Word: frankling
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...Viktor E. Frankl, 62, founder of logotherapy, is a lecturer at the University of Vienna, as was Freud. But Frankl has dismissed Freud's idea that human beings are driven mainly by sexual energy, no matter how broadly defined. Similarly, he rejects Adler's emphasis on power drives and Jung's turning back to vague, ancestral archetypes. He has only contempt for the reductionist, or "nothing-but" schools, which define man as nothing but a biochemical machine or nothing but the product of his conditioning or nothing but an economic animal. What is left? Only, says Frankl...
Existential Vacuum. Since this search is at the intellectual rather than the instinctual level, Dr. Frankl makes great play with words beginning with noo, from the Greek noös (mind), as in noö-dynamics and noögenic neuroses.* He coined logotherapy from logos, usually translated as word, speech or reason, which he defines as "meaning." As Dr. Frankl views the human condition to day, it is distinguished by "the existential vacuum," or "a total lack, or loss, of an ultimate meaning to one's existence that would make life worthwhile...
...Frankl freely concedes that logotherapy is an existential approach. Existentialism has built up a strong undercurrent in both European and U.S. analysis and psychotherapy in the past dozen years. But Frankl notes that there are almost as many kinds of existentialism as there are existentialists, and insists that his is different. He has spelled it out in books such as Man's Search for Meaning and Psychotherapy and Existentialism. The Existential Vacuum: A Challenge to Psychiatry is on press...
...Time and again, the psychiatrist is consulted by patients who doubt that life has any meaning," said Dr. Frankl. "This condition I have called 'existential vacuum.'" And in a survey of his own students, Dr. Frankl found that while 40% of the Germans, Swiss and Austrians report existential vacuum, no less than 81% of the Americans say they have felt...
...Said Dr. Frankl, "We must not draw the conclusion that the existential vacuum is predominantly an American disease, but rather that it is apparently a concomitant of industrialization." It results, he thinks, from a loss of the instinctual security of the animal world on the one hand and of social tradition on the other. "At present, instincts do not tell man what he has to do, nor do traditions direct him toward what he ought to do; soon he will not even know what he wants to do, thus completely succumbing to conformism...