Collective Neuroses Of Our Days: Viktor Frankl On Fatalism, Conformism And Nihilism

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Viktor Frankl about what collective neuroses haunt people of the era of automation, how the innate will to meaning is replaced by the will to power and pleasure, or is completely supplanted by a constant increase in the pace of life, and why the problem of finding meaning cannot be limited to simple procreation

There seems to be no need to introduce Viktor Frankl to the readers of our magazine: the great psychiatrist, who, on the basis of his experience in concentration camps, was able to create a unique method of therapy aimed at finding meanings in all manifestations of life, even the most unbearable, appeared on the pages of Monocler more than once: o his military experience can be read in selected fragments of the book Say Yes to Life. Psychologist in a Concentration Camp”, and about logotherapy - in the article“Ten Theses on Personality”.

But today we publish a lecture "Collective neuroses of our days", which Victor Frankl read on September 17, 1957 at Princeton University. Why is she so interesting? Not only a detailed analysis of the mental state of people who happened to be born in the era of wars, total automation of life and devaluation of the personality, but also Frankl's reflections on the consequences to which the symptoms he singled out lead to: the scientist explains how an ephemeral attitude to life leads to the rejection of a long-term planning and goal-setting, fatalism and a neurotic tendency to devalue make people easily controlled by "homunculi", conformism and collective thinking lead to self-denial, and fanaticism to ignore the personalities of others.

The psychiatrist is sure that the cause of all symptoms is rooted in the fear of freedom, responsibility and in flight from them, and boredom and apathy, which haunt more than one generation of people, are manifestations of an existential vacuum in which a person finds himself who voluntarily abandoned the search for meaning or replaced it with a desire to power, pleasures and simple procreation, which, as Frankl is sure, is devoid of any meaning (yes, yes - and in this last hope to justify his existence, he refused to us).

"If the life of an entire generation of people is meaningless, then isn't it pointless to try to perpetuate this meaninglessness?"

Does Viktor Frankl offer any options for getting out of this vacuum and existential frustration? Of course, but the master himself will tell us about this. We read.

Collective neuroses of our day

The topic of my lecture is "the disease of our time." Today you entrust the solution of this problem to a psychiatrist, so I, apparently, must tell you about what the psychiatrist thinks about modern man, respectively, we should talk about the "neuroses of mankind."

Someone in this regard will seem interesting book entitled: "Nervous disorder - a disease of our time." The name of the author is Wenck, and the book was published in the 53rd year, only not in 1953, but in 1853 …

Thus, a nervous disorder, a neurosis, does not belong exclusively to modern diseases. Hirschman of the Kretschmer Clinic of the University of Tübingen has statistically proved that, without any doubt, neuroses have become more common in recent decades; the symptomatology has also changed. Surprisingly, in the context of these changes, the anxiety symptom scores declined. Therefore, it cannot be said that anxiety is the disease of our century.

It was found that the state of anxiety had no tendency to expand, not only in recent decades, but also in recent centuries. The American psychiatrist Freehen argues that in earlier centuries, anxiety was more common, and that there were more appropriate reasons for this than today - he means trials of sorcerers, religious wars, migration of peoples, the slave trade and plague epidemics. …

One of the most frequently cited claims of Freud is that humanity was severely affected by narcissism for three reasons: first, because of the teachings of Copernicus, second, because of the teachings of Darwin, and third, because of Freud himself. … We readily accept the third reason. However, with regard to the first two, we do not understand why explanations related to the “place” (Copernicus) that humanity occupies, or “where” (Darwin) it came from, can have such a strong impact. The dignity of a person is not affected in any way by the fact that he lives on Earth, a planet of the solar system, which is not the center of the universe. To worry about this is like worrying about the fact that Goethe was not born in the center of the earth, or because Kant did not live at the magnetic pole. Why should the fact that a person is not the center of the universe affect his significance? Are Freud's achievements belittled by the fact that he spent most of his life not in the center of Vienna, but in the ninth district of the city? Obviously, everything related to a person's dignity does not depend on his location in the material world. In short, we are faced with the confusion of different dimensions of being, with the ignorance of ontological differences. Only for materialism can the bright years be a measure of greatness.

