Now, imagine this: we live in a so-called leisure society. People just don’t know what to do with their free time. During this free time, an inner emptiness, a worldwide and pervasive feeling of futility, breaks out in the form of Sunday neurosis, or “weekend depression.” But the problem of unemployment is apparently going to be cured by a reduction in working hours! And we already have so many problems with the retirement crisis, which also represents an existential crisis, a crisis of meaning, when, from one day to the next, pensioners don’t know what to do with this sudden surge of free time. The problems of early retirement and so on cannot be solved sociopolitically by catching pensioners in the social welfare net. The net is too wide-meshed and the psychological problems that accompany all this will just fall through it. This means that we must also take account of this issue—however we try to solve the sociopolitical problems.

  With the retirement crisis, we now find ourselves at the forefront of gerontological psychiatry, the psychiatric problems and the prophylaxis concerning elderly people.

  As mentioned, the problems have essentially remained the same over the last half-century, but the terminology has changed. For example, today we no longer talk about “lunatic asylums” but “old people’s homes” and the like. But at the time that insane asylums existed under that name, I once asked an elderly lady in such an institution, “How are you, what do you do all day?” And she replied, “My God, Doctor, at night I sleep and in the day I’m insane.” That had become the entire content of her life.

  We can see that these are all essential problems for gerontological psychiatry, particularly because our life expectancy depends on whether we are still encountering values, opportunities to find meaning, and tasks, even in retirement.

  And the other way around: I will never forget that I once read that Goethe finished the second part of his tragedy, Faust, in January 1832, after seven years’ work. And just two months after he had signed and sealed the manuscript, he was dead. We can say with confidence that, for at least some of those seven years, he had lived “beyond his biological capabilities.” But the vision of this task, his life’s work that he needed to complete, did not let go of him and sustained him.

  This applies not only to being active but also to remaining receptive. I don’t think I have ever met an old man who impressed me as much as Professor [Josef] Berze, who, for many years, was the director of the big psychiatric institution in Vienna, the Steinhof, as it was known. The last time I saw him, Professor Berze was well over 90, and I will never forget the huge tower of reference books piled up on his desk. I have never seen anything like this with much younger colleagues. He continued to work on and study his subject without interruption. And here, near the Swiss border, for the sake of piquancy, I would like to tell you this: he and I were—and I am convinced of this—the only people in Vienna, if not in Austria, who had read the wonderful book by Ludwig Binswanger, Grundformen und Erkenntnis Menschlichen Daseins [Principles and Knowledge of Human Existence], from A to Z, and word for word. The book is over 800 pages long—in Zurich, they only ever called it the “phone book.” Professor Berze was 90 at the time and I was around 40; so he was half a century ahead of me, setting an example.

  Please don’t hold it against me if I sometimes throw in a few personal anecdotes, but I can’t go on endlessly about the “phenomenological analysis of pre-reflexive, ontological self-perception.” I would love to, but I would rather write about it and talk about other things.

  Please don’t misunderstand me: I am not as oversimplistic as I sound or as I seem. I don’t deny that even someone like Professor Berze had a few defects in terms of his cerebral performance. That’s actually not the point. He could compensate for those defects and, with the rest of his capabilities, was able to achieve far more than the average young psychiatrist or neurologist in Vienna at that time.

  And I will never forget what happened to me several years ago. I was climbing a rock face in the Rax Mountains, and “Gruber Naz” was my guide at that time. Ignaz Gruber is a very well-known mountain guide who had already led tours in the Himalayas and other high mountain ranges. And, as he sat there at the belay station and pulled in the rope, he looked at me pityingly and said: “Don’t take this the wrong way, Professor, but if I’m honest, you have no strength left at all. But, you know, you make up for it with your clever climbing technique—I must say, people could really learn to climb from watching you.” I nearly exploded with pride—a man who’d led expeditions in the Himalayas was saying this to me! But he meant it sincerely: there are compensatory mechanisms, coping mechanisms, that don’t just compensate for the defects of brute force, they can actually overcompensate for them. And a couple of years later, when I climbed the Luis-Trenker-Kamin* and the Second Sella Tower with a Ladin guide, I asked him afterwards, “Please be honest with me; should I stop?” “No, don’t stop. Never stop.”

  On that note, I would like to move on to the problem of stopping. Should one stop? Many people suffer from never having begun, never having lived their own life. For a few years, this was fashionably known as the “midlife crisis.” It looks like this: many years ago, a prominent American diplomat came to my office and said he would like to continue his psychoanalysis with me. He had lain on the couch of a Manhattan psychoanalyst for five years, and the analyst had told him that his psychoanalysis was far from being complete and he would have to continue when he moved to Vienna. So, he came to me, and I asked him why he actually wanted to be psychoanalyzed. He told me that he disagreed with American foreign policy and the psychoanalyst had spent five years trying to talk him out of it: “Look, this isn’t about foreign policy. What you hate is not the government, not the president, not the secretary of state—it’s your father. You are in conflict with your father-imago, believe me. You must make up with your father, and then you will suddenly find American foreign policy to your liking.” I’m exaggerating, of course, I’m caricaturing the situation, but that’s more or less how it went for five whole years. They couldn’t see reality anymore, let alone the political facts. They only saw more and more images and symbols, but they could no longer perceive the wood of reality for the trees of the symbols. They spun themselves into their own cocoon, a personal monadology, no longer transcending themselves into reality, even political reality. Instead, they had spent five years talking about images and the symbolic value of this or that. They analyzed dreams, childhood memories, and so on.

