Subjectivity in Logotherapy
[Subjectivity in Psychotherapy, 02]
I. Introduction
By now, everyone has heard of the Viennese psychiatrist Viktor Frankl. His immensely famous book, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), changed how the world of psychotherapy as well as how the general public (for those who have read it, which is a lot) conceptualized suffering, meaning, and hope. Since then, Frankl (1905–1997) has published numerous books and has given talks around the world expounding on his concept of logotherapy and logotheory. I would like to spend some time examining how subjectivity is represented in Frankl’s beliefs.
There are two central concepts to understand to lay the groundwork for understanding the subject of logotherapy: intentionality and self-transcendence.
II. Being-towards
Intentionality. The concept of intentionality in Frankl’s work comes from phenomenology. Elucidated earliest in Franz Brentano, intentionality refers to the idea that consciousness is always “consciousness of X, Y, Z, etc.”. In other words, we are always existing in relation to something, or referring to something, an object (Huemer, 2019). The important thing to know is that we are not “be conscious”, we are always “conscious towards/of something”. This fact is constitutive of human consciousness.
Self-transcendence. Self-transcendence is difficult to pin down in Frankl’s writings, but it comes up often. In his On the Theory and Therapy of Mental Disorders (2004), he claims that this concept is what distinguishes logotherapy from other modes of clinical work:
Self-transcendence marks the fundamental anthropological fact that human existence is always directed toward something that is not itself — toward something or someone, namely, either a meaning to be fulfilled or an interpersonal existence that it encounters (p. 4).
So, already we see Frankl’s use of intentionality when examining subjectivity and the human experience: “existence is not only intentional but also transcendent. Self-transcendence is the essence of existence. Being human is directed to something other than itself” (2014, p. 45, my italics). What is this “other than itself” that subject is always directed towards? There is something different between the concepts intentionality and self-transcendence. While intentionality is more fundamental, necessary to conceptualize self-transcendence, the latter adds the dimension of the noological (from the Greek root, “spirit”). We must now turn to the problem of meaning and the will to meaning which Frankl sees as the center of self-transcendent subjectivity.
III. The Subject of Meaning
Meaning, is, for Frankl, “what is meant” (2014, p. 53). Human beings, in contrast to animals, are open to the world in a way that they can break out of boundaries and definitions of what is to seek what could be. This implies the ability to detach oneself from one’s conditions and change these conditions by revising how one stands into relation to them. Frankl’s experience in the Nazi concentration camps would corroborate this finding. But what is the structure of this detachment? It cannot be the subject of the Enlightenment, an entirely self-contained individual capable of constructing its own experience a priori (Mansfield, 2001) because of Frankl’s reliance on the concept of intentionality. Rather, the structure of logotherapy’s subjective detachment is one of values and valuing.
Max Scheler developed a phenomenological theory of valuing from which logotherapy borrows. The act of valuing (for it is active, not passive), for Scheler, is “an act of meaning giving or creation and is therefore an intentional act” (Davis & Steinbock, 2021). We are, then, always intending towards our values, creating them in the process of acting on/against them. For example, we do not simply perceive Beethoven’s 9th: as soon as we hear the tune, we are relating to it in a specific way (“It is beautiful; It is nationalistic; It is nostalgic; It is stale;” and so on). This goes for events and moments in our lives as well. From deciding who to marry to how to prioritize things in our day, everything we do is an act of value-creation, or valuing. It is our confrontation with our lives which grounds our self-transcendent activity: by reflecting on our condition, we are surpassing it. This is due to the implicit value-comparison we make during reflection. The subject of logotherapy is one of ideals and striving, always inherently “living in the polar field of tension established between reality and ideals to materialize” (2014, p. 46). Thus, meaning arises in the field where the individual strives to fulfill the meaning which is somehow ‘missing’ in his or her reality.
For instance, Frankl (1946) had two options in the concentration camps: sulk, lose hope, and degenerate, or reject his slave status, cultivate hope, and help others when he could. Each option implied a preference for certain values relative to the situation at hand: suffering at the hands of the Nazi force. But why these two options? Why not more? Why not an infinite number of options? There is a paradox we need to avoid falling into when thinking the subject of logotherapy: we need to think self-transcendence along with our actual conditions.
It is an axiom in logotherapy that “Meanings are discovered but not invented” (2014, p. 52). But this ‘discovery’ does not imply collaborating with an objective, static, and absolute reality. Meaning always implies decision-making in unique situations by unique people. So meaning is not absolute, but it is also not subjective or relative. Frankl considers meaning to be trans-subjective: Indeed, there are unique situations with unique people to respond to them; however, commonality exists somewhere (culturally, historically, universally, etc.) in which every person will make meaning from their experience in similar ways. This is the foundation of values in Frankl’s theory of subject, and it can alleviate the need for an individual to find the meaning in each situation anew. For example: we know it is bad to hurt people with malice, and don’t need to keep re-finding this meaning with each encounter with another. But subject is not entirely alleviated of decision-making, because it will often happen that two values will apparently conflict, and then an either/or decision must be made, thereby finding meaning in the situation which the subject is presented with. The function that carries out this valuing is conscience.
Conscience. Frankl uses the term conscience to discern the impasse of the hierarchical nature of values and the appearance of value conflicts: “consciousness also has the power to discover unique meanings that contradict accepted values” (2014, p. 54). Meaning in life comes not from traditional absolutist value systems (although Frankl does lament this loss), but from a unique subject’s confrontation with their unique situation. Again, “[conscience] is subject to the human condition in that it is stamped by the finiteness of man” (p. 55). There is humility in Franklian subjectivity. We can never know for certain whether our conscience is leading us astray or into nobility, love, and heroism — in short, a deeper subjective engagement — because detachment is always already grounded in our current conditions, in reality. There is an open-endedness to conscience, then. This is our way out of the impasse: Yes, we are always “beyond” our own conditions, and it is our freedom and our responsibility to confront these conditions (via conscience). This is why meaning must be ‘found’ but not ‘given’: there is nothing outside of ourselves that can bestow meaning to our lives; nonetheless, there is always a unique meaning for each unique situation in the form of self-transcendence — aiming beyond the self. Humor, heroism, and love are the three other modes of being in which subject can take itself into account.
Humor, heroism, love. It is subject’s capacity for humor, heroism, and love which allows it to detach itself from its conditions. Or, rather, these are concrete manifestations of self-transcendence. In these stances we ‘take a stand’ in relation to our own conditions and ourselves. In this act, though, subject makes itself an object unto itself; otherwise, this distance from our conditions would not be possible. This otherness — or making self into object — in which subject undertakes is possible due to the inherent tension which constitutes object and subject in the structure of intentionality. Humor and heroism are acts in which subject either affirms or rejects itself. Love is “is that capacity to grasp another human being in his very uniqueness” (2014, p. 22).
References
Davis, Zachary and Anthony Steinbock, “Max Scheler”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/scheler/>.
Frankl, V. (1946). Man’s Search for Meaning. Kindle.
Frankl, V. (2014). Will to Meaning: Foundations and Applications of Logotherapy. New York, NY: Plume Publishing. Originally published 1969.
Frankl, V. (2004). On the Theory and Therapy of Mental Disorders. New York, NY: Routledge.
Huemer, Wolfgang, “Franz Brentano”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/brentano/>.
Mansfield, N. (2000). Subjectivity: Theories of Self from Freud to Haraway. Kindle.
