It looks as if I had better take a moment to deal with the ghost of Viktor Frankl, a man who is much revered for “talking about meaning” and who made a career out of his internment experiences, experiences (some of which he quite fibbed about) that have done a lot to obscure the fact that he was a religious zealot and a fascist and not a father of a freedom-loving branch of psychology.
Many people think that previous movements like Viktor Frankl’s Logotherapy have already tackled the problem of meaning and that therefore noimetic psychology can’t really be new or say anything new. In fact, a philosophy, religion or psychology such as Logotherapy (it is most properly a religion) did not investigate meaning at all. Rather it used the “meaning” word in the context of an authoritarian agenda, in the context of support for and allegiance to gods. Frankl, an Orthodox believer, construed meaning as nothing less than and nothing else than obeying the-one-true-god.
That is not where a psychology of meaning can legitimately start and it is certainly not where it should be allowed to end.
Frankl seems to have acquired a bit of a halo as someone who, so people think, articulated our human need for meaning. In fact, he stood not for the psychological experiencing of meaning, a trait that we all share, but for the age-old authoritarian approach to meaning: there are higher meanings, namely those provided by a god, and you had better align with them or else.
In 1934 Frankl joined the Fatherland Front, an Austrian fascist organization. From 1936 to 1938 he associated himself with the Nazi-oriented branch of the Goering Institute, which had the pleasure of publishing him. From 1940 through 1942, as a “Jewish specialist” and while under Nazi supervision, he performed experiments on confined Jews who had committed suicide. This is the resume of a right-wing authoritarian zealot for whom meaning is “objective” – that is, for whom meaning is what he or his god says it is.
If you say that there are absolute values, for example values provided by a god, and I say that values are contextual, personal, and subjective, we are both “talking about values” but we are in fact on different planets. If you say, as Frankl did, that the meaning of life is “freedom through suffering,” which is clearly a religious principle, and I say that there is no “meaning of life,” that there are only the meanings that come unbidden or the meanings that we affirm, support, and create, we are both “talking about meaning” but we couldn’t possibly be further apart in our understanding of the facts of existence.
Here is a brief but telling quote from the website of the current Victor Frankl Institute: “LTEA [Logotherapy and Existential Analysis] is based on the idea that meaning is an objective reality, as opposed to a mere illusion arising within the perceptional apparatus of the observer.” In noimetic psychology, we claim exactly the opposite, that meaning is a subjective reality. If the difference between “meaning” being an objective reality that you must work to discern and that you are obliged to obey and “meaning” being a subjective psychological experience that you can create sounds like no difference to you, you are not finely attuned to the difference between believing authoritarian dogma and embracing freedom.
Logotherapy, the psychotherapy that emerged from Frankl’s views, and noimetic psychology have little in common except that we both employ the word “meaning.” As soon as someone informs you that “meaning is objective” you can be sure that soon he will be announcing, “And here’s what it is.” In the authoritarian view objective meaning must be found, since it is “out there somewhere”; in the noimetic view subjective meaning, which is all that we have and exactly what we have, is always available if and when we decide to embrace the truth of that reality.
Our contemporary conversations about meaning are not exhausted because religious zealots like Frankl have used the word a lot. Rollo May, the existential thinker and writer, publicly took Frankl to task for disguising religion as psychology. It is funny that Frankl is revered as a figure in the history of freedom. He is actually a figure in the history of the authoritarian personality, one who just happened to use the word “meaning” in felicitous ways. He surely did not end our conversation about meaning; in fact, he never really began it.
**
Eric Maisel, Ph.D., is a psychotherapist, bestselling author of 40 books, and widely regarded as America’s foremost creativity coach. His latest book is Rethinking Depression: How to Shed Mental Health Labels and Create Personal Meaning (New World Library, February, 2012). He is the founder of noimetic psychology, the new psychology of meaning. Please visit Dr. Maisel at http://www.ericmaisel.com or contact him at ericmaisel@hotmail.com. You can learn more about noimetic psychology at http://www.entheosacademy.com/courses/7