  I asked the man, “Alright, so you haven’t enjoyed politics for a long time. What would you like to do instead?” He said he wanted to move into a particular industry. He found it interesting, and he felt that he also had a talent for it, that he would be able to hold his own in that field. After the second discussion—I’m deliberately not saying “therapy session,” let alone “couch therapy session”—I gave him the green light and he did actually change his career. And six months later, I received a letter from him from a distant country. He was the happiest person alive . . .

  His will to meaning had been frustrated; that was the whole story. And his analyst had searched again and again: there must be something behind this that must be related to childhood conflicts between the ego, the id and the superego. The man’s need for meaning was not satisfied, and he felt it acutely: here is the boundary, here is the watershed. He had to decide right then, this way or that way, if he wanted to feel fulfilled. His midlife crisis was in reality a crisis of meaning (and most of them are!).

  A companion piece: there was an American steel magnate who had been involved in developing the atomic bomb, among other things. He did not find his work particularly satisfying, so he became an evangelical pastor. But he wasn’t completely satisfied with that either, so he came to Vienna and studied with me for two years. Then he returned to the USA and became a logotherapist, and specialized in a very particular area: he advised industrialists, managers, executives—who, for whatever reason, had left their companies and needed to find work elsewhere—and helped them to find meaning in their professional field.

  Some time ago, Rolf von Eckartsberg* from Harvard University wrote a thesis about 100 former Harvard students who had graduated and then, 20 years later, had become famous and well-established lawyers, surgeons, even psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. For most of them, their private lives, their married lives, were also absolutely fine. In any case, they had made careers for themselves, but a significant percentage of them simply suffered from the fact that their lives seemed pointless, and they couldn’t get over it.

  This is important for the following reason: these people often despair, and I have a theory—which, of course, I can’t prove here and now—that every instance of despair is actually caused by a kind of idolatry, that is to say, the idolization of a particular value.

  For example, when does a woman tend to despair? Some women despair when they can’t find a husband, when they can’t have children, whether they are married or unmarried. (The latter is very much in fashion, and apparently it’s already going out of fashion again.) At any rate, a woman who idolizes and makes absolute the value of being married and having children stipulates that the life of a woman can only be meaningful if she has a child or if she is married.

  If one makes these values (and that’s what they are) absolute, then one is programmed for despair. Therefore, it is important for us to reverse this process of idolization, to be open to possibilities for finding meaning that can be different from hour to hour, from minute to minute, and that are certainly different from person to person. Hic et nunc, here and now, life is offering me meaning—in one way or another. I can be active and shape it, or I can be passive and receptive, and let beauty and truth influence me through research or education, or by experiencing and accepting the essence of human beings not only in their humanity but also in their uniqueness and singularity—in other words, when I love them.

  Those are possibilities for finding meaning, but not exclusive ones. They could change at any moment. At any moment, the offer—the offer of meaning in my life—can be different. I must be open, I must keep an open mind, I must keep my eyes open. I must have broad horizons in order to notice what’s going on, to notice when and where life might offer me a hidden possibility for finding meaning.

  That is vital. Instead of idolization and instead of fixating on the idea that I must be a great scientist or my life will be meaningless; I must become this or that or my life is meaningless; I must have healthy children at any price. God forbid, if I give birth to a retarded child, then my life is meaningless because the life of this child is meaningless. That is not the way forward. We have to stay flexible; we have to remain resilient. We must be grateful for what life has to offer, one way or another. As my friend the late Paul Polak* summarized it so beautifully, “You can’t set life any conditions.”

  We are talking about life and its meaning. I speak as a doctor; I speak as a neurologist. Of course, I can’t say what the meaning of life is. Besides, there isn’t one meaning—just as I might ask a chess master, “Sir, tell me, please, what is the best chess move in the world?” He would laugh in my face. There is no such thing. It all depends on the very specific, concrete situation and the personality of the particular player and that of his opponent, and how they are involved in that specific game. So, there is no such thing. There is, of course, an ultimate meaning of life, but a law applies that I would like to summarize like this: the more all-encompassing the meaning of life that we are talking about may be, the less tangible it is, the more it evades at least an intellectual or rational attempt to grasp it with our limited, finite minds.

