Embracing Hope, page 6
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 Eckartsberg, showed in his dissertation that people, 20 years after graduation from Harvard, having made wonderful careers, being very successful, didn’t find a meaning in their lives. And on the other hand, I can present to 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 I was justified in saying that meaning can be found irrespective of 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 analysts’ couches—an indoctrination to the effect that man is nothing but a mechanism, that man is nothing but the outcome of conditioning or psychodynamic processes, that man is nothing but a computer. If you indoctrinate people along these lines, small wonder if they are purged of any enthusiasm or idealism. I recently had to address, as guest speaker, the annual meeting of the international PEN 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.”
BONISTEEL: This is, it seems to me, part of the problem we face today, in this age we live in: the media and the writers of drama that we watch on TV, or 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 superficial, 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 aim for a 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; this is a literal quotation from Goethe.
BONISTEEL: 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.
BONISTEEL: 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—to 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 were not destroyed after Kafka’s death—I speak of Max Brod. And Max Brod, in a relatively unknown philosophical book concerning 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 does so, then he has reached the peak of whatever man is capable of.
BONISTEEL: 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 always say, what is transitory are only the potentialities, are only the opportunities to fulfil 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 own 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 and make it 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 have made myself clear . . .
BONISTEEL: I understand. One other area, though, that you talked earlier about, about the involvement with each other, 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.
BONISTEEL: 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, over here you might have more tasks to complete, but, you know, the Americans have retained their freedom to choose their tasks.” How beautiful it would 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 like to call “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 really be pursued. Happiness must ensue; happiness is a side effect, happiness is a by-product and must remain a by-product of meaning fulfilment, 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, she winds 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 that 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 glaucoma, I see 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 is living out his self-transcendence—in that he is serving a cause, fulfilling a meaning or loving another human being.
BONISTEEL: 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 is available to each and every person and patient—that it must be available to the religious patient as well as to the irreligious one. And more than that: that it must 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.
BONISTEEL: 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?
BONISTEEL: 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?
BONISTEEL: (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.
BONISTEEL: (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 or 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.
BONISTEEL: 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.
BONISTEEL: 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 because of despair, he should be able patiently to wait—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 asked him: “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, 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 call it.
