Ch. 11: Meaninglessness & Psychotherapy

Question 1

Meaninglessness and Psychotherapy

Answer 1

A therapist who accepts a patient’s formulation of the problem is likely to share that patient’s sense of entrapment - reminded of their own incomplete quest for meaning in life

Question 2

First steps:

Question

Dissect

Answer 2

The first step is not to accept the patient’s formulation of the problem at face value

• If one analyzes the ground on which the complaint rests - “What meaning is there in life?” - one learns that the question is primitive and contaminated
• The question assumes that there is a meaning to life that a particular patient is unable to locate
• As such, the question is in conflict with the view of the human as a meaning-giving subject

Another problem is that meaning of life is often confounded with a hose of other issues
- Dissecting and discarding those helps the primary meaning concern less lethal and far more manageable

Question 3

Why Do We Need Meaning?

Answer 3

Kohler, Wertheimer, and Koffka with their gestalten spawned an enormous amount of research that demonstrates that we organize all sorts of different sorts of stimuli into configurations or patterns

• Just as with random dots we connect into a pattern or a broken circle we connect to a whole, we look for patterns (and experience dysphoria when we don’t find them) in the face of an indifferent, unpatterned world and search for patterns, explanations, and the meaning of existence
• Even if the meaning-schema that one has discovered involves the idea that one is puny, helpless, or dispensable, it is nonetheless more comforting than a state of ignorance

Question 4

A standard anthropological definition of a value

Existing in groups

Answer 4

“A conception, explicit or implicit, distinctive of an individual or a characteristic of a group, of the ‘desirable’ which influences the selection from available modes, means and ends of action.”

• A code according to which a system of action may be formulated
• Values allow us to place possible ways of behaving into some approval-disapproval hierarchy
• Yalom has stressed that one creates oneself by a series of ongoing decisions
• But one cannot make each and every decision de novo throughout one’s life

Values also make it possible for individuals to exist in groups

• Those belonging to a particular culture have some shared conception about “what is” and “what must be done”
• Not only what an individual ought to do but what others probably do as well

Question 5

Death and Meaning

Answer 5

We too easily assume that death and meaning are entirely interdependent
- Yet they are not fused - if we were able to live forever, we would still be concerned about meaning
- Experiences are temporal, and once cannot exist outside of time. When they are over, they are over, and nothing can be done about it.
Is it true, as Schopenhauer posed, that “what has been exists as little as what has never been”? Is memory not “real”?
- Frankl argues that the past is not only real but permanent
- He is sorry for the pessimist who despairs when he watches his calendar grow thinner each day as a sheet is removed and admires the man who saves each successive leaf and reflects with joy on the richness experienced in the days represented by the leaves - “Instead of possibilities, I have realities.”

Question 6

Anxiety and Meaning

Answer 6

Anxiety stemming from awareness of freedom and isolation is also frequently confused with the anxiety of meaninglessness. Fear of absolute loneliness propels one into a search of identification with something or someone.

Question 7

Cultural artifact? History of meaning

Answer 7

There were eras in our own culture where goal-directed striving was by no means accepted as a commonly sanctioned mode of finding meaning in life

From antique: horas non numero nisi serena (“The hours don’t count unless they’re serene”)

Fromm notes that man’s burning ambition for fame has been common from the Renaissance up until the present day whereas little seen in medieval man

In northern Europe it was not until the 16th century that man’s obsessional craving to work appeared

Question 8

D. T. Suzuki, the Zen master

Answer 8

17th century haiku by Basho

When I look carefully
I see the Nazuma blooming
By the hedge!

The second by Tennyson

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you of of the crannies; -
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand.
Little Flower - but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all
I should know what God and man is.

Suzuki suggests that this contrast illustrates Western and Eastern attitudes toward nature and life

• The Westerner is analytical and objective and attempts to understand nature by dissecting, subjugating and exploiting it
• The Oriental is subjective, integrative, totalizing, and attempts not analyze and harness but to experience and harmonize

Question 9

“Mind-setting”

Answer 9

The first act is “mind-setting”: listening carefully and becoming aware of of the importance of meaning in the lives of individuals

• For some it is not crucial, for others the sense of meaninglessness is profound and pervasive
• Yalom with young, sensuality-, sex-, prestige-oriented Californians has noticed that therapy is rarely successful unless he helps the patient focus on something beyond these pursuits

Question 10

How does a therapist affect such a refocusing?