  What is the relationship of this ultimate meaning, this final meaning, this “super-meaning,” as I call it (this doesn’t have anything to do with the supernatural, by the way, but just means “beyond our limited capacity for understanding”)? What is the relationship of this super-meaning to the tangible meaning that speaks to me personally and that I try to extract from a given situation? This relationship is very simple. Think about when you’re watching a film at the cinema. This film consists of hundreds of thousands or millions of individual frames. And each one of these frames, every single one of these scenes, has a certain meaning that you can grasp. However, you cannot grasp the film’s ultimate meaning—it doesn’t become apparent until the end. In other words, the ultimate meaning, the big picture, can at best appear to us when we are lying on our death bed. And in spite of this, it could never have been fulfilled, we could never have realized that ultimate meaning if we had not tried to fulfil the meaning of each individual scene of our lives, every single situation in our lives, to the best of our knowledge or ignorance, to our best knowledge and belief. So that is the relationship between the all-encompassing but elusive ultimate meaning and the specific, personal “shaping of meaning” (since the way we grasp meaning boils down to our perception of “Gestalt,” elements in the sense of [Kurt] Koffka, [Wolfgang] Köhler and Wertheimer’s Gestalt psychology, which has hardly anything to do with so-called Gestalt therapy—and I’m not the only one who dares to say that, it’s also the view of [Max] Wertheimer, the founder of Gestalt psychology).

  Now, you don’t have to imagine this meaning from a specific situation that speaks to us, or even calls to us, as being something grandiose. I am still talking about the transience of our existence, in other words about the imperative to actualize precisely these fleeting, transitory possibilities for fulfilling meaning. I am still on the subject, albeit by way of a thousand detours. As I said, this meaning does not have to be in any way grand. Let me cite a specific example from a little book about the meaning of life by Bishop Georg Moser. He tells of a dustman who, some years ago, had been awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. This dustman searched through the rubbish bins and household waste to find discarded toys, repaired them in the evenings and then gave them to needy children. With his talent for crafting, he managed to extract a second meaning from his job: exemplary, quite plain and simple, and modest, but effective—socially effective—and most of all, meaningful.

  Now, it’s not only through activity that we can obtain meaning from life, but also through experiencing something, and, as I mentioned earlier, through love—so, experiencing something or experiencing someone, and experiencing someone in their uniqueness and singularity means loving them.

  But what does that look like in everyday life? Well now, I would particularly like to talk about old people again. In front of me, I have a letter from a woman, who writes: “In 14 days’ time I will be 87 years old. And for me, every day is a gift, and one must be grateful for every gift. You see, Doctor, I can look up at the sky, look down at the glorious park, I can talk to the trees, I can welcome my friends to my home in the afternoons. Saying yes to everything, to everything, that’s what counts. You know why most people find this so hard to understand? Doctor, I am deaf. But I can talk in my mind. I can hardly walk. But I can think. And my gratitude for this knows no bounds.”

  A simple letter, very unassuming. This woman is already dead. She had no idea that one day I would use her words. She didn’t have any grand aspirations. But that’s what life is like—as with the dustman, whose achievements only live on in his Federal Order of Merit and in the ten lines in the book by Bishop Moser.

  I would like to read you two or three sentences from a second letter. It’s from a prisoner who had set up a therapeutic self-help group in prison in Florida and recently reported that, out of 20 members of this group who help each other to get over their criminality, only one person had relapsed (and even he has now been released). This man wrote to me a short while ago, “I was hospitalized in the oncology unit for 11 weeks. I had a lung adenoma diagnosed. Most luckily, I found a part-time job on the ocean.” He had found a job as a dishwasher at a restaurant by the sea. And then he writes: “I enjoy the sunrises and sunsets. How very beautiful life is!” This is what he writes, a man who has been sentenced to death—not sentenced to death in a prison in Florida, but sentenced to death by his cancer cells, by his lung cancer, a man at the end of his life. How very beautiful life is!

  Now, do you see what I mean? Not only by doing a deed or completing a work, but also by experiencing and loving, can we squeeze meaning out of life and become aware of opportunities to find meaning. That’s my opinion. But this man has actually written it. It is now flesh and blood. That’s how life is; these are not empty phrases, these are not abstract things—these are things that have been lived by real people. And he is in a hopeless situation, and yet that’s what he writes. He has become the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, and still he finds meaning!

  Even in this situation of an unavoidably tragic fate, we can find meaning by bearing witness to what man is capable of—in other words, by turning a personal tragedy into a triumph, and turning human suffering into an achievement. This is possible and it remains possible right down to our last breath. And this is the essence of what I call a theory of meaning that is therapeutically directed against a lack of meaning, against the deep feeling of meaninglessness we see nowadays.

  But this theory or lesson of meaning—we logotherapists are not the ones teaching it; not even I am teaching it. Instead, our teachers are those from whom we have learned this lesson. And who are our teachers? They are our patients. They are the ones who have lived it, who have suffered it.

  I have had the honor of being the head of a neurological hospital department for a quarter of a century. I have met young men who had been skiing a week earlier, who had been tearing along on their motorbikes a week earlier, and then were paralyzed in an accident. I know girls who, a week earlier, had been dancing at the disco, and then they got myelitis or a spinal cord tumor, and they will become progressively more disabled and will be bedridden for the rest of their lives. How they shape and master such a fate—that, I could tell you about for hours. We have learned from them what we are now trying to pass on to you.

 

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