[In the following review of From Death-Camp to Existentialism, Hassenger focuses on Frankl's assertion that logotherapy is a necessary supplement to current psychoanalysis.]

Dr. Frankl, of the Medical Faculty, University of Vienna, has penned a work which might well be required reading for anyone who would understand the metaphysical malady of our time. This brief yet gripping account of the author's three years in concentration camps [From Death-Camp to Existentialism] serves as a background against which he outlines the basic concepts of the "third Viennese school of psychotherapy," founded to contribute toward the completion of psycho-therapy's picture of man. He terms his approach "logotherapy."

It is Dr. Frankl's contention that each age is characterized by a particular frustration, which is the primary social factor in the etiology of neuroses. Today "existential frustration" plays the chief role, "existential" meaning, in this context, "anything pertaining to man's quest for a meaning to his existence." Contemporary man is crippled by a sense of the meaninglessness of life, leaving an "existential vacuum" within him. This is manifested primarily by the phenomenon of boredom, which in our day sends more people to the psychiatrist than Freud's "libido" or Adler's "will-to-power" (the "first" and "second" Viennese schools of psychotherapy, respectively.) This horror vacui can lead to a psychic illness, termed by Dr. Frankl a "noogenic neurosis," emphasizing its spiritual root. Only a therapy which pursues man into the noetic, spiritual dimension can illuminate the possibilities of meaning. And it is here that logotherapy attempts to go beyond the other schools of existential analysis (as the Daseinsanalyse of Binswanger), stopping not with the illumination of being, but seeking rather to reorient the patient toward meaning. The author's personal experiences in the death camps have served to convince him that only the knowledge of a life task, only a "will-to-meaning," enables one to survive in these "limit situations" (Jaspers' Grenzsituationen). Dr. Frankl is fond of echoing Nietzsche