Viktor E. Frankl Goes to Community College

Introduction

I have spent the last twenty-seven years teaching my adapted version of Frankl’s logotherapy to community college students. Frankl’s theory of logotherapy is a psychotherapy based on meaning. I chose, those many years ago, to develop the course because I agree with Frankl that a life without meaning is not sustainable. Frankl makes the point exceedingly clear that many mental health issues such as depression, aggression, addictions and some suicides can be linked back to the sufferer experiencing a lack of meaning.¹ In Frankl’s words: “As to the causation of the feeling of meaninglessness, one may say, albeit in an oversimplifying vein, that people have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning.”²

The topic of suicide was always at the forefront of Frankl’s work. Before he was imprisoned by the Nazis, his psychiatric research focused on trying to understand the increase in suicides among students during report card distribution. We are told that he framed the ←1 | 2→entire psychiatric encounter by asking the patient: “Why do you not commit suicide?”³ He did this because he knew if he could help patients identify their reason for living and to acknowledge what they are living for, they would be less likely to take their own lives. Frankl tells us: “A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or an unfinished work, will never be able to throw his life away.”⁴ Here, Frankl is telling us that it is our love and work (two parts of the trilogy of logotherapy) are what gives our lives meaning. The work we need to do as human beings is to figure out how love and work fit within the context of our own lives. Frankl borrows some of his theoretical framework from the philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, who said: “He who has a why to live for can bear with any how.”⁵

The Existentialists, and the Stoics who preceded them, understood that life does not come with a pre-established meaning and if our lives are meaningless, it is because we have not put the meaning into our lives. We are the ones who need to do the necessary work of constructing meaning. Sometimes people, especially young people, fall into despair and they choose to end their lives before they do the necessary work. If they could have endured the pain a bit longer, they may have been able to arrive at a new place of understanding. Frankl tells us that whenever he was confronted with a person who was prone to suicide, he reports what others have told him in the past.