Man's Search For Ultimate Meaning

Preface

The main title of this book is identical with the title of the Oskar Pfister Award Lecture that I gave at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in 1985. The text of this lecture is reprinted here as Chapter 9. As for the first part of this volume, it has already been published under the title “The Unconscious God” in 1975, the English translation of “Der unbewusste Gott,” published in 1947. This book, in turn, had been based on the manuscript for a presentation I had been invited to give in Vienna, only a few months after the end of the war.

The “printing history” of the present volume thus goes back some 50 years. Perusing what I wrote in 1947, in 1975, and in 1985, I feel that it is, as a whole, a consistent sequence of presentations of some substantial thoughts regarding a quite important subject. Hopefully, then, some of what I have written throughout these decades may be of value to some readers.

However it may be—“See, I have not kept my lips closed.”

V. F.

Preface to the First English Edition

The material in this book is drawn from a lecture I gave shortly after World War II, at the invitation of a small club of Viennese intellectuals. My audience was composed of no more than a dozen listeners. In 1947 the lecture was published as a book in German. It is only now, 28 years after its original publication, that the book appears in an English translation. (Spanish, Danish, Dutch, French, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, and Swedish editions have already been published.)

Considering the time that has elapsed since the first edition—more than a quarter of a century—it might be understood that I no longer am in a position to subscribe fully to each and every word as it was printed in 1947. My thinking has developed considerably in the meantime—developed and, I hope, also matured.

To be sure, some of the changes have been implemented in the present edition by slightly altering certain passages. However, I have deliberately refrained from major alterations of the text because, of my 20 books, this is the most organized and systematized one, and it would have been a pity to destroy the cohesive structure of this piece of work by interspersing too much of the material that might have accrued in the meantime.

All the more, I welcomed the alternative that the publishers Simon and Schuster offered me, namely, to add, by way of a postscript, a supplementary chapter outlining some of the ideas that have evolved in my theory of conscience during the last two decades. As to the wider field that this book concerns, i.e., the interrelationship between psychotherapy and theology, the reader will find pertinent discussions in my two most recent books published in English (and in English only), Psychotherapy and Existentialism^* and The Will to Meaning.^† In each of these books one chapter explicitly deals with religious issues, and there are scattered references to this topic as well.

The updated bibliography at the end of this volume will enable the reader to locate further publications, not only those dealing with the relationship between religion and psychiatry but also those covering the whole area of logotherapeutic teachings and practices.

However, the main thesis propounded in the lecture entitled “The Unconscious God” remains still valid and tenable. There is, in fact, a religious sense deeply rooted in each and every man’s unconscious depths. In two of my books, Man’s Search for Meaning^‡ and the above-mentioned The Will to Meaning, evidence has been advanced to support my contention that this sense may break through unexpectedly, even in cases of severe mental illness such as psychoses. For example, a student of mine at the United States International University, San Diego, California, wrote:

Likewise, such unexpected religious feelings may break through under other circumstances, as was the case with a man who wrote from prison:

But one may discuss religion irrespective of whether it is unconscious or conscious, for the question confronting us is more basic and radical. First, we must ask ourselves whether this is a legitimate area for psychiatric exploration. Lately, I have come to draw the line of demarcation between religion and psychiatry ever more sharply.^* I have learned, and taught, that the difference between them is no more nor less than a difference between various dimensions. From the very analogy with dimensions, however, it should become clear that these realms are by no means mutually exclusive. A higher dimension, by definition, is a more inclusive one. The lower dimension is included in the higher one; it is subsumed in it and encompassed by it. Thus biology is overarched by psychology, psychology by noölogy, and noölogy by theology.

The noölogical dimension may rightly be defined as the dimension of uniquely human phenomena. Among them, there is one that I regard as the most representative of the human reality. I have circumscribed this phenomenon in terms of “man’s search for meaning.” Now, if this is correct, one may also be justified in defining religion as man’s search for ultimate meaning. It was Albert Einstein who once contended that to be religious is to have found an answer to the question, What is the meaning of life? If we subscribe to this statement we may then define belief and faith as trust in ultimate meaning. Once we have conceived of religion in this way—that is, in the widest possible sense—there is no doubt that psychiatrists are entitled also to investigate this phenomenon, although only its human aspect is accessible to a psychological exploration.

