Logotherapy: Finding Meaning in Life and Overcoming Existential Vacuum
**The Voice Cries Demanding Sense**
A literal translation of the term “speech therapy” is treatment by *logos*. By the way, this represents the true line of the traditional conceptualization of psychotherapy, which could be well formulated as meaning through psychotherapy.
For the physician Paracelsus, diseases originate in the realm of nature, and healing comes to the realm of spirit. Expressed in more technical terms, in the terminology of logotherapy, neurosis is not necessarily noogenic, i.e., resulting from a sense of meaninglessness.
The human dimension, or as it is designated in speech therapy, the noological dimension, is beyond the psychological dimension and is higher (covers and includes the lower dimension). The only condition of man, his human body, is not in contradiction with the fact that in their psychological and biological dimensions, the animal scale is included.
Along with noological factors, psychological factors are also involved in the somatic etiology of mental illness. At least in the etiology of psychosis (rather than in neuroses), important biochemical and biological heritages are present, even if the symptoms are mostly psychogenic.
Finally, we record the fact that there are also sociogenic neuroses. This term is particularly applicable to the mass neurosis of today, that is, the feeling of meaninglessness. Patients no longer complain of feelings of inferiority or sexual frustration, as they did at the time of Freud and Adler. Today, they come with feelings of futility (little or no importance of something).
Currently, we also deal with entertainment in the form of involuntary unemployment. The latter can lead to “unemployment neurosis,” which has been shown to have a real cause of confusion between being unemployed and feeling useless and, therefore, a meaningless life.
The feeling of meaninglessness, emptiness, and existential understanding is increasing to such an extent that it can truly be described as a mass neurosis.
This raises the question of etiology and symptoms. Regarding the first, unlike other animals, man is not dictated by their impulses and instincts on what he must do, and unlike the man of the past, traditions are prescribed traditional values that have to do. Now lacking these guidelines, they do not know sometimes what they want to do, or do the same as others, which is conformism, or do what others want to do, which is totalitarianism.
**The Will to Meaning**
Man is always trying to make sense of things, constantly putting into play his search for meaning. That is what I will designate as meaning and must be considered even as the main concern of man. It is this desire that remains unfulfilled in today’s society. Existing motivation theories consider man as a being that reacts to stimuli or through their impulses.
If we want to develop optimal human potential, we must first believe in its existence and its presence. Otherwise, man will drift and will deteriorate, as there is also a potential negative human.
The statement must not stay too high; a conception of man presupposes that it is dangerous to overestimate, but much more dangerous to underestimate since they get corrupted. On the contrary, if we recognize the highest aspirations of man, as his will to meaning, we will be able to join together and mobilize.
Example: The question is that if you want fullness in life, it is enough to have an excellent economic situation (that you can pay a psychoanalyst). That is false, and the greatest desire should be to be healthy, and health seems the ultimate goal of life. More health is not a fact but a means to an end, a precondition for achieving what can be considered the true meaning of life.
Maslow’s distinction between higher and lower needs does not take into account that when the lower needs are not met, there may be a more urgent need for the superior, as the will to meaning.
Abundance can also stimulate the search for meaning by man or even, as the case may be, thwart his will to meaning. This is true for wealth in general and particularly for wealth in the form of leisure time. Since both the frustration of the lower needs can drive man to seek the meaning of life, we can deduce that the need for meaning is independent of other needs.
Existence depends on self-transcendence, and the primordial anthropological fact is to be always directed or pointing to something or someone other than oneself: to a sense that fulfills or another human being, to find a cause to which a person served or that love.
The pursuit of happiness is what prevents happiness. The more it becomes the object of our lives, the more it moves away from us. This is most evident when looking for sexual happiness; in the pursuit of sexual pleasure, the result is sexual neurosis.
**Giving Meaning to Life**
First, we must consider that the effect is not abolished, as this is precisely what makes reductionism.
The question is how we can help people who have been plunged into despair at the apparent meaninglessness of life. Meaning cannot be transmitted by tradition. Only values can be affected by the decline of traditions. Arguably, instincts are transmitted through genes, and values are transmitted by tradition, but meaning, being unique, must be subject to discovery.
**How do you verify the discovery of meaning?**
As Gestalt, in the traditional sense, we see a figure against a background, and in regard to finding meaning, we perceive the possibility that is included in reality. Specifically, it is possible to do something about the situation we are facing: change reality if necessary.
Change itself is often rising above himself, to grow beyond yourself.
A speech therapist cannot tell a patient what the meaning is, but at least can show that there is a meaning in life, which is accessible to everyone. What’s more, it keeps its sense of life under any circumstances.
He is widely regarded as *Homo sapiens*, who has skill and expertise, who knows how to succeed, such as a prominent businessman. It moves between the positive end, represented by success, and failure, represented by the negative. It differs from *Homo patiens*: the suffering man, moves in an axis perpendicular to the success-failure of *Homo sapiens*. It is the axis that moves between compliance (on our own “self” by complying with the direction) and desperation (on the meaninglessness of one’s life).