Logotherapy and Curly's One Thing

The book I just read has been translated into twenty-four languages.  Twelve million copies are in print.  And as of this morning there are over 7500 reviews on Amazon.  Is there anything more I can add to the world wide commentary on Viktor Frankl’s classic, “Man’s Search for Meaning”?  Probably not, but regardless, my intent today is to write a review in the midst of these numerous threads of thought that might perhaps edge in on something different. That said, let’s begin...

Frankl’s great book is a revelation to me in that I definitely believe, some 70 years later, his theories still have the power to transform the treatment of mental health patients. Frankl’s hard won Logotherapy, the approach he developed in the 30's and 40's, still has legs.  In particular, his belief that those with anxiety and depression can find relief by simply discovering some meaning in their lives.  Interestingly, and anecdotally, this can happen with just some basic observation and a few strategically placed words that can shift a patient's perspective directly into recovery mode.  Easier, perhaps, said than done.  In the movie "City Slickers", with Billy Crystal and Jack Palance, the role of Curly being played by Palance (who incidentally won an Oscar for his role) tried to get Mitch (Billy Crystal's character) to find the meaning in his life.  If we are not careful, we might fall into the easy trap. Curly's famous line in the movie about finding the "One Thing", seems to ring true in a book entitled "Man's Search for Meaning".  This is about the farthest from Frankl's philosophy as it can get…No offense Curly.  Yet the search may be easier than we think, just not in Curly's way, if we can lower some of our natural defenses.

Can it work?  Will it work?  Let's find out… But first, let’s understand it…and give it a try later on as I wrap up this discussion.

Imagine first, what everyone must know about the Holocaust.  Whether you’ve read about it in “The Diary of a Young Girl (Anne Frank)”, or you’ve been exposed to Concentration Camps through documentaries or movies, or perhaps you’ve visited the Holocaust museum in Washington DC, or physically been to one of the dark places,  like  Auschwitz, preserved in Europe to remember these dark times.  The first part of Frankl’s book, entitled, “Experiences in a Concentration Camp” is exactly what Frankl says. This part contains his first hand experience in German death camps.  Altogether he was in four different camps and somehow survived to write about it. It’s worth noting, as he certainly does, that blind luck had more to do with his survival more than his metal attitude. If you can imagine, one in 29, souls survived those camps.  That's Frankl's number, I didn't check actual statistics.  One does not give positive attitude any credit under those deathly odds.  And he does not credit his attitude though some have claimed with a certain insensitivity, that he has.  He is not casting undue blame on the millions who perished for being responsible for their own demise.  This is an unfair and insensitive characterization of what Frankl is telling us.  That he survived to tell his story has less to do about his actual survival and more to do about his unique observational platform.  Prior to his internment in the concentration camps he was already a psychiatrist of note.  During his informative years in Austria, over a four-year period, he interviewed more than 12,000 patients--most following their attempt at suicide.  This is the 1930’s and the fact that Frankl talked with so many patients with depression and suicidal tendencies is quite incredible.  How many therapists today have had that sort of clinical experience?  We send our family’, or perhaps go ourselves, to therapists and doctors who prescribe medications based on a textbook diagnosis. This is a sad state of affairs but that discussion is for another day.

Fast forward into Auschwitz.  If you can imagine a doctor of note with such a storehouse of human knowledge pertaining to mental health conditions as he is personally walking within the gray huts, snow, mud, and fence line of a death camp. Where everybody, including him, have been stripped of anything remotely human, as they are freezing, starving, and waiting to die, but taking mental notes of the human behavior occurring under such extreme and dire circumstances.  The fact that he was the observer is like having the prescience to send a great poet such as Whitman or Wadsworth to view the great plateau of Olympus Mons.  This is like sending a great engineer such as Tesla or Edison to examine technology on an alien world, or like sending Stephen Hawking to an event horizon to study Black Holes.   If we are not careful, we might ascribe even greater meaning to Frankl’s survival than permitted by the math alone.  Why he, among millions of others, with his observational abilities, as opposed to someone less learned in the human condition, survived?  Arguably one of the greatest emerging minds in psychology sent to a Concentration Camp.  Think about it for a second, Frankl was living and working in Vienna, Austria, as was Sigmund Freud, et al.  Vienna in the 1920s was to psychology what Paris was to the art world in the same decades. As an eminent medical scholar, he had the ability to leave Austria when it was clear the war was coming.  He chose to stay and serve his patients.  And here he was present to observe  and miraculously actually did survive on the slimmest of margins.  And not only did he survive he has given us his story.  The world is a richer place for his observations and his new insight into psychology.