Thus, if - from the point of view of the quaestio jurisⓘ "question of law" - Trans. from lat.

- we dispute the right of a person to believe that his dignity depends on spiritual categories, then from the point of view of the quaestio factiⓘ “question of fact” - Per. from lat.

- one can doubt that Darwin lowered a person's self-esteem. It may even seem like he has promoted her. Because the “progressive” thinking, progression-obsessed generation of the Darwin era, it seems to me, did not feel humiliated at all, but, rather, was proud of the fact that the monkey ancestors of man were able to evolve so far that nothing can interfere with the development of man and his transformation into "Superman". Indeed, the fact that the man stood up straight "affected his head."

Where, then, did the impression arise that the incidence of neuroses had become more frequent? In my opinion, this was due to the growth of something that causes the need for psychotherapeutic help. Indeed, people who have gone to a pastor, priest, or rabbi in the past turn to a psychiatrist today. But today they refuse to go to the priest, so the doctor is forced to be what I call a medical confessor. These functions of a confessor have become inherent not only to a neurologist or psychiatrist, but also to any doctor. The surgeon has to perform them, for example, in inoperable cases, or when he is forced to make a person disabled by amputation; an orthopedist faces the problems of a medical confessor when he deals with the crippled; a dermatologist - when treating disfigured patients, a therapist - when talking to incurable patients, and, finally, a gynecologist - when he is approached with the problem of infertility.

Not only neuroses, but even psychoses do not currently have a tendency to increase, while they change over time, but their statistical indicators remain surprisingly stable. I would like to illustrate this with the example of a condition known as latent depression: in the past generation, obsessive self-doubt associated with feelings of guilt and remorse was latent. The present generation, however, is symptomatically dominated by complaints of hypochondria. Depression is a condition associated with delusional ideas. It is interesting to see how the content of these crazy ideas has changed over the past few decades. It seems to me that the spirit of the times penetrates into the very depths of a person's mental life, therefore, the delusional ideas of our patients are formed in accordance with the spirit of the times and change with it. Krantz in Mainz and von Orelli in Switzerland argue that modern delusional ideas, compared to what they were before, are less characterized by the dominance of guilt - guilt before God, and more - by anxiety about their own body, physical health and performance. In our time, the delusional idea of sin is supplanted by the fear of illness or poverty. The modern patient is less concerned with his morale than with his finances.

Studying the statistics of neuroses and psychosis, let's turn to those numbers that are associated with suicide. We see that the numbers change over time, but not in the way, it would seem, they should change. Because there is a well-known empirical fact that in times of war and crisis, the number of suicides decreases. If you ask me to explain this phenomenon, then I will quote the words of an architect who once told me: the best way to strengthen and strengthen a dilapidated structure is to increase the load on it. Indeed, mental and somatic stress and stress, or what is known in modern medicine as "stress", is not always pathogenic and leads to the onset of the disease. We know from the experience of treating neurotics that, potentially, relieving stress is just as pathogenic as the onset of stress. Under the pressure of circumstances, former prisoners of war, former prisoners of concentration camps, as well as refugees, having endured severe suffering, were forced and were able to act at the limit of their capabilities, showing themselves from their best side, and these people, as soon as they were relieved of stress, suddenly freed them, mentally ended up on the brink of the grave. I always remember the effect of "decompression sickness" that divers experience if they are pulled to the surface too quickly from the layers of increased pressure.

Let's go back to the fact that the number of cases of neuroses - at least in the precise clinical sense of the word - is not increasing. This means that clinical neuroses in no way become collective and do not threaten humanity as a whole. Or let's put it more carefully: it just means that collective neuroses, as well as neurotic states - in the narrowest, clinical, sense of the word - are not inevitable!

Having made this reservation, let's turn to those traits of modern man's character that can be called neurosis-like, or "similar to neuroses." According to my observations, the collective neuroses of our time are characterized by four main symptoms:

1) Ephemeral attitude to life. During the last war, man had to learn to live until the next day; he never knew if he would see the next dawn. After the war, this attitude remained in us, it was strengthened by the fear of the atomic bomb. It seems that people are in the grip of a medieval mood, the slogan of which is: "Apr’es moi la bombe atomique" ⓘ "After me, even an atomic war" - Per. with fr.

