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This new edition with additional material first published in 2011 by Rider,
an imprint of Ebury Publishing
Ebury Publishing is a Random House Group company
Originally published in 2000 in the United States of America
by Perseus Publishing
Copyright © 1948, 1975, 2000 Viktor E. Frankl
Foreword copyright © 2011 Claudia Hammond
Afterword copyright © 2011 Alexander Batthyány
The present text is a revised, updated version of the original Austrian edition,
Der Unbewusste Gott, © 1948 Viktor E. Frankl; and the English translation, The Unconscious God, © 1975 Viktor E. Frankl
Viktor E. Frankl has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Praise
Also by Viktor E. Frankl
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword by Claudia Hammond
Foreword by Swanee Hunt
Preface
Preface to the First English Edition
1. The Essence of Existential Analysis
2. The Spiritual Unconscious
3. Existential Analysis of Conscience
4. Existential Analysis of Dreams
5. The Transcendent Quality of Conscience
6. Unconscious Religiousness
7. Psychotherapy and Theology
8. New Research in Logotherapy circa 1975
9. Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning
Notes
References
Further Books by Viktor E. Frankl
Afterword by Alexander Batthyány
References
Index
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Viktor Frankl is known to millions of readers around the world as the author of Man’s Search for Meaning, his harrowing Holocaust memoir. In his own words: ‘Readers of my short autobiographical story usually ask for a fuller and more direct explanation...’ and this insightful book is it. In Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, Frankl explains the thinking that enabled him to survive the concentration camps in spite of tremendous odds. Believing there is more to our existence than meets the eye, he reveals his firm conviction that we are not glorified animals but repressed angels. From the nature of our dreams to the question of God, Frankl considers a range of important subjects. Ultimately, he reveals how to create meaning for ourselves and how life has more to offer us than we could ever imagine.
Viktor Frankl was Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Vienna Medical School. For twenty-five years he was head of the Vienna Neurological Policlinic. His Logotherapy/Existential Analysis came to be known as the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy. He held professorships at Harvard, Stanford, Dallas, and Pittsburgh, and was Distinguished Professor of Logotherapy at the US International University in San Diego, California. His writings have been called ‘the most important contributions in the field of Psychotherapy since the days of Freud, Adler and Jung’ by Sir Cyril Burt, ex-President of the British Psychological Society.
Born in 1905, Frankl received the degrees of Doctor of Medicine and Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Vienna. During World War II he spent three years at Auschwitz, Dachau and other concentration camps.
Through four decades Dr. Frankl made innumerable lecture tours throughout the world. He received honorary degrees from twenty-nine universities in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. He held numerous awards, among them the Oskar Pfister Award of the American Psychiatric Association and an Honorary Membership of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Frankl’s thirty-nine books appeared in thirty-eight languages. His book Man’s Search for Meaning has sold millions of copies around the world. Viktor Frankl died in 1997 in Vienna.
“Viktor Frankl … is one of the moral heroes of the twentieth century. His insights into human freedom, dignity and the search for meaning are deeply humanising and have the power to transform lives” Chief Rabbi Dr Jonathan Sacks
“Viktor Frankl declares that evil and ennui cannot fully extinguish us” Brian Keenan, author of An Evil Cradling
Institutes of Logotherapy can now be found on all five continents. For further information on Viktor Frankl and Logotherapy, including an extensive bibliography, please refer to the website of the Viktor Frankl Institute, Vienna at www.viktorfrankl.org.
As the title suggests, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning is for anyone who is interested in the hunt for meaning in life. In it, Frankl explains how anyone can find meaning, whatever their circumstances, and why even a life of unbearable pain can still be meaningful. As people begin to wonder whether consumerism is really the way forward, at the start of the twenty-first century this book feels especially relevant.
I’m approaching writing this foreword in the way I imagine most people will approach reading the book—as an admirer of Victor Frankl’s more famous work, Man’s Search for Meaning. I still remember sitting in a café, making cups of tea last long enough for me to finish that book in the same afternoon. If you have not read the original no doubt you will want to by the time you have read this fascinating work.
Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl’s meditation on suffering and survival, is a classic which has sold more than a million copies for each of the nine days he spent writing it (with sales now in excess of twelve million copies worldwide). We marvel at this concentrated genius, but those nine days only covered the act of writing his thoughts down; the thinking had taken place over many years. Like many great books, it left me wanting more. Some eminent writers leave us to gain all our understanding from the work alone, but with Frankl we are lucky enough to have the set of writings published here, in Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, in which he explains his thinking in more depth. The following chapters undoubtedly have a unique value if read alone, but also provide a fresh perspective on and a new motivation for reading the first book again.
The second decade of the twenty-first century with its air of crisis and uncertainty is the perfect time to revisit Frankl’s theories. Reading these writings by Frankl, I am struck many times by the way they anticipate modern research in the field of psychology. Here, he talks of tragic optimism, of how we know that life brings pain, guilt and death and yet, for the most part, we manage to carry on. Using his observations and experiences from the Holocaust, Frankl tells us how to deal with these three inevitable elements of life by making use of them: turn suffering into achievement, use guilt to improve yourself and use the knowledge that life is short as a spur to action. Half a century later optimism has become a key theme in the increasingly influential field of positive psychology, the study of the strengths and virtues that allow both individuals and communities to thrive. Although I doubt Frankl would have described himself as associated with this field, there are some striking parallels.
Anyone with experience of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), either as a practitioner or a client, will see precursors of today’s techniques in Frankl’s work. In CBT, people learn how to reframe information, to find other ways of looking at their thoughts. In Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, Frankl gives the example of an older man devastated by the loss of his wife. The man is questioning why she had to die first, leaving him alone and grief-stricken in old age. Frankl advises him to think of his staying behind as a sacrifice. He has saved his wife from experiencing this grief herself and should view it as a gift to the person he loved most in the world.
In psychological research today resilience is an important theme. Rather than teach children to have high self-esteem regardless of achievement, we should foster the strength of character to handle setbacks in the future as well as successes. Although resilience is not a word Frankl uses often, I would argue that again he was ahead of his time here. In a sense his observations in the concentration camps were studies of resilience—not just of other people’s, but of his own. Part of the fascination in reading Frankl’s work is watching how he employs coping mechanisms to manage his own mental survival. He found meaning in his experiences of the Holocaust by taking the opportunity not only to observe human behaviour in a situation far more desperate than any psychologist could create in a laboratory, but also to make use of those insights.
The most challenging element of Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning for me is the emphasis on religion. Frankl defines religion in its broadest sense, but coming to the material without faith myself and from a background in contemporary psychology, my initial reaction was to baulk at the prominence he gives it. However, Frankl anticipates late twentieth-century research on the potential of religion to aid recovery from mental health problems. While I would disagree with his view that only psychiatrists possessing religious feelings of their own can do this, there have been recent calls for mental health professionals to have more training in discussing spirituality with clients. It is true that sometimes such discussions make practitioners feel uncomfortable. Frankl could be talking today when he describes patients feeling ashamed to mention their religion to their psychiatrists.
If you come to this book as religious person the six and seventh chapters might be of particular interest to you, but if you are not religious there is still plenty here for you. For me, the most thought-provoking parts of the book are the final chapters, in which Frankl examines the problem of meaninglessness. He discusses the choice between taking a job that pays well or one that brings your life meaning. These are questions with particular pertinence during the economic downturn and this is where his theories can have lessons for us all today. Frankl is convinced that even when all control appears to have been taken away from us, such as when facing death in a concentration camp, it is still possible to find meaning. Although few of us will experience any such horror, the existential vacuum of modern life that he describes will resonate with many today. As we wonder if there is life beyond consumerism in a time where trust between individuals is decreasing, he talks about finding shared meaning and a new sense of community.
