Viktor Frankl’s unfashionable godliness may be what we need

For Frankl was overtly religious in his approach and thinking around psychiatry and the human mind. In this, he was very much at odds with the Freudian and Jungian schools of psychoanalysis, which attempted to map how thoughts and behaviours are guided by irrational and largely hidden forces. 

Frankl believed these theories resulted in an overly materialistic view of what makes humans tick, which ultimately depersonalised the subject.   

“A psychotherapist is continually concerned with spiritual existence in terms of freedom and responsibility, and with marshalling it against the psychophysical facticity which the patient is prone to accept as his fate,” Frankl wrote in The Unconscious God. Written in 1947 and updated in 1975, Frankl sought in it to revise the theories of Freud and Jung by arguing that there is not only an instinctual unconscious but a spiritual unconscious also, and that unconscious religious belief is not only a universal reality but a vital element of the human condition.

For Frankl, the biggest problem with the Freudian focus on repressed libidinal instincts as drivers of human behaviour was its atomising effect, turning “the human person into an object, the human being into a thing”. 

This could leave people more vulnerable to the neuroses they were being treated for in the first place and, most significantly, unable to find meaning in life. 

While Frankl credited Jung with having “discovered distinctly religious elements within the unconscious”, he argued that Jung’s mistake was to resort to collective archetypes and explain unconscious religiousness as stemming from “an impersonal pool of images shared by mankind”.

Frankl sought to emphasise, in contrast, that religiousness came “from the personal centre of the individual man”. 

Frankl’s concerns with these depersonalising — and thereby dehumanising — ramifications were not surprising given his experience of the incredible attempts to dehumanise man in the concentration camps. That experience played a crucial role in developing his thoughts on religion’s relevance for humanity.  

“Among those who actually went through the experience of Auschwitz, the number whose religious life was deepened — in spite, not to say because, of this experience — by far exceeds the number of those who gave up their belief,” Frankl wrote. 

“One might say that just as the small fire is extinguished by the storm whereas 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.”

It led Frankl to stipulate that the spirituality dimension is fundamentally important for humans: “Body and psyche may form a unity — a psychophysical unity — but this unity does not yet represent the wholeness of man. Without the spiritual as its essential ground, the wholeness cannot exist.” 

When the “somatic, psychic and spiritual aspects” are successfully integrated in a person, he argued, it enables “self-actualisation” and engagement in meaningful human existence. This is “always directed to something, or someone, other than itself — be it a meaning to fulfil or another human being to lovingly encounter.” 

Not only could this “will to meaning” stand up to all the suffering and pain of human life, acting as a buttress against a sense of meaninglessness and despair, he explained — without it man becomes increasingly unmoored from himself and humanity. 

“Unless life points to something beyond itself, survival is pointless and meaningless. It is not even possible,” Frankl argued. “This is the very lesson I learned in three years spent in Auschwitz and Dachau, and in the meantime it has been confirmed by psychiatrists in prisoner-of-war camps: Only those who were orientated toward the future, toward goal in the future, toward a meaning to fulfil in the future, were likely to survive.”

Logotherapy was accused of being in essence authoritarian. In 1969, Rollo May, the American existential psychologist and author of the influential book Love and Will, argued that in offering such a plain solution to all of life’s problems, Frankl undermined the complexity of human life itself and thereby diminished the individual as a person. Frankl responded to the criticism, highlighting the areas of freedom and responsibility involved in logotherapy, where the person is free to search and to find meaning.

The religious aspect drew criticism that logotherapy was founded on Frankl’s worldview. It wasn’t a scientific psychotherapeutic school in the traditional sense, detractors said, but more a philosophy of life, and one that wasn’t fully coherent, due to being based on questionable metaphysical premises. 

Frankl responded by asserting that the spiritual unconscious does not necessarily entail religiosity. Every person has a spiritual unconscious that exists independently of religious views or beliefs, he argued. 

A read through The Unconscious God alone is enough to find evidence aplenty countering those criticisms and supporting Frankl’s defence of his theories. Furthermore, those criticisms appear increasingly tenuous considering how Frankl’s arguments have since been borne out. 

“Time and again we watch and witness how repressed religion degenerates into superstition,” Frankl wrote in 1948. “In our century, a deified reason and megalomaniac technology are the repressive structures to which the religious feeling is sacrificed.”

Now, more than 70 years later, the process has gone even farther. Technology and mass communication stifle authentic human nature even more, while many commentators note how activism for the likes of racism and LGBT issues has, for some, taken on the form of a type of religious fundamentalism, with accompanying levels of intolerance and vitriol. 

At the same time, the modern emphasis on the likes of self-love and primacy of the individual, accompanied by popular mantras such as “living your best life,” do not seem to be working — judging by the rising rates of loneliness, addiction and deaths from despair — and go completely against what Frankl counselled.  

“The more one forgets oneself — giving oneself to a cause or another person — the more human he is,” Frankl wrote. “Man is actually a being who is reaching out for meanings to fulfil and other human beings to encounter.” 

Hence today, even more so than in Frankl’s day, the psychological ills that plague the western world appear less to do with the repressed instincts of the Freudian school — and that still remains so fashionable — and more to frustrations from thwarted attempts to find meaningful ways of living. The result at a societal level is one that is riven with division and rancour, as warned the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.

“A society with only competition and very limited cooperation will be abrasive and ruthless, with glittering prizes for the winners and no consolation for the losers,” Sacks wrote in his 2020 book Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times.

Frankl couldn’t have agreed more, though he emphasised that religion wasn’t enough to heal the rifts. 

“If common values and meaning are to be found, another step must be taken, a step now, thousands of years after mankind developed monotheism, the belief in one God,” Frankl said. “Monotheism is not enough; it will not do. What we need is not only the belief in one God but also the awareness of the one mankind, the awareness of the unity of humanity. I would call it mon-anthropism.”

A strange-sounding word to finish on, but we are living through strange and vexed times still calling out for a solution. Frankl doesn’t necessarily have it, but listening to him may well help. 

James Jeffrey is a freelance writer and former British Army officer 

jamesjeffreyjournalism.com

@jrfjeffrey