… And therefore, they refuse long-term planning, from setting a certain goal that would organize their life. Modern man lives fleetingly, day by day, and does not understand what he is losing in this. He is also unaware of the truth of Bismarck's words: “In life, we treat many things like a visit to the dentist; we always believe that something real has yet to happen, in the meantime it is already happening. Let's take the life of many people in a concentration camp as a model. For Rabbi Jonah, for Dr. Fleischman and for Dr. Wolff, even the camp life was not fleeting. They never treated her as something temporary. For them, this life became the confirmation and the pinnacle of their existence.

2) Another symptom is fatalistic attitude to life … An ephemeral person says: "There is no point in making plans for life, because one day the atomic bomb will explode anyway."The fatalist says: "It is not even possible to make plans." He sees himself as a plaything of external circumstances or internal conditions and therefore allows himself to be controlled. He does not rule himself, but only chooses the blame for this or that in accordance with the teachings of modern nihilism. Nihilism holds in front of him a distorting mirror that distorts images, as a result of which he presents himself as either a mental mechanism or simply a product of an economic system.

I call this kind of nihilism "homunculism" because a person is mistaken, considering himself a product of what surrounds him, or his own psychophysical make-up. The latter claim finds support in popular interpretations of psychoanalysis, which provides many arguments for fatalism. Depth psychology, which sees its main task in "exposing", is most effective in treating the neurotic tendency to "devalue". At the same time, we must not ignore the fact noted by the famous psychoanalyst Karl Stern: “Unfortunately, there is a widespread belief that reductive philosophy is part of psychoanalysis. This is typical of the petty-bourgeois mediocrity, which treats everything spiritual with contempt”ⓘК. Stern, Die dritte Revolution. Salzburg: Muller, 1956, p. 101

… Most modern neurotics who turn to erring psychoanalysts for help are characterized by a contemptuous attitude towards everything related to spirit and, in particular, to religion. With all due respect to the genius of Sigmund Freud and his achievements as a pioneer, we must not close our eyes to the fact that Freud himself was the son of his era, dependent on the spirit of his time. Of course, Freud's reasoning about religion as an illusion or about the obsessive neurosis of God as the image of his father was an expression of this spirit. But even today, after several decades have passed, the danger that Karl Stern warned us about cannot be underestimated. At the same time, Freud himself was not at all a person who would have explored the spiritual and moral too deeply. Didn't he say that a person is even more immoral than he imagines, but also much more moral than he thinks of himself? I would end this formula by adding that he is often even more religious than he knows he is. I would not exclude Freud himself from this rule. After all, it was he who once appealed to "our Divine Logos."

Today, even psychoanalysts themselves feel something that, recalling the title of Freud's book "Dissatisfaction with Culture", can be called "dissatisfaction with popularity." The word "difficult" has become a sign of our days. American psychoanalysts complain that the so-called free association, partly using basic analytic techniques, have not been truly free for a long time: patients learn too much about psychoanalysis before they even arrive for an appointment. Interpreters no longer trust even the patient's dream stories. They are too often presented in a distorted form. So, in any case, say famous analysts. As noted by Emile Gazet, editor of the American Journal of Psychotherapy, patients who turn to psychoanalysts dream about the Oedipus complex, patients from the Adlerian school see power struggles in their dreams, and patients who turn to Jung's followers fill their dreams with archetypes.

3) After a short excursion into psychotherapy in general and into the problems of psychoanalysis in particular, we again return to the traits of a collective neurotic character in modern man and move on to considering the third of the four symptoms: conformism, or collective thinking … He manifests himself when an ordinary person in everyday life wants to be as less noticeable as possible, preferring to dissolve in the crowd. Of course, we should not confuse crowd and society with each other, since there is a significant difference between them. To be real, society needs individuals, and individuals need society as a sphere of manifestation of their activity. The crowd is different; she feels hurt by the presence of the original personality, therefore it suppresses the freedom of the individual and levels the personality.