What I most admire about Frankl is his compassion and generosity. He had the opportunity to leave Vienna before the war, yet he stayed behind to care for his parents despite the risks. He is never prescriptive and admits that his form of existential analysis, logotherapy, is no panacea. The aim of this form of therapy is to help people find meaning in life and it rests on the premise that however wretched a person’s circumstances, meaning still can be found. Frankl seems to want people to find their own way. His appalling experiences could have led him to dismiss as trivial everyday complaints about the meaninglessness of our safe, comfortable lives. Instead he seems to understand that any of us can feel lonely, in despair and in desperate need of meaning. In this way he turned his own battle to understand what he witnessed into a great contribution to twentieth-century thought. At the same time he put his theories into practice in his own life by making his work be devoted to helping others fulfil their own search for meaning.
Claudia Hammond is an award-winning broadcaster, writer and lecturer in psychology. Using her specialist knowledge she has originated and presented numerous radio series on psychology and science, including the critically acclaimed landmark series State of Mind. She has appeared often on TV, discussing psychological research, and is on the part-time faculty at Boston University’s London base where she lectures in health and social psychology. Her first book, Emotional Rollercoaster—a journey through the science of feelings, has been translated into six languages.
On January 1, 1994, I stood at the top of the stairs at the embassy residence, a bit confused. The diminutive, white-haired man walking spryly toward me wasn’t at all what I had expected. I shook the hand of Viktor Frankl, my guest, and told him, “I read your book 25 years ago, and I still remember it.”
“Do you remember in your mind, or in your heart?” he asked.
“In my heart.”
“That’s good,” he answered, as if bestowing a blessing.
Throughout the coming months, I came to rely on Professor Frankl as a confidant and an advisor. Whether the subject was U.S. foreign policy in Bosnia, family health problems, or my own personal and professional priorities, Viktor and Elly were my anchor, a vital source of wisdom. And when wisdom failed us all, they were my wellspring of comfort.
Their clarity was imparted with kindness, understanding, and love. I was close enough to know of some of their own travails. And I wondered about their own source of strength.
This book holds an answer to that question. For in it, we see Viktor Frankl dealing with the finitude of his place within infinite possibility. He does not confuse his own limitations with ultimate limitation, nor does he mistake his own being with ultimate being.
There is also an extraordinary sense of tolerance in his thinking—a graciousness in his concession that our symbols for ultimate meaning only point to a reality we cannot experience directly. The concentration camps in which he suffered and in which his loved ones died were, after all, created to annihilate those who were different. And so Frankl leaves room for the breadth of human experience of the metaphysical.
Let God take on an anthropomorphic form for some. For others, let God be confused with the self. After all, ultimate meaning is certainly able to absorb the finitude of our attempts to understand and describe infinity.
But for Frankl, such tolerance does not imply a lack of judgment. For there is evil in the world, and his life bears the scars. The unconscious search for ultimate meaning can lead to nefarious ends: flagrant nationalism, obsessive jealousies, ethnic hate, compulsive work. Half a century since this volume was conceived, I spent an afternoon with Elly and Viktor speaking not only of Auschwitz, but also of Srebrenica: a diabolic and perverted meaning found by some in sadistic debauchery.
So we are reminded once again that abstract theory is not an end in itself. It must shape concrete living. From this small volume, there is a great moral imperative to be pondered. As we reflect on Frankl’s thought, we may take time to muse on what we personally hold most dear and, even in the moment of that intimate dialogue, contribute to the universal force for goodness.
Tolerance, jealousy, benevolence, hate, decency. What will be ultimate in our lives? As Viktor Frankl would remind us, the choice is ours.
Swanee Hunt
United States Ambassador
to Austria
The main title of this book is identical with the title of the Oskar Pfister Award Lecture that I gave at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in 1985. The text of this lecture is reprinted here as Chapter 9. As for the first part of this volume, it has already been published under the title “The Unconscious God” in 1975, the English translation of “Der unbewusste Gott,” published in 1947. This book, in turn, had been based on the manuscript for a presentation I had been invited to give in Vienna, only a few months after the end of the war.