The isolated engineer

Answer 10

If the therapist has heightened sensitivity to the importance of meaning then the patient will gradually, through subtle cues, also become similarly sensitive to the issue

• The therapist will, implicitly and explicitly, wonder about the patient’s belief systems, inquire deeply into the loving of another, ask bout long-range hopes and goals, explore creative interests and pursuits
• (“I have found it singularly rewarding to take an in-depth history of the patient’s efforts to express themselves creatively.”)
• The therapist, in order to “care” for the patient must know the patient as deeply as possible, including these meaning-seeking activities

The isolated engineer

Question 11

DEREFLECTION

Therapy group

Answer 11

By Frankl, a simplistic technique of telling the patient to stop focusing on themselves and search for meaning outside of self
- Vignette of 19-year-old schizophrenic to whom Frank repeatedly and in an authoritative fashion tells not to think of inner turmoil, but to turn her gaze to what is waiting for her, what is waiting to be achieved by you

Although wouldn’t work for modern, especially American, patients, the idea is important: the therapist must find a way to help the patient develop curiosity and concern for others

• The therapy group is especially well suited for this endeavor
• Therapists may ask to reflect on how others feel at the moment
• Therapist may ask morbidly self-absorbed patients the task of introducing new patients to the group

Question 12

DISCERNMENT OF MEANING

Answer 12

Frankl suggests that the therapist’s task is to comprehend some coherent pattern in what would appear to be the random and tragic events of life. Often a lot of ingenuity is required, e.g. with an elderly GP who could not overcome the loss of his wife:

“Now how could I help him? Well I confronted him with the question “What would have happened, Doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?” “Oh,” he said, “for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!” Whereupon I replied, “You see, Doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it is you who have spared her this suffering; but now, you have to pay for it by surviving and mourning her.” He said no word but shook my hand and calmly left my office.”

Question 13

Frankl’s authoritarianism

Answer 13

Frankl’s approach is problematic in his authoritarianism - doesn’t he move the patient even further from the assumption of full personal autonomy?

Jung does the same with a Jewish girl, whose grandpa was a Zaddick, a mystic and - Jung told the girl: “Now I am going to tell you something you may not be able to accept. Your grandfather was a Zaddick… Your father betrayed the secret and turned his back on God. And you have your neurosis because the fear of God has got into you.”

• “Struck her like a bolt of lightning”
• Jung later shared a dream with the girl where it was raining and Jung didn’t just give an umbrella to the girl, but gave it to her on his knees as if she were a goddess
• After a week the neurosis had vanished

Question 14

PROGRAMMED MEANING

James Crumbaugh’s two-week “crash course” logotherapy program with alcoholics

Answer 14

Assumption: if one is to find some coherent pattern in complex life situations, one must be able to perceive details and events in a comprehensive manner and then to recombine the data into a new gestalt

• The program included exercises in recording visual stimuli (e.g. exposed to Rorschach cards and seascape scenes and assisted in the recall of details)
• The program for creative imagination consisted of exercises of viewing a picture on a screen, projecting oneself into the picture, and relating the picture to some wish based on past experiences
• The PIL showed an increase, yet no clarity about outcome specificity: which feature of the intensive course was responsible for which results?

Question 15

ENGAGEMENT: THE MAJOR THERAPEUTIC ANSWER TO MEANINGLESSNESS

Answer 15

There is something inherently noxious in the process of stepping too far back from life, e.g. like the brick-carrying morons (and the writer of the fable) in the beginning of ch. 10

Question 16

The “galactic” or “nebula’s-eye” view

Answer 16

The galactic view presents a formidable problem for therapists

On one hand, the ability to be self-aware, to step outside of oneself, to view oneself from a distance is one of the human’s most valued attributes
- It generally provides us with more objectivity

On the other hand, this particular perspective drains the vitality from life

• To assume it for prolonged periods results in profound dispiritedness
• The tradition of philosophical pessimism is a natural derivative of the galactic view

Question 17

WHAT CAN BE DONE

Logical inconsistencies

Answer 17

First, there are logical inconsistencies that should lead to the position that “nothing matters, and since nothing matters, life is not worth living”.
- For one thing, if nothing matters, it should not matter that nothing matters

Thomas Nagel, states that the nebula’s eye view is one of our most advanced and precious straits and is not agonizing unless we make it so

• To allow it to matter so heavily betrays a failure to appreciate the cosmic unimportance of the situation
• Nagel suggests that a true appreciation of the view, coupled with the knowledge that it is our strength to be able to assume that view, should permit us to return to our absurd life “laced with irony” instead of with despair

Another fact to note is that an actual mattering underlies the despair associated with the “not mattering” of the galactic view
- Many things mattered to Schopenhauer: to convince others that things did not matter, it mattered to him to oppose an Hegelian system of thought, to continue writing actively until the end of his life, to philosophize rather than to commit suicide

Question 18

Kent Bach on Cosmic Perspective

Answer 18

Kent Bach’s view renders things meaningless only when one is in that cosmic perspective.