4) The conformist, or collectivist, denies his own identity. The neurotic suffering from the fourth symptom - fanaticism, denies personality in others. No one should surpass him. He doesn't want to listen to anyone but himself. In fact, he does not have his own opinion, he simply expresses a conventional point of view, which he assumes for himself. Fanatics are increasingly politicizing people, while real politicians must be increasingly humanized. It is interesting that the first two symptoms - an ephemeral position and fatalism, are most common, in my opinion, in the Western world, while the last two symptoms - conformism (collectivism) and fanaticism - dominate in the countries of the East.

How common are these traits of collective neurosis among our contemporaries? I asked several of my staff to test patients who looked, at least clinically speaking, mentally healthy, who had just received treatment at my clinic for organic-neurological complaints. They were asked four questions to find out to what extent they showed any of the four symptoms mentioned. The first question aimed at manifesting an ephemeral position was: do you think it is worth taking any action if we might all be killed one day by an atomic bomb? The second question, showing fatalism, was formulated in this way: do you think that a person is a product and a toy of external and internal forces? The third question, revealing tendencies towards conformism or collectivism, was this: do you think that it is best not to attract attention to yourself? And finally, the fourth, really tricky question was phrased like this: Do you think that someone who is convinced of their best intentions for their friends has the right to use whatever means they think are necessary to achieve their goal? The difference between fanatical and humane politicians is this: fanatics believe that the end justifies the means, while, as we know, there are means that defile even the most sacred ends.

So, among all these people, only one person was found to be free from all the symptoms of collective neurosis; 50% of those surveyed showed three or even all four symptoms.

I have discussed these and other similar results in the Americas, and everywhere I have been asked if this is the case only in Europe. I replied: it is possible that the Europeans show the features of collective neurosis in a more acute form, but the danger - the danger of nihilism - is of a global nature. Indeed, it can be observed that all four symptoms are rooted in the fear of freedom, in the fear of responsibility and in flight from them; freedom together with responsibility makes a person a spiritual being. And nihilism, in my opinion, can be defined as the direction in which a person follows, tired and tired of the spirit. If we imagine how the world wave of nihilism is rolling, growing, forward, then Europe occupies a position similar to a seismographic station registering at an early stage an impending spiritual earthquake. Perhaps the European is more sensitive to the toxic fumes of nihilism; hopefully he will eventually be able to devise an antidote while there is time for it.

I have just spoken about nihilism and in this connection I want to note that nihilism is not a philosophy that asserts that only nothing exists, nihil is nothing, and therefore there is no Being; nihilism is a view of life that leads to the assertion that Being is meaningless. A nihilist is a person who believes that Being and everything that goes beyond his own existence is meaningless. But apart from this academic and theoretical nihilism, there is practical, so to speak, "everyday" nihilism: it manifests itself, and now more vividly than ever before, in people who consider their life meaningless, who do not see the meaning in their existence and therefore think that it is worthless.

Developing my concept, I will say that the strongest influence on a person is not the will to pleasure, not the will to power, but what I call the will to meaning: the striving for the highest and final meaning of his being, rooted in his nature, the struggle for it. This will to meaning can be frustrated. I call this factor existential frustration and contrast it with the sexual frustration that is so often attributed to the etiology of neuroses.

Each era has its own neuroses, and each era needs its own psychotherapy. Existential frustration today, it seems to me, plays at least the same important role in the formation of neuroses as previously played by sexual frustration. I call such neuroses noogenic. When neurosis is noogenic, it is not rooted in psychological complexes and trauma, but in spiritual problems, moral conflicts and existential crises, so such a neurosis rooted in the spirit requires a focus on the spirit of psychotherapy - this is what I call logotherapy, in contrast to psychotherapy. in the narrowest sense of the word. Be that as it may, logotherapy is effective in treating even neurotic cases of psychogenic rather than noogenic origin.

Adler introduced us to an important factor in the formation of neuroses, which he called the feeling of inferiority, but it is obvious to me that today the feeling of meaninglessness plays an equally important role: not the feeling that your being is less valuable than the being of other people, but the feeling that life doesn't make sense anymore.

Modern man is threatened by the assertion of the meaninglessness of his life, or, as I call him, an existential vacuum. So when does this vacuum manifest itself, when does this so often hidden vacuum manifest itself? In a state of boredom and apathy. And now we can understand the relevance of Schopenhauer's words that humanity is doomed to forever swing between the two extremes of desire and boredom. Indeed, boredom today poses more problems for us - both patients and psychiatrists - than desires and even so-called sexual desires.