The “printing history” of the present volume thus goes back some 50 years. Perusing what I wrote in 1947, in 1975, and in 1985, I feel that it is, as a whole, a consistent sequence of presentations of some substantial thoughts regarding a quite important subject. Hopefully, then, some of what I have written throughout these decades may be of value to some readers.
However it may be—“See, I have not kept my lips closed.”
The material in this book is drawn from a lecture I gave shortly after World War II, at the invitation of a small club of Viennese intellectuals. My audience was composed of no more than a dozen listeners. In 1947 the lecture was published as a book in German. It is only now, 28 years after its original publication, that the book appears in an English translation. (Spanish, Danish, Dutch, French, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, and Swedish editions have already been published.)
Considering the time that has elapsed since the first edition—more than a quarter of a century—it might be understood that I no longer am in a position to subscribe fully to each and every word as it was printed in 1947. My thinking has developed considerably in the meantime—developed and, I hope, also matured.
To be sure, some of the changes have been implemented in the present edition by slightly altering certain passages. However, I have deliberately refrained from major alterations of the text because, of my 20 books, this is the most organized and systematized one, and it would have been a pity to destroy the cohesive structure of this piece of work by interspersing too much of the material that might have accrued in the meantime.
All the more, I welcomed the alternative that the publishers Simon and Schuster offered me, namely, to add, by way of a postscript, a supplementary chapter outlining some of the ideas that have evolved in my theory of conscience during the last two decades. As to the wider field that this book concerns, i.e., the interrelationship between psychotherapy and theology, the reader will find pertinent discussions in my two most recent books published in English (and in English only), Psychotherapy and Existentialismfn1 and The Will to Meaning.fn2 In each of these books one chapter explicitly deals with religious issues, and there are scattered references to this topic as well.
The updated bibliography at the end of this volume will enable the reader to locate further publications, not only those dealing with the relationship between religion and psychiatry but also those covering the whole area of logotherapeutic teachings and practices.
However, the main thesis propounded in the lecture entitled “The Unconscious God” remains still valid and tenable. There is, in fact, a religious sense deeply rooted in each and every Man’s unconscious depths. In two of my books, Man’s Search for Meaningfn3 and the abovementioned The Will to Meaning, evidence has been advanced to support my contention that this sense may break through unexpectedly, even in cases of severe mental illness such as psychoses. For example, a student of mine at the United States International University, San Diego, California, wrote:
In the mental hospital, I was locked like an animal in a cage, no one came when I called begging to be taken to the bathroom, and I finally had to succumb to the inevitable. Blessedly, I was given daily shock treatment, insulin shock, and sufficient drugs so that I lost most of the next several weeks….
But in the darkness I had acquired a sense of my own unique mission in the world. I knew then, as I know now, that I must have been preserved for some reason—however small, it is something that only I can do, and it is vitally important that I do it. And because in the darkest moment of my life, when I lay abandoned as an animal in a cage, when because of the forgetfulness induced by ECT I could not call out to Him, He was there. In the solitary darkness of the “pit” where men had abandoned me, He was there. When I did not know His Name, He was there; God was there.
Likewise, such unexpected religious feelings may break through under other circumstances, as was the case with a man who wrote from prison:
I am at the age of 54 financially ruined, in jail. At the beginning of this incarceration (8 months ago) everything looked hopeless and irrevocably lost in chaos that I could never hope to understand, much less to solve.
Endless months passed. Then, one day I had a visit by a court psychiatrist to whom I took an immense liking, right from the start, as he introduced himself with a very pleasant smile and a handshake, like I would be still “somebody,” or at least a human being. Something deep and unexplainable happened to me from there on. I found myself reliving my life. That night, in the stillness of my small cell, I experienced a most unusual religious feeling which I never had before; I was able to pray, and with utmost sincerity, I accepted a Higher Will to which I have surrendered the pain and sorrow as meaningful and ultimate, not needing explanation. From here on I have undergone a tremendous recovery.