The concept of religion in its widest possible sense, as it is here espoused, certainly goes far beyond the narrow concepts of God promulgated by many representatives of denominational and institutional religion. They often depict, not to say denigrate, God as a being who is primarily concerned with being believed in by the greatest possible number of believers, and along the lines of a specific creed, at that. “Just believe,” we are told, “and everything will be okay.” But alas, not only is this order based on a distortion of any sound concept of deity, but even more importantly it is doomed to failure: Obviously, there are certain activities that simply cannot be commanded, demanded, or ordered, and as it happens, the triad “faith, hope, and love” belongs to this class of activities that elude an approach with, so to speak, “command characteristics.” Faith, hope, and love cannot be established by command simply because they cannot be established at will. I cannot “will” to believe, I cannot “will” to hope, I cannot “will” to love—and least of all can I “will” to will.

Upon closer investigation it turns out that what underlies the attempt to establish faith, hope, love, and will by command is the manipulative approach. The attempt to bring these states about at will, however, is ultimately based on an inappropriate objectification and reification of these human phenomena: They are turned into mere things, into mere objects. However, since faith, hope, love, and will are so-called “intentional” acts or activities, along the lines of the terminology coined by Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler, the founders of the school of “phenomenology,” these activities are directed to “intentional” referents—in other words, to objects of their own. To the extent that one makes intentional acts into objects, he loses sight of their objects. Nowhere, to my knowledge, is this brought home to us more strikingly than with the uniquely human phenomenon of laughter: You cannot order anyone to laugh—if you want him to laugh, you must tell him a joke.

But isn’t it, in a way, the same with religion? If you want people to have faith and belief in God, you cannot rely on preaching along the lines of a particular church but must, in the first place, portray your God believably—and you must act credibly yourself. In other words, you have to do the very opposite of what so often is done by the representatives of organized religion when they build up an image of God as someone who is primarily interested in being believed in and who rigorously insists that those who believe in him be affiliated with a particular church. Small wonder that such representatives of religion behave as though they saw the main task of their own denomination as that of overriding other denominations.

Certainly the trend is away from religion conceived in such a strictly denominational sense. Yet this is not to imply that, eventually, there will be a universal religion. On the contrary, if religion is to survive, it will have to be profoundly personalized.

This does not mean that there is no need for symbols and rituals. Even the die-hard agnostic and atheist cannot completely dismiss symbols. Consider the Russians, who once constructed a monument to express symbolically their indebtedness and gratitude to the thousands of dogs that had been sacrificed by Pavlov in the course of his famous conditioned-reflex experiments—what a purely symbolic gesture, pointless by the utilitarian yardstick adopted by dialectical materialism, and yet extremely meaningful to the heart of the Russian nation. A heart like that, as Blaise Pascal once observed, has reasons that are unknown to reason (le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point). The heart of man defies even Marxist indoctrination.

To all appearances, religion is not dying, and insofar as this is true, God is not dead either, not even “after Auschwitz,” to quote the title of a book. For either belief in God is unconditional or it is not belief at all. If it is unconditional it will stand and face the fact that six million died in the Nazi holocaust; if it is not unconditional it will fall away if only a single innocent child has to die—to resort to an argument once advanced by Dostoevski. There is no point in bargaining with God, say, by arguing: “Up to six thousand or even one million victims of the holocaust I maintain my belief in Thee; but from one million upward nothing can be done any longer, and I am sorry but I must renounce my belief in Thee.”

The truth is that among those who actually went through the experience of Auschwitz, the number of those whose religious life was deepened—in spite of, not because of, this experience—by far exceeds the number of those who gave up their belief. To paraphrase what La Rochefoucauld once remarked with regard to love, one might say that just as the small fire is extinguished by the storm while 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.

Viktor E. Frankl