Let’s start with the word Logos.  Frankl says “logos” in Latin means, "meaning".  Hence, he named his therapy, Logotherapy.  I can’t find a Latin or Greek translation that actually defines logos this way which is rather odd.  Most definitions I can find seem to relate the word "logo" to mean logic or rhetoric.   Assuming he was better in Latin and Greek than Google or Wikipedia as they currently exist, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt principally because the word “Logo” obviously must come from the same root word and it doesn’t take a huge leap to ascribe meaning to a logo...any logo...even in modern times, right?  Who doesn’t derive some meaning from their favorite sports team logo, or their family coat-of-arms, or that of the great seal of the United States?  I think, just as Frankl says, Logos means, literally, meaning.  When Christians speak of Logos, they are of course, referring to Jesus by one of His many names.  Thus again, Logos is meaning, if Jesus is your reason, or meaning, for living.  That makes profound sense.  Yet, that is not what Frankl is after.

Frankl was not observing whether or not prisoners who were at the brink of being sent to their death on a minute by minute basis believed in God.  Frankl was looking into what inner force created something more.  I'm reminded of a Far Side Cartoon.  It depicts the fires of Hell with one character pushing a wheel barrow with a heavy load through this environment. He is whistling, he is obviously happy and oblivious to the dire circumstances surrounding him.  Two devils, obviously the guards, are standing to the side.  One is commenting to the other that, "You know, we are just not reaching that guy."

Where does this inner force originate?  Again, I must reiterate, there is nothing in a person's character or attitude that would make him more likely to survive.  His odds are the same because life and death was arbitrary in the death camps.    Frankl's interest lay more in from where this attitude might emerge.  Not whether or not it would save someone from the gas chamber.

True enough one can search for the meaning in life as many have.  Cosmologist and philosophers a plenty have dedicated their lives to the study of life’s meaning…that's what they do.  Each one of us has our own world view and set of beliefs be they spiritual or other.  From this we might entertain our own meaning of life or what life means to us. Many try to impose their own meaning upon us.  But this is not the meaning Frankl is after nor what he describes in his book.  Lest we fall into that trap.  If we don’t believe in God, for instance, perhaps our life has no meaning. Thus, we must define meaning based on something different.  Perhaps "Christmas means a little bit more" as Dr. Seuss has pointed out when the Grinch's heart expands 10 times.  But even then, we will fall well short of what Frankl was driving towards with his Logotherapy.

I think if we stick to western definitions, we will continuously be spinning our wheels with regard to a search for meaning. Sure, we can find it…and will find it in many places.  But I find it odd that there is never any mention of eastern philosophies in this book.  Perhaps Frankl was more studied on eastern philosophy and wrote about it elsewhere.  The attribute of meaning that cannot manifest itself in a more western definition is that attribute that has no external origin.  That attribute that cannot be attributed to anything tangible.  I don't want to get rolled up in the cyclical philosophical arguments here…many have.  Not the least of which is the existence of God as a foundation for meaning.  But hear in lies the rub.  Where was God in those concentration camps?  Frankl avoids that search.  It's a fruitless endeavor and ends in either proving the absence of God or, as in the case of Harold Kushner in his best-selling, "When Bad Things Happen to Good People", we end up with some form of a lessor, or less than all powerful God.  We can avoid those traps by examining where Frankl takes us and to a larger extent where reliance on eastern philosophy can take us.  Logotherapy easily coexists with or without a Christian Monotheistic Omega. Yet there still exists a profound source, or origin, of meaning...this meaning...Frankl's meaning, as well as others.