This happened in Baltimore County Prison in April of this year. Today, I am at complete peace with myself and the world. I have found the true meaning of my life, and time can only delay its fulfillment but not deter it. At fifty-four, I have decided to reconstruct my life and to finish my schooling. I am sure I can accomplish my goal. I have also found a new great source of unexpected vitality—I am able now to laugh over my own miseries, instead of wallowing in the pain of irrevocable failure, and somehow there are hardly any great tragedies left….
But one may discuss religion irrespective of whether it is unconscious or conscious, for the question confronting us is more basic and radical. First, we must ask ourselves whether this is a legitimate area for psychiatric exploration. Lately, I have come to draw the line of demarcation between religion and psychiatry ever more sharply.fn4 I have learned, and taught, that the difference between them is no more nor less than a difference between various dimensions. From the very analogy with dimensions, however, it should become clear that these realms are by no means mutually exclusive. A higher dimension, by definition, is a more inclusive one. The lower dimension is included in the higher one; it is subsumed in it and encompassed by it. Thus biology is overarched by psychology, psychology by noölogy, and noölogy by theology.
The noölogical dimension may rightly be defined as the dimension of uniquely human phenomena. Among them, there is one that I regard as the most representative of the human reality. I have circumscribed this phenomenon in terms of “Man’s search for meaning.” Now, if this is correct, one may also be justified in defining religion as Man’s search for ultimate meaning. It was Albert Einstein who once contended that to be religious is to have found an answer to the question, What is the meaning of life? If we subscribe to this statement we may then define belief and faith as trust in ultimate meaning. Once we have conceived of religion in this way—that is, in the widest possible sense—there is no doubt that psychiatrists are entitled also to investigate this phenomenon, although only its human aspect is accessible to a psychological exploration.
The concept of religion in its widest possible sense, as it is here espoused, certainly goes far beyond the narrow concepts of God promulgated by many representatives of denominational and institutional religion. They often depict, not to say denigrate, God as a being who is primarily concerned with being believed in by the greatest possible number of believers, and along the lines of a specific creed, at that. “Just believe,” we are told, “and everything will be okay.” But alas, not only is this order based on a distortion of any sound concept of deity, but even more importantly it is doomed to failure: Obviously, there are certain activities that simply cannot be commanded, demanded, or ordered, and as it happens, the triad “faith, hope, and love” belongs to this class of activities that elude an approach with, so to speak, “command characteristics.” Faith, hope, and love cannot be established by command simply because they cannot be established at will. I cannot “will” to believe, I cannot “will” to hope, I cannot “will” to love—and least of all can I “will” to will.
Upon closer investigation it turns out that what underlies the attempt to establish faith, hope, love, and will by command is the manipulative approach. The attempt to bring these states about at will, however, is ultimately based on an inappropriate objectification and reification of these human phenomena: They are turned into mere things, into mere objects. However, since faith, hope, love, and will are so-called “intentional” acts or activities, along the lines of the terminology coined by Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler, the founders of the school of “phenomenology,” these activities are directed to “intentional” referents—in other words, to objects of their own. To the extent that one makes intentional acts into objects, he loses sight of their objects. Nowhere, to my knowledge, is this brought home to us more strikingly than with the uniquely human phenomenon of laughter: You cannot order anyone to laugh—if you want him to laugh, you must tell him a joke.
But isn’t it, in a way, the same with religion? If you want people to have faith and belief in God, you cannot rely on preaching along the lines of a particular church but must, in the first place, portray your God believably—and you must act credibly yourself. In other words, you have to do the very opposite of what so often is done by the representatives of organized religion when they build up an image of God as someone who is primarily interested in being believed in and who rigorously insists that those who believe in him be affiliated with a particular church. Small wonder that such representatives of religion behave as though they saw the main task of their own denomination as that of overriding other denominations.
