Logotherapy for Filipinos in 2008

My New Year’s reading is Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Actually more like a re-reading, since I had gone through an earlier edition of this book during my prison years. It inspired one of the quotations I used on the greeting cards and wall decors we made for our friends and solidarity contacts: “Those who would give light must endure burning.”

The image I chose for that quotation was a burning candle, with the molten wax taking human forms, and a strand of barbed wire encircling the candle. When I first saw the logo of Amnesty International, I wondered how many prisoners in how many prisons also combined the two symbols - barbed wire for repression, and a burning candle for defiance.

I brought the book much earlier with me to Naujan before Christmas, but didn’t have the the quiet space and time to read it. Finally today, the slow boat ride to Batangas and the road trip to Quezon City gave me the opportunity for a meditative reading.

The Los Angeles Times raved about an earlier edition of this book: “If you read but one book this year, Dr. Frankl’s book should be that one.”

It is praise fully earned. I think Filipinos would find much benefit from reading this book at the start of 2008.

Part One of Man’s Search for Meaning is a 100-page “autobiographical fragment” of his years in various concentration camps. His prose is spare, almost clinical, reflecting his training as a psychiatrist. He writes that one of the many ways we cope with unavoidable suffering and pain is by adopting a cold detached curiosity.

Re-reading his story more than 20 years later, I recall some of my thoughts in prison. When I was in solitary confinement and feeling down, I had access to Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and found twisted comfort in its meticulous narration of repression and suffering. My personal situation seemed so trivial. I even told myself: “We won’t be able to produce this level of literature. We have not suffered as much!”

The same applies to reading Frankl’s prison experiences. I have heard of terrible tales about political prisoners in the Philippines, but they don’t compare with what he underwent. I doubt if I would have been able to survive as he did. And he even distilled his experiences to develop what is called the Third School of Viennese Psychiatry - the school of logotherapy.

He embodies the quote he cites from Nietsche: “Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich starker.” What does not kill me makes me stronger.

Part Two of this slim book describes “Logotherapy in a Nutshell.” Part Three is an addition to the 1984 edition, and has the provocative and profound title, “The Case for Tragic Optimism.”

You do not need to have been in prison in order to appreciate the wisdom of Frankl. In fact, although I re-read him mainly to help me look back at my life as I approach my 65th in July 2008, I realize that his insights and advice apply to Filipinos as we face 2008.

Frankl explains that logotherapy is less retrospective and introspective compared to psychoanalysis. It focuses on the future, on the meanings to be found, or rather, fulfilled. Logotherapy asserts that he striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in a human being.

In simplified terms, compared to Freudian psychoanalysis which is centered on the will-to-pleasure, and Adlerian psychology which is focused on the will-to-power, Frankl’s logotherapy emphasizes the will-to-meaning.

One of his favorite quotes, again from Nietzche, is “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

Before you think that he advocates only philosophical musings about the “grand meaning” of life, he stresses that “the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his psyche, as though it were a closed system…Being human always points and is directed to something or someone other than oneself.”

That is why he says “the meaning of life always changes but it never ceases to be.” We can discover this meaning in life in three ways: 1) by creating a work or doing a deed, 2) by experiencing something or encountering someone, and 3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.

I am glad I have re-read Frankl, since my recollection of my first reading was that logotherapy was mainly about the third way - how to find meaning in a seemingly hopeless situation. He called it the “last of human freedoms” - the ability to choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances.

Re-reading him reassures me that logotherapy does not advocate resigned acceptance of a situation, much less equanimity for its own sake. In fact he writes that the search for meaning “may arouse inner tension rather than inner equilibrium.”

The third way to find meaning focuses on changing our attitude, but only in the face of unavoidable suffering and pain. If what causes suffering and pain can be avoided or ended, logotherapy’s prescription is to assume our responsibility to do something about it.

Frankl writes that logotherapy is neither teaching nor preaching. The logotherapist is not a painter but an eye specialist. The painter tries to give us a picture of the world as he or she sees it. The opthalmologist tries to enable us to see the world as it is, so that the whole spectrum of potential meaning becomes visible to us.

In doing so, logotherapy challenges us with potential meanings that is our responsibility to fulfill.

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