• Such times are part of life but only a part
• “Meaning” is what something needs to matter only when in that perspective
• At other times things matter because they matter.
• It matters that I communicate these ideas as clearly as possible, at other times other things matter - relationships, tennis, reading, chess, talking
• When things matter, they don’t need meaning to matter!

Question 19

Current doubting does not vitiate the reality of past mattering

Answer 19

A nun had been in the monastery for 25 years, had lost faith, and was depressed afterwards of her wasted life
- The nun gradually understood that her current lack of faith did not erase the faith she had once had nor the good she had done as a teacher under a different meaning system

Another patient began writing poetry at 55 and discovered huge talent felt she had wasted it with the life she had lived before as a housewife
- The poet also learned that her earlier life had much meaning to her at the time, through her children and through mingling with nature (in their farm), and that in the midst of all of this her poetry had been conceived - her poetry today was a product of her entire life

Another woman’s husband after a 20 years marriage attempted to strip meaning from her by exclaiming that he had never lover her

• This patient also learned hat past mattering was not only imperishable but very precious
• She said to her ex-husband: “If you lived with me for twenty years without loving me, that’s your tragedy! As for me, though I do not love you now, I once loved you very much and spent many of the best years of my life with you.”

Question 20

Engagement in Life

David Hume’s Treatis

Answer 20

Though some of these philosophic rebuttals to the state of meaninglessness have some interesting implications, they lack potency and remain for the most part psychotherapeutic curiosities, but the therapist needs something more potent.

In the Treatise, David Hume points the way:

“Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours of amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.”

Question 21

By-product

Answer 21

Frankl argues that pleasure is a by-product of meaning, and that one’s search should be directed toward the discovery of meaning.
- Yalom: “I believe that search for meaning is similarly paradoxical: the more we rationally seek it, the less we find it; the questions that one can pose about meaning will always outlast the answers.”

Meaning, like pleasure, must be pursued obliquely, a sense of meaningfulness is a by-product of engagement.

• Engagement does not logically refute the lethal questions raised by the galactic perspective, but it causes these questions not to matter
• Wittgenstein: “The solution to the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.”

Question 22

Therapist’s goal is engagement

Answer 22

The task is not to create engagement nor to inspirit the patient with engagement - these the therapist cannot do

But it is not necessary: the desire to engage life is always there within the patient and the therapist’s clinical activities should be directed toward removal of obstacles in the patient’s way

• What prevents the patients from loving another individual?
• Why is there so little satisfaction from relationships with others?
• What are the parataxic distortions that systematically poison their relationships?
• Why is there so little work satisfaction?
• What blocks the patient from finding work that is commensurate with their talents?
• Why has the patient neglected their creative or religious or self-transcendent strivings?

Question 23

The therapist’s most important tool

Answer 23

The therapist’s most important tool is their own person, through which the therapist engages with the patient
- The therapists are also models of commitment to engagement, they care about their professional mission and they help others, often in creative ways, to search for meaning

Question 24

Overlap of meaninglessness

Answer 24

Thus, the therapist’s fist step is to analyze and refine the question
- Much that is subsumed under “meaninglessness” belongs elsewhere
- Either a cultural artifact
Of as part of other ultimate concerns: death, freedom, isolation

“Pure” meaninglessness, especially when it emanates from assuming a detached, galactic perspective, is best approached obliquely through engagement which vitiates the galactic perspective

Death, freedom, and isolation must be grappled with directly. Yet when it comes to meaninglessness, the effective therapist must help patients to look away from the question: To embrace the solution of engagement rather than to plunge in and through the problem of meaninglessness.

Question 25

The question of meaning in life by Buddha

Answer 25

The question of meaning in life is, as the Buddha taught, not edifying. One must immerse oneself in the river of life and let the question drift away.