Certainly the trend is away from religion conceived in such a strictly denominational sense. Yet this is not to imply that, eventually, there will be a universal religion. On the contrary, if religion is to survive, it will have to be profoundly personalized.
This does not mean that there is no need for symbols and rituals. Even the die-hard agnostic and atheist cannot completely dismiss symbols. Consider the Russians, who once constructed a monument to express symbolically their indebtedness and gratitude to the thousands of dogs that had been sacrificed by Pavlov in the course of his famous conditioned-reflex experiments—what a purely symbolic gesture, pointless by the utilitarian yardstick adopted by dialectical materialism, and yet extremely meaningful to the heart of the Russian nation. A heart like that, as Blaise Pascal once observed, has reasons that are unknown to reason (le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point). The heart of man defies even Marxist indoctrination.
To all appearances, religion is not dying, and insofar as this is true, God is not dead either, not even “after Auschwitz,” to quote the title of a book. For either belief in God is unconditional or it is not belief at all. If it is unconditional it will stand and face the fact that six million died in the Nazi holocaust; if it is not unconditional it will fall away if only a single innocent child has to die—to resort to an argument once advanced by Dostoevski. There is no point in bargaining with God, say, by arguing: “Up to six thousand or even one million victims of the holocaust I maintain my belief in Thee; but from one million upward nothing can be done any longer, and I am sorry but I must renounce my belief in Thee.”
The truth is that among those who actually went through the experience of Auschwitz, the number of those whose religious life was deepened—in spite of, not because of, this experience—by far exceeds the number of those who gave up their belief. To paraphrase what La Rochefoucauld once remarked with regard to love, one might say that just as the small fire is extinguished by the storm while a large fire is enhanced by it—likewise a weak faith is weakened by predicaments and catastrophes, whereas a strong faith is strengthened by them.
fn1 Viktor E. Frankl, Psychotherapy and Existentialism: Selected Papers on Logotherapy (New York: Washington Square Press, 1967, and Touchstone Paperback, 1968).
fn2 Viktor E. Frankl, The Will to Meaning: Foundations and Applications of Logotherapy (New York and Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1969; paperback edition, New York: New American Library, 1970).
fn3 Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959; New York: Touchstone, Simon and Schuster, 1973).
fn4 Viktor E. Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.; second, expanded edition, 1965; paperback edition, New York: Vintage Books, 1973).
When I first conceived the idea to expand one of my personally favorite works, The Unconscious God, into Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, I thought it to be a rather uncomplicated task. As in all things, experience turned out to be the best teacher. Bringing this book to fruition has been truly a team effort, and for that I am indebted to many.
I am indebted to Joanna Lawrence of Plenum Publishing Company for making Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning a reality. I am also most grateful to the Honorable Swanee Hunt, the U.S. Ambassador to Austria, for honoring me by writing the Foreword to this book. She has captured the true spirit of my work. I am also indebted to Dr. Jay Levinson, my assistant and friend, for his help in coordinating the many logistical details of this project. I am deeply grateful to my son-in-law, Dr. Franz Vesely, who served as my personal “editor-in-chief” in Vienna, providing advice and help whenever it was needed. Without the diligent and gracious service of Franz and Jay this book would never have become a reality. Last, but certainly not least, I wish to express my love and appreciation to my wife, Elly. She is my light, my inspiration, my support.
To them and to all the other unnamed contributors I express my deepest appreciation.
Arthur Schnitzler, Vienna’s famous poet and a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, has been quoted as saying that there are really only three virtues: objectivity, courage, and sense of responsibility. It would be tempting to allot to each of these virtues one of the schools of psychotherapy that have emerged from Viennese soil.
It is obvious that the virtue of courage fits Adlerian psychology. The Adlerian, after all, regards his entire therapeutic procedure, in the final analysis, as nothing but an attempt at encouraging the patient. The purpose of this encouragement is to help the patient overcome his inferiority feelings, which Adlerian psychology considers to be a decisive pathogenic factor.
psyche