The man was then able to think of his suffering as a sacrifice made on behalf of his wife. Frankl helped the man realize that if he had died before she had, she would be the one suffering instead. For example, Frankl once had a patient who was still grief-stricken over his wife’s death two years after her passing. This state can help clarify a man’s will to meaning (sense of purpose) and set him back on a healthy path. Frankl encourages therapists to help their patients achieve a state of noö-dynamics, in which what one has already accomplished is in a healthy tension with what one hopes to accomplish in the future. This frustration can also lead to existential despair, or a state in which one deeply questions the meaning of one’s life. He defines his therapy by comparing it to Freud’s method of psychoanalysis: logtherapy is “less retrospective and less introspective.” Frankl says that existential frustration (a lack of meaning in one’s life) can lead to noögenic neuroses like anticipatory anxiety, which must be treated with logotherapy. The second section of the book deals with logotherapy more directly, and sets out Frankl’s core beliefs. Thus he gives personal details about life in the camps, but he does so from a psychologist’s point of view, and draws larger conclusions from his experiences. Moreover, Frankl maintained a sense of purpose in the concentration camps precisely by deciding to study how the camps affected prisoners’ psychologies. Unlike Freud’s psychoanalysis and Adler’s individual psychology, logotherapy claims that the search for existential meaning is the major motivating force in a person’s life. Logotherapy is known as the “Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy,” after Freud’s and Adler’s respective theories. Logotherapy is a school of psychology-developed by Frankl himself-that is centered around helping people find meaning in life.
Although much of Frankl’s book is focused on his time in concentration camps, Man’s Search for Meaning is fundamentally about logotherapy.
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