[Broyard was an American critic, essayist, memoirist, stort story writer, and educator whose works include Aroused by Books (1974) and Kafka Was the Rage (1993). In the following mixed review of The Unconscious God, he focuses on Frankl's call for the "rehumanization" of psychotherapy.]

While our behavior goes from bad to worse, our psychological image keeps getting better. At the turn of the century, when Western man was still a relatively orderly creature, Freud saw him as a hotbed of lust and aggression. Now, Viktor Frankl suggests that man's primary motive is the search for meaning in his life. Within man, says the author, "there is a repressed angel."

According to the American Journal of Psychiatry, Viktor Frankl has contributed "perhaps the most significant thinking since Freud and Adler." An earlier book, Man's Search for Meaning, sold 1.5 million copies and is often quoted by contemporary writers. Dr. Frankl has founded what amounts to a school of psychotherapy, which he calls logotherapy, embracing the various meanings of logos, including word, Divine word, reason and rational principle.

The Unconscious God was published in German in 1947: this is its first translation into English. Since then, the author writes, he has accumulated new evidence, additional insights. But since he feels that the original publication was his "most organized and systematized" book, he was reluctant to "destroy the cohesive structure of this piece of work by interspersing too much of the material that might have accrued in the meantime." He solved the problem by making the second half of the present volume a commentary on the first. The chief difference lies in the "experimental" evidence he cites for his position, provided by members of his school or psychologists sympathetic to it.

Based mainly on the author's reasoning, the original version of The Unconscious God is hortatory and only moderately persuasive. It seems to preach or proselytize at least as much as it reasons. The second half of the book, which is richer in tangibles, strengthens his position somewhat.

Logotherapy sees man's "will to meaning" as a sign of his unconscious or spontaneous spirituality. Freud, writes the author, saw the unconscious as "a reservoir of repressed instinctuality." He has "betrayed the self and delivered it to the id." Under Freud, psychoanalysis "succumbed" to objectivity, which led to reification of the self, a reduction of personality to a thing whose mechanisms could be influenced by merely technical means.

For Freud, religion was "the universal compulsive neurosis of mankind." But Dr. Frankl feels that "compulsive neurosis may well be diseased religiousness." Far from being "driven" by instincts, man is starved for motives. He does not ask, "What is the meaning of life?" Life poses the question to him in his spiritual nakedness, in his "unrest of the heart."

The search for meaning, writes the author, is not the same as the search for self. Freudian analysis places too much emphasis on the self, which "does not yield to total self-reflection." "Human existence," Dr. Frankl adds, "exists in action rather than reflection." Like many of the new approaches to therapy, Dr. Frankl's logotherapy claims to be action-oriented, although he never makes it sufficiently clear what these actions may be. His formulations tend to be rather grandiose, such as "the more one forgets one's self—giving one's self to a cause or another person—the more human he is. And the more one is immersed and absorbed in something or someone other than one's self the more he really becomes himself."

According to The Unconscious God, man's actions are a response to "existential" situations rather than to instinctive drives. Life is a process of "deciding what one is going to be." While the search for meaning may imply various kinds of pressure, man's response to these pressures is personal and autonomous. Nor does Dr. Frankl's spirituality resemble Jung's, for Jung's collective unconscious is still too general and impersonal for him.

Happiness, says the author, "cannot be pursued. It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness." Pleasure and happiness are only the byproducts of "self-transcendence." The nobility of Dr. Frankl's vocabulary takes some getting used to, as when he writes that the most important factor contributing to high orgasm and potency rates is "romanticism."

He describes the absence of meaning in one's life as the "abyss experience" and says that 60 percent of his American students, as against 25 percent of his European students, had suffered from this feeling. When he states that "self-interpretation" is the value that ranks highest among American college students, he seems to be suggesting a correlation. Apparently, 60 percent of these self-interpreters failed to find satisfactory answers. Some of them turned to drugs in order to induce delusions of meaningfulness.

Calling for a "rehumanization" of psychotherapy, Dr. Frankl observes that its orthodox image is in such low repute that the American Psychoanalytic Association went so far as to hire a public relations expert to counsel the counselors. Logotherapy, which is presumably humanized, is described by its own public relations counselor, Dr. Frankl himself, as "education to responsibility." While it is difficult to disapprove of this idea, the author does not tell us very much about how we can implement it. When he writes about "ontologized morals" and "repressed transcendence," some readers may hark back nostalgically to the chaste silence of their Freudian "shrinks." If "shrink" is the slang term for the Freudian analyst, then the logotherapist ought to be called "stretch."