Viktor Frankl, the Viennese psychiatrist who survived three years in the concentration camps of the Second World War, founded logotherapy, which holds that the search for meaning is the deepest human motivation. His ideas that meaning is found through what we do, what we love and the attitude we take to unavoidable suffering, that we always keep the freedom to choose our response, and that we become most human by giving ourselves to something beyond ourselves, sit very close to how Therapeutic Shamanism understands a meaningful life.
Who was Viktor Frankl, and what is logotherapy?
Frankl was born in Vienna in 1905 and became professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Vienna, and for twenty-five years head of the Vienna Neurological Policlinic. During the Second World War he spent three years in Auschwitz, Dachau and other concentration camps. His book Man’s Search for Meaning tells the story of those years, and then sets out the approach to therapy he founded, logotherapy.1
At its heart is what Frankl called the will to meaning: “this striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man.”2 He set this against the idea that what drives us most deeply is pleasure, or power.
How did Frankl say we find meaning?
In three ways. “According to logotherapy, we can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take towards unavoidable suffering.” The second way, he explains, includes “experiencing nature and culture”, and experiencing another person by loving them.3
Frankl also turned the question round. “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognise that it is he who is asked.”4 Therapeutic Shamanism also turns the question towards how we live. When we ask what the meaning of life is, “what we are really asking is, “How shall I live my life?””5 See What can shamanism offer logotherapy and the search for meaning?
What can Frankl’s “last freedom” offer shamanic work?
A way of meeting what cannot be changed. Frankl remembered the men who walked through the huts comforting others and giving away their last piece of bread. Few as they may have been, he wrote, they “offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms”, the freedom “to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances”.6
Something very close holds true of the hardest times in life: bereavement, abuse, illness, trauma and breakdown. Sometimes we come out of them changed for the better. “Whether that re-forging happens for an individual person though, seems to largely come down to how they respond to the event. It depends upon the lessons and meanings they choose to take from it, and whether they choose to let the event make them, or break them.”7 As Frankl saw, that choice always remains ours.
What does Frankl’s idea of self-transcendence offer?
A reminder that meaning is not found by looking only at ourselves. Frankl wrote that “the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system”. He called this “the self-transcendence of human existence”: “being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself”.8
Therapeutic Shamanism also looks outwards. Turning despair into empowerment means “not withdrawing from the world, but taking your place in it and actively being of service.”9 There are three suggestions for how to live: “Find the true Stories of your Soul”, “Let your Human, Adult Soul shape your life”, and “From that place, find ways to be of service in the world.”10 See What does it mean to become a True Adult?
Why did Frankl think so many modern people feel empty?
Because of what they have lost. Frankl called the feeling the “existential vacuum”, and traced it to a twofold loss: first of the animal instincts that guide other creatures, and then of the traditions that once guided humans. “No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do”.11 He linked it to depression, aggression and addiction.
Therapeutic Shamanism tells a similar story about the loss of the stories that once taught people how to live. Healthy peoples knew that “We need good myths to live by, and healthy stories to teach us how to live in balance on the Earth. Any culture that forgets those stories is lost.”12 That loss goes back to domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this and the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer. See What is the Fall?
Did Frankl find meaning in nature?
He describes it. In the camps, he writes, the prisoners “experienced the beauty of art and nature as never before”, and on the journey between camps they were “carried away by nature’s beauty”.13 He also tells of a young woman, dying in the camp, who pointed through the window of her hut at a chestnut tree and told him: “This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness.”14 For Frankl these were experiences of beauty and of the human spirit. Therapeutic Shamanism goes further, and meets the tree as one of the Plant People. See Who are the Animal, Plant and Stone People?
