him. You know what he did - the great philosopher? He wrote on a piece of paper, "Lampe" - this was the name of his servant, "Lampe must be forgotten." And he put the paper on the wall opposite to his desk. Of course, in this way he was preventing himself from forgetting Lampe. You cannot forget anything, least of all yourself, unless you are devoting yourself to a task, a concrete personal task. Also the will to meaning cannot be elicited unless someone is elucidating a meaning, the meaning itself. And this is most important because otherwise, it’s always the same as with the boomerang. When I was once giving a lecture at the University of Melbourne, Australia, they gave me a boomerang as a souvenir, a genuine boomerang. When it was handed over to me I suddenly had what is called in psychology according to Karl Buehler, an aha- experience. Suddenly I had the insight, this is the very symbol of human existence and the self-transcendent quality of the human reality. Because generally it is assumed that it is the job of a boomerang to return to the hunter - but that’s not true, the Australian told me. Because only that boomerang returns to the hunter which in the first place had failed the target, the prey! INT: (laughs) FRANKL: The same with man. Only that type of people are so intent on themselves and so eager to contemplate and to observe themselves, to actualize themselves, to interpret themselves, who in the first place had missed - not a target but - a mission in their life; who had not found a meaning outside of them; or a human being other than themselves. This is self-transcendence: not being primarily concerned with oneself, but something other than oneself, or still better someone other than oneself. INT: One more question: earlier when we were talking you used the phrase ”the unconscious god”. Just what do you mean by that? FRANKL: It is the title of one of my latest books. I thereby just refer to the fact, which I’ve come across ever more throughout my many years of psychiatric practice, that even irreligious people are, in their unconscious depth, religious - of course in the broadest sense of the word. But once you subscribe to a statement once made by Albert Einstein to the effect that having found an answer to the question for a meaning to life means to be religious; once you subscribe to a definition of religion in this broadest sense you are justified to assume that each and every person, unconsciously and in a very universal way, may be religious. And sometimes you may also evidence that this, not only unconscious but repressed, religiousness may well result in certain forms of neurotic illness. So the belief of Sigmund Freud that religion is a neurosis of mankind may in a way be even reversed: inasmuch as we may come across cases in which, on the contrary, a neurosis is the result of a repressed religious desire and longing in an individual. But certainly this should not entice anyone in now frantically embracing and espousing religion, and because institutionalized religion is as it were out-of-fashion, to follow each and every fad - and particularly it's fashionably to embrace and espouse eastern forms of religion. I have a lot of understanding and I am very sympathetic for Eastern mysticism and meditation techniques, but all that cannot be achieved and accomplished upon command, upon order, upon demands placed upon you, not even by will, but only spontaneously as it were. And you should also not neglect the fact that Eastern religion by and large is different from our Western mind inasmuch as the Western mind... may I say Western mind? Does it make sense? INT: Yes, Yes, yes it does... FRANKL: ...the Western mind, as far as it is oriented towards religion, is oriented toward a deeply personalized... INT: That’s right, that’s right... FRANKL: ...religion, you see - rather than an impersonal religion. Most conspicuous this fact becomes in the phenomenon of prayer: in prayer you are addressing, you are speaking towards an entirely and absolutely personal entity rather than just a cosmic entity or being. I would say, prayer is not a station-to-station but rather a person-to-person call, if I might say so. And this fact must not be neglected, that our Western minds are very much attached to a personal way of religion. The contrary to institutionalized religion is rather personalized religion - but both can be combined, and it is in the responsibility of each thinking individual to come up with the synthesis of both. There is a place for personalized religion within institutional religion - and also vice versa. But on the other hand, as long as you depict deity in terms of someone who is mainly and primarily concerned with having as many believers in him as possible - and at that, believers in the strict sense of a certain denomination -, you will fail, you will not attract the religious depth or the deep religious feelings in an individual. He will rather become disgusted, because he conceives of God in a different way: as someone caring, as someone unconditionally loving him rather than someone who is eager to have the greatest number of believers in the strict sense. And that is why I think that one should do away and overcome the habit that one denomination is fighting or ridiculing or arguing against another denomination. You see, all of them - of these types of denominations or denominational activities, will in the long run lose. I am used to comparing - perhaps it’s a sacrilege - comparing religions with languages. INT: How do you mean? FRANKL: There are different languages; but no one can say that he is content that his own mother tongue is superior to other languages, simply because you may arrive at the truth in each language; you may err, go astray, in each language; you may even lie in each language. So there is no mutual superiority or inferiority, respectively. And the same holds for religion or the individual denominations. There simply cannot be any superiority. There’s certainly one truth, I concede, I admit, but what I also would have to add is that noone is ever justified in contending that it is he and he alone in whose hands truth lies. INT: Thank you, sir. Thank you very much.