Finding Meaning Through Logotherapy
Is There More to Life Than This?
If you have ever found yourself wondering “surely there must be more to life than this,” then you might be interested to learn that there is an approach to therapy which places such a high premium on our need to have meaning in our lives that it actually incorporates the very notion into its name.
What is Logotherapy?
Logotherapy was developed by the world-famous psychotherapist and author Viktor Frankl during the second half of the twentieth century and comes from the Greek word logos which signifies meaning.
You may have heard of Viktor Frankl because he wrote a famous book called Mans Search for Meaning which is still very influential today. In this book, Frankl goes beyond saying that it is important for us to lead meaningful lives. He actually suggests that pursuing meaning is a fundamental human drive which when it becomes disrupted for one reason or another can result in significant psychological and emotional distress.
My Path to Logotherapy
I had read his book as an undergraduate student many years ago but picked it up once again shortly after Covid when I was struggling with personal difficulties which were causing me to reevaluate aspects of my life. I found the book personally very inspiring, so much so that I read more of his books and then decided to train to become a logotherapist.
With its emphasis on meaning, logotherapy can be considered an existential approach and I found it to be very much in tune with how I was already working as a therapist in many respects. Qualifying as a logotherapist, however, provided me with many new and very valuable additions to the way I think about therapy and these I have incorporated into my style of therapy.
When Meaning is Lost
Frankl speaks about meaning as something that we have to discover and sometimes particularly when we are confronted with significant difficulties, we can lose our faith in life itself and start to doubt that there may even be a way forward.
Perhaps you know the feeling? It’s most frequently characterised as despair and is without a shadow of a doubt one of the most challenging of all human emotions to contend with. We can find ourselves grappling with despair for any possible number of reasons.
Despair and its accompanying loss of meaning frequently occur when we experience serious health issues or have an accident that is life changing. In moments like these, when everything we ever took for granted has been so suddenly taken away, we can find ourselves lost without any way to understand our experience and without a sense of how to pick up the pieces.
A crisis of meaning in our lives may occur when a loved one dies, a relationship suddenly comes to an end or when we lose our job for one reason or another. This is why retirement can be so challenging. All of a sudden, the meaning which has sustained us for the past forty years has gone. And then what? How do we find new meaning that feels significant enough for us to orientate our lives around it and forge a way forward once again. When we struggle to do this, the loss of meaning that we experience may very well manifest as depression. Losing a job can mean losing our identity and make us wonder who we even are without the job title and accompanying role.
These are the very sort of questions that Logotherapy addresses. Frankl was of the opinion that within each of us resides an “indomitable spirit” that can survive more or less anything so long as we see a meaning even in our suffering. This is why he liked to quote the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who said “he who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
A Hard-Won Insight
This conviction in the importance of living a meaningful life wasn’t an idea that came to Frankl one day while he was sitting in his comfortable office or hiking through the countryside of Austria. On the contrary he learnt it first hand in the concentration camps during the second world war where he was held prisoner for a number of years. In these most challenging of all circumstances, he developed a conviction that finding meaning in suffering and engaging our free will if only with regard to the attitude we adopt to the situation, could on occasion, be the difference between life and death.
I personally can’t help but wonder if perhaps his work that he was able to do in the camp supporting other prisoners and engaging in pastoral care was the very thing that gave his life meaning during such difficult times and which played a role in helping him to survive his experience.
The Defiant Power of the Human Spirit
Now you might be thinking that after such an appalling experience, Frankl would have become a broken and bitter man. This in fact couldn’t be further from the truth. In spite of his own enormous suffering, Frankl developed an approach to psychotherapy which is ultimately very optimistic.
He liked to speak about the “defiant power of the human spirit.” This was his conviction that no matter what life throws at us, we have the freedom and wherewithal to deep deep and tap into resources that perhaps we didn’t even realise we had. Resources which can sustain us and help us get through difficult times. This is something that I personally believe and after working with people for over thirty years now, have seen happen time and time again. If you were to come and work with me my hope would be to help you to find this resourcefulness within yourself.
Looking Forward Not Back
Logotherapy, because it is largely focused on meaning which is something we are always searching for tends to be an approach to therapy which is very forward thinking. This is not to say that your past is not important, rather to acknowledge that unlike many approaches to therapy which tend to see the past as perhaps the most significant dimension of time, logotherapy instead sees the future and where we are heading as perhaps most important of all.
What I like about Logotherapy is that there are a significant number of ways in which to help with this process of meaning making; techniques and ideas which Frankl evolved over time and which I’ll write about more extensively in a number of blog articles where I will be able to do them justice and which I have incorporated into my work as a therapist.
Get in Touch
If you are currently struggling with difficulties in your life and are struggling with your own personal despair and wondering how to make sense of things, then feel free to get in touch with me. I’d be delighted to hear from you.