The problem of boredom is becoming more and more urgent. As a result of the second industrial revolution, so-called automation is likely to lead to a huge increase in the average worker's free time. And the workers won't know what to do with all this free time.

But I see other dangers associated with automation: one day a person in his self-understanding may be under the threat of assimilating himself to a thinking and counting machine. At first he understood himself as a creature - as if from the point of view of his creator, God. Then came the machine age, and man began to see the creator in himself - as if from the point of view of his creation, the machine: I’homme machine, according to Lametrie. Now we live in the age of a thinking and counting machine. In 1954, a Swiss psychiatrist wrote in the Vienna Neurological Journal: "The electronic computer differs from the human mind only in that it works mostly without interference, which, unfortunately, cannot be said about the human mind." Such a statement carries with it the danger of a new homunculism. The danger that one day a person may misunderstand himself again and be interpreted again as "nothing but". According to the three great homunculisms - biology, psychologism, and sociologism - man was "nothing but" automatic reflexes, multiple drives, a mental mechanism, or simply a product of an economic system. In addition, there was nothing left for man, for the man who was called "paulo minor Angelis" in the psalm, thus placing him just below the angels. The human essence turned out to be non-existent, as it were. We must not forget that homonculism can influence history, at least it has already done so. It is enough for us to remember that not so long ago, the understanding of man as “nothing but” a product of heredity and the environment, or “Blood and Earth,” as it was later called, pushed us to historical cataclysms. In any case, I believe that there is a direct path from the homunculist image of man to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Majdanek. Distortion of the human image under the influence of automation is still a distant danger. Our, medical, task is not only to recognize and, if necessary, treat diseases, including mental illnesses and even those related to the spirit of our time, but also to prevent them whenever possible, therefore we have the right to warn of impending danger.

Before existential frustration, I said that a lack of knowledge about the meaning of existence, which alone can make life worthwhile, can cause neuroses. I have described what is called unemployment neurosis. In recent years, another form of existential frustration has intensified: the psychological crisis of retirement. They should be dealt with by psychogerontology or gerontopsychiatry.

It is vital to be able to direct someone's life towards a goal. If a person is deprived of professional tasks, he needs to find other life tasks. I believe that the first and main goal of psychohygiene is to stimulate the human will to the meaning of life by offering a person such possible meanings that are outside his professional sphere. Nothing helps a person to survive American psychiatrist J. E. Nardini ("Survival Factors in American Prisoners of War of the Japanese", The American Journal of Psychiatry, 109: 244, 1952) noted that American soldiers captured Japanese people would have a better chance of survival if they had a positive outlook on life aimed at a goal more dignified than survival.

and to maintain health as knowledge of a life task. Therefore, we understand the wisdom of Harvey Cushing's words, quoted by Percival Bailey: "The only way to prolong life is to always have an unfinished task." I myself have never seen such a mountain of books waiting to be read that rises on the table of the ninety-year-old Viennese professor of psychiatry, Joseph Berger, whose theory of schizophrenia provided so much for research in this area many decades ago.

The spiritual crisis associated with retirement is, more precisely, the constant neurosis of the unemployed. But there is also a temporary, recurrent neurosis - depression, which causes suffering to people who begin to realize that their lives are not meaningful enough. When every day of the week turns into Sunday, a sense of existential vacuum suddenly makes itself felt.

As a rule, existential frustration does not manifest itself, existing, usually in a veiled and hidden form, but we know all the masks and images by which it can be recognized.

In case of a “disease with power,” the frustrated will to meaning is replaced by a compensating will to power. The professional work that the executive gets involved in really means that his obsessive enthusiasm is an end in itself that leads nowhere. What the old scholastics called "terrible emptiness" exists not only in the realm of physics, but also in psychology; a person is afraid of his inner emptiness - an existential vacuum and runs away from it into work or pleasure. If the will to power takes the place of his frustrated will to meaning, then it may be economic power, which is expressed by the will to money and is the most primitive form of the will to power.

