Man's Search For Meaning - Viktor E. Frankl

LOGOTHERAPY IN A NUTSHELLA statistical survey recently revealed that among myEuropean students, 25 percent showed a more-or-lessmarked degree of existential vacuum. Among myAmerican students it was not 25 but 60 percent.The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in astate of boredom. Now we can understand Schopenhauerwhen he said that mankind was apparentlydoomed to vacillate eternally between the two extremesof distress and boredom. In actual fact, boredomis now causing, and certainly bringing to psychiatrists,more problems to solve than distress. And theseproblems are growing increasingly crucial, for progressiveautomation will probably lead to an enormousincrease in the leisure hours available to the averageworker. The pity of it is that many of these will notknow what to do with all their newly acquired freetime.Let us consider, for instance, "Sunday neurosis,"that kind of depression which afflicts people whobecome aware of the lack of content in their lives whenthe rush of the busy week is over and the void withinthemselves becomes manifest. Not a few cases ofsuicide can be traced back to this existential vacuum.Such widespread phenomena as depression, aggressionand addiction are not understandable unless werecognize the existential vacuum underlying them.This is also true of the crises of pensioners and agingpeople.Moreover, there are various masks and guises underwhich the existential vacuum appears. Sometimes thefrustrated will to meaning is vicariously compensatedfor by a will to power, including the most primitiveform of the will to power, the will to money. In other129