Among the thinkers who have influenced the way I understand psychotherapy, Viktor Frankl has always held a particularly important place.
When I first encountered his work, one question stayed with me:
What gives a person’s life meaning?
It is a deceptively simple question. The more I have thought about it, and the more people I have had the privilege of working with, the more I have come to realise just how deep that question really is.
It is a question that has stayed with me throughout my professional life.
Beyond the Relief of Symptoms
Psychotherapy is, of course, often about helping people feel better. We work with anxiety, depression, difficult emotions, painful experiences and patterns of thinking or behaviour that may no longer be helpful.
Reducing psychological distress is important, and for many people it can be the first step towards feeling able to live their lives again.
But over the years, I have become increasingly aware that people are more than the difficulties they bring into the therapy room. Sometimes, beneath the anxiety or depression, there are other questions waiting to be asked.
Why am I here?
What is the purpose of my life?
What makes life worth living?
How do I rebuild my life after loss?
Who am I now that everything has changed?
These questions can appear during times of crisis, but they can also arise during much quieter moments.
Sometimes they emerge when a relationship ends, when children leave home, when someone retires, when a person becomes unwell, or when life simply enters a different chapter.
Sometimes nothing dramatic has happened at all. A person simply reaches a point where they pause and think:
Is this really the life I want to be living?
What Frankl Taught Me
Viktor Frankl’s work, particularly his development of logotherapy, placed the search for meaning at the centre of his understanding of human beings.
His own experiences of unimaginable suffering profoundly influenced his thinking. He wrote about the human capacity to continue searching for meaning even when circumstances become incredibly difficult.
I think it is important to be careful with this idea.
Frankl was not suggesting that suffering is good, or that we should somehow be grateful for painful experiences. Nor do I believe that every experience of suffering needs to be turned into a positive lesson.
Some things are simply heartbreaking.
Loss can be devastating. Trauma can change people profoundly. There are experiences for which there may never be a satisfying explanation, and I think we need to leave room for that.
What I find meaningful in Frankl’s work is something slightly different: the possibility that, even when we cannot control what happens to us, there may still be some space in which we can decide how we meet what has happened.
That space may sometimes be very small, but it can matter.
Meaning Is Personal
One of the things I have come to appreciate most about the search for meaning is that there is no universal answer. What makes life meaningful for one person may mean very little to another.
For some people, meaning is found in family.
For others, it may be creativity, faith, friendship or helping other people. It might be work, learning, nature, art, parenthood, community, or simply being present for the people we care about.
I don’t think we necessarily know what gives our lives meaning at every stage. At times, our priorities can change.
What mattered deeply to us at twenty may feel very different at fifty. Experiences such as becoming a parent, losing someone we love, changing careers, becoming unwell, retiring or going through a major relationship change can alter the way we see ourselves and what we value.
Sometimes we have to rediscover what matters, and sometimes we have to let go of an old sense of purpose and make room for a new one.
Finding Meaning After Loss
Some of the most difficult conversations about meaning arise after loss.
When someone loses a loved one, a relationship, their career, their health or a part of their identity, it can feel as though the life they knew has disappeared.
People sometimes ask, consciously or unconsciously:
Who am I now?
Where do I go from here?
What is left for me?
There isn’t always an immediate answer, and perhaps there should not be.
I have come to think that, after significant loss, people sometimes need time not simply to recover, but to reconstruct their understanding of themselves and their lives.
You cannot always replace what has been lost; and sometimes the task is to find a way of living with the loss while gradually discovering what life can become now.
This is one of the reasons I believe psychological support can sometimes involve something deeper than symptom reduction.
There can be a process of rebuilding; not necessarily rebuilding the life that existed before, but discovering whether a different life can begin to take shape.
Sometimes the first step is simply having somewhere safe to ask the questions.
Meaning and Responsibility
Frankl also made me think deeply about the relationship between meaning and responsibility. If our lives have meaning, then our choices matter.
We may not be free from our circumstances, but there can sometimes be a degree of freedom in how we respond to them.
At the same time, I think this idea needs to be handled with care. It should never become a way of blaming people for the difficulties they face.
People do not all begin from the same place. Poverty, discrimination, trauma, illness, social circumstances and many other factors can profoundly limit the choices available to someone. It would be simplistic and unfair to tell a person that they simply need to choose differently.
For me, the more interesting question is not whether we are completely free, because we clearly are not. It is how we understand the relationship between circumstance, freedom and possibility.
Even within difficult circumstances, where might there still be a small area of choice? And what might we do with it?
Spirituality and Meaning
Frankl’s work also helped deepen my interest in the relationship between psychology and spirituality.
I don’t think spirituality has to mean belonging to a particular religious tradition. For some people, it is deeply connected to faith and religious belief. For others, it may be experienced through nature, creativity, contemplation, relationships, compassion or a sense of connection to something larger than themselves.
For many people, spirituality is simply about asking questions that are bigger than everyday life. What matters? What do I believe? What kind of person do I want to be? What makes a life worthwhile? What does it mean to be human?
Psychology cannot necessarily answer all of these questions; but I don’t think that means we should ignore them.
Sometimes the most important questions we carry are the ones that don’t have straightforward psychological answers.
The Search Continues
Perhaps what I appreciate most about Frankl is that he never reduced human beings to their circumstances. What happens to us can shape us profoundly. Sometimes it can change us in ways we never expected; but we are not necessarily defined entirely by what happens to us. There can remain some possibility of reflection, response and meaning.
I don’t mean that in a simplistic or overly optimistic way. Finding meaning isn’t about putting a positive spin on suffering. It isn’t about convincing ourselves that everything happens for a reason. Sometimes meaning emerges slowly, and it can change with time. Sometimes we lose our sense of meaning altogether for a period of time; and at times, if we are honest, we simply don’t know what something means, and that can be okay.
There can be something deeply human about being able to say, “I don’t understand this yet.”
Perhaps meaning does not always arrive as an answer. Sometimes it develops gradually, through the way we continue to live, relate to others, make choices and make sense of our experiences.
Looking Back
After many years of working with people, I find that Frankl’s question continues to interest me as much as it did when I first encountered his work.
Perhaps even more so.
The longer I work with people, the more I see that the search for meaning isn’t something that belongs only in psychotherapy. It belongs to all of us. We encounter it when we choose a career, fall in love, become parents, experience loss, grow older, retire, face illness or uncertainty, or simply reach a point in our lives when we stop and ask ourselves:
What really matters to me now?
I think that is one of the reasons Frankl’s work has stayed with me. He reminds us that human beings are not simply creatures who want to be free from pain. We also want our lives to mean something.
We want to feel that our experiences make some kind of sense, to feel connected and to love and be loved. We want to contribute something; and, perhaps most fundamentally, we want to feel that our lives matter.
I don’t think we ever completely finish the search for meaning. Our answers change as we change; and perhaps that is the point.
As I look back over my own professional journey, I find that the search for meaning remains one of the most interesting and enduring questions I have encountered.
It is a question I continue to think about, both in my work with others and in my own life.
Perhaps that is what I find most valuable about Frankl’s work: not that he gave us a definitive answer to the question of meaning, but that he reminded us that the question itself matters.
Sometimes, the search is part of the meaning.