The situation is different with the wives of executives who suffer from a "disease of power." While executives have too many things to do to catch their breath and be alone with themselves, the wives of many executives often have nothing to do, they have so much free time that they don’t know what to do with it. They also find themselves stumped when faced with existential frustration, only for them it is associated with excessive alcohol consumption. If husbands are workaholics, then their wives develop dipsomania: they run from inner emptiness to endless parties, they develop a passion for gossip, for playing cards.

Their frustrated will to meaning is thus compensated not by the will to power, as in their husbands, but by the will to pleasure. Naturally, it can be sex as well. We often point out that existential frustration leads to sexual compensation and that sexual frustration is behind existential frustration. Sexual libido thrives in an existential vacuum.

But, besides all of the above, there is another way to avoid inner emptiness and existential frustration: driving at a breakneck speed. Here I want to clarify a widespread misconception: the pace of our time, associated with technological progress, but not always a consequence of the latter, can only be the source of physical illness. It is known that in recent decades, far fewer people have died from infectious diseases than ever before. But this death deficit was more than offset by fatal traffic incidents. However, on a psychological level, the picture is different: the speed of our time is not, as is often believed, the cause of disease. On the contrary, I believe that the high pace and rush of our time is rather an unsuccessful attempt to heal ourselves of existential frustration. The less able a person is to determine the purpose of his life, the more he accelerates its pace.

I see an attempt, under the noise of engines, as a vis a tergo of rapidly developing motorization, to remove the existential vacuum from the road. Motorization can compensate not only for the sense of meaninglessness of life, but also for the feeling of banal inferiority of existence. Doesn't the behavior of so many motorized parvenus remind us? - Approx. per.

what do animal psychologists call impression-seeking behavior?

What makes an impression is often used to compensate for feelings of inferiority: sociologists call this prestigious consumption. I know a great industrialist who, as a patient, is a classic case of a power-sick person. His whole life was subordinated to one single desire, for the satisfaction of which he, exhausting himself with work, ruined his health - he had a sports plane, but he was not satisfied, because he wanted a jet plane. Accordingly, its existential vacuum was so great that it could only be overcome at supersonic speed.

We spoke, from the standpoint of psychohygiene, about the danger that nihilism and the homunculist image of man pose in our time; psychotherapy can eliminate this danger only if it saves itself from becoming infected with the homunculist image of a person. But if psychotherapy understands a person as just a being that is perceived by "nothing but" the so-called id and superego, moreover, on the one hand, "controlled" by them, and on the other hand, seeking to reconcile them, then the homunculus, which is a caricature of what a person is will be saved.

Man is not "controlled", man makes decisions by himself. Man is free. But we prefer to talk about responsibility instead of freedom. Responsibility presupposes that there is something for which we are responsible, namely, for the fulfillment of specific personal requirements and tasks, for the awareness of the unique and individual meaning that each of us must realize. Therefore, I consider it incorrect to speak only about self-realization and self-actualization. A person will realize himself only to the extent that he performs certain specific tasks in the world around him. So not per intentionem, but per effectum.

We consider the will to pleasure from a similar standpoint. Man fails because the will to pleasure contradicts itself and even opposes itself. We are convinced of this every time, considering sexual neuroses: the more pleasure a person tries to get, the less it achieves. And vice versa: the more a person tries to avoid trouble or suffering, the deeper he sinks into additional suffering.

As we can see, there is not only the will to pleasure and the will to power, but also the will to meaning. We have the opportunity to give meaning to our life not only by creativity and experiences of Truth, Beauty and Kindness of nature, not only by familiarizing with culture and cognizing man in his uniqueness, individuality and love; we have the opportunity to make life meaningful not only by creativity and love, but also by suffering, if we, no longer having the opportunity to change our fate by action, take the right position in relation to it. When we can no longer control and change our destiny, then we must be ready to accept it. We need courage to creatively define our destiny; we need humility to deal correctly with suffering associated with an inevitable and unchanging destiny. A person experiencing terrible suffering can give meaning to his life by the way he meets his fate, taking upon himself suffering, in which neither active existence nor creative existence can give life value, and experiences - meaning. The right attitude to suffering is his last chance.