In "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", Robert Pirsig examines the source of this meaning as quality in our lives.  It too can be derived from externally, or from a source of higher meaning and its decomposition done with hierarchical  building blocks from which meaning can be traced, a very western activity given to us by Aristotle.  But that is not it's only source.  When you strip away all this decomposition of reality, and you are left with only the constructs of language and rhetoric, you are left with nothing but instinct.  You can't reason your way to quality or more importunately, do the right thing for the right reason, if you've left reason.  Without this form of thought we are lost. Faith must fill the gap, as Francis Schaeffer tells us in his monumental work, "Escape from Reason" which laid the foundations for new age, evangelical, Christianity.  Without something to hold onto we a lost.  Yet animals don't seem lost.  And animals know the difference between right and wrong.  They also get anxious and they also get depressed.  They certainly suffer PTSD and any number of other mental illnesses.  Yet they have no foundation of higher meaning or a rhetoric behind it to hitch their lives and their animal mental sanity. 

A dog, however, wags their tail.  When my dog wags her tail, she is not wagging based on her knowledge of her eternal salvation through the love of her Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. But yet her life still has meaning.  The happiness in her heart is arguably tied directly to the prospect of the next morsel of food to fill her doggo tummy but yet she also seems very happy just to be with me.  Just to be close to me.  Man's best friend.  This is the quality that Frankl is driving towards.  This is the quality that Pirsig is driving towards.  What is the attribute of the moment of living that creates quality in our lives?  That is the moment of life that gives us meaning.  And that moment, that crystal clear vision of meaning, is the essence of hope that can carry us through bad times…the worst of times.  The question remains, can we find it when we need it?  And that is what Logotherapy, more than anything else, is about.

It is not about the past, in the words of the Indigo Girls, "Galileo's head was on the block, the crime was looking up the truth, as the bombshells of our daily fears explode, we try to trace them too our roots".  That is the essence of Freudian psycho-analysis…which Frankl attempts to move away from.  But yet the meaning of life the Girls grasped for was nevertheless at their fingertips.  "We look to the children, we go to the Bible, we go through the work out, we read up on revival" has us in the moment, which they also clearly reject as their source of happiness.  And instead, just want to be happy, being happy…"The less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine", So they are rejecting one source of meaning and ignoring the source of meaning right in front of them...not the best philosophy but a great song none-the-less.

But I promised at the beginning of this for a practical example so let's give it a try.  So how can you find meaning at this very moment?  Not just any meaning, but meaning on such a deep level as to carry you through whatever disaster you might be facing in your own life.  This is Frankl's fundamental philosophy and contribution to therapy.  And it was, and still is, a game changer. It's is Curly's "One Thing" but as it turns out that one thing can change from moment to moment.

Happiness can be derived from the one thing that gives your life meaning at this very instant.  Logotheraphy is not about finding the meaning for your life in general but rather finding meaning as you live today.  So many searches for the general meaning of life can ask a question that has forever been too profound to answer.  The less profound answer is never-the-less no less profound.  Maybe more so.  Because it is the moment to moment solution that is the essence of what makes every life valuable.  Every life, not just human life.  It is why there is such thing as quality of life for a quadriplegic, or a patient in Hospice, or the life of a three-legged dog.  What possible meaning does any of this life make for itself if not but in the very moments of living?  Meaning is not the salvation of ones soul in the afterlife.  That may be important for other reasons.  Meaning, more so, is drawn from what you are doing at this very moment.  The sanctity of life is drawn moment to moment...not in the past and not in the future.

So let's try.  Stop what you are doing.  Look out the window.  Ask yourself one question?  Not why am I here but rather why am I looking out this window?  Look for something as simple as a cat crossing the street or a squirrel eating a nut on a tree branch.  If you don't see anything, look a little closer.  Try to focus. Try to quiet the noise from all sides.  Too much sound, too much light, too many distractions from TikTok or Tumbler.  If you must, look down at your window sill.  You need not capture any ants to hold under a tumbler on your window sill as Henry David Thoreau had done, just find the life as if exists around you at this very moment.  Your life's meaning then, at this very moment, is as an observer…your meaning is simply to observe.  If you think that's too simple, I dare you to try it…let me know what you discover.  Then do it again.  Then do it again.  And you are on your way to understanding Logotherapy...and Man's Search for Meaning...