Thus, life, right down to the last breath, has its own meaning. The possibility of realizing the right attitude towards suffering - what I call attitude values - lasts until the very last moment. Now we can understand the wisdom of Goethe, who said: "There is nothing that cannot be ennobled by action or suffering." We add that suffering worthy of a person includes an act, a challenge and an opportunity for a person to gain the highest achievement.

In addition to suffering, the meaning of human existence is threatened by guilt and death. When it is impossible to change what as a result of which we were guilty and incurred responsibility, then guilt as such can be rethought, and here again everything depends on how ready a person is to take the right position in relation to himself - to sincerely repent of what he did. (I do not consider cases where the deed can be somehow redeemed.)

Now with regard to death - does it cancel the meaning of our life? In no case. As there is no history without end, so there is no life without death. Life can make sense whether it is long or short, whether a person left children behind him or died childless. If the meaning of life lies in procreation, then each generation will find its meaning only in the next generation. Consequently, the problem of finding meaning would simply be passed on from one generation to the next, and its solution would be constantly postponed. If the life of an entire generation of people is meaningless, then isn't it pointless to try to perpetuate this meaninglessness?

We see that any life in each situation has its own meaning and keeps it until the last breath. This is equally true for the life of both healthy and sick people, including the mentally ill. The so-called life unworthy of life does not exist. And even behind the manifestations of psychosis there is a truly spiritual personality, inaccessible to mental illness. The disease affects only the ability to communicate with the outside world, but the essence of a person remains indestructible. If this were not so, then there would be no point in the activities of psychiatrists.

When I was in Paris for the First Congress of Psychiatry seven years ago, Pierre Bernard asked me as a psychiatrist if idiots could become saints. I answered in the affirmative. Moreover, I said that due to the inner attitude, the terrible fact in itself of being born an idiot does not mean that it is impossible for this person to become a saint. Of course, other people, and even we psychiatrists, are hardly able to notice this, since mental illness blocks the very possibility of external manifestations of holiness in sick people. God only knows how many saints were hiding behind the antics of idiots. Then I asked Pierre Bernard if it was intellectual snobbery to doubt the very possibility of such transformations? Doesn't such doubts mean that in the minds of people, the holiness and moral qualities of a person depend on his IQ? But then is it possible, for example, to say that if the IQ is below 90, then there is no chance of becoming a saint? And one more consideration: who doubts that a child is a person? But can't an idiot be considered an infantile person who remained in his development at the level of a child?

Therefore, there is no reason to doubt that even the most miserable life has its own meaning, and I hope that I was able to show it. Life has an unconditional meaning, and we need unconditional belief in that. This is most important in times like ours, when a person is threatened by existential frustration, frustration of the will to meaning, existential vacuum.

Psychotherapy, if it comes from the correct philosophy, can only have unconditional faith in the meaning of life, any life. We understand why Waldo Frank wrote in an American journal that logotherapy lent credibility to the widespread attempts to supplant the unconscious philosophies of Freud and Adler by conscious philosophy. Modern psychoanalysts, especially in the United States, have already understood and agreed that psychotherapy cannot exist without a concept of the world and a hierarchy of values. It becomes more and more important to bring the psychoanalyst himself to the realization of his often unconscious ideas about a person. The psychoanalyst must understand how dangerous it is to leave this unconscious. In any case, the only way for him to do this is to realize that his theory is based on a cartoon image of a person and that it is necessary to make a correction in it.

This is what I tried to do in existential analysis and logotherapy: not replace, but supplement the existing psychotherapy, make the original image of a person a holistic image of a true person, including all dimensions, and pay tribute to the reality that belongs only to a person and is called “being”.

I understand that you can reproach me for the fact that I myself created a caricature of the person who suggested correcting. Perhaps you are partly right. Perhaps, indeed, what I was talking about was somewhat one-sided and I exaggerated the threat posed by nihilism and homunculism, which, it seemed to me, constitute the unconscious philosophical basis of modern psychotherapy; perhaps, indeed, I am hypersensitive to the slightest manifestations of nihilism. If so, please understand that I have this hypersensitivity because I had to overcome this nihilism in myself. Perhaps that is why I am able to detect him wherever he is hiding.

Perhaps I see a speck in someone else's eye so clearly because I wept a log out of my own, and therefore, maybe I have the right to share my thoughts outside the walls of my own school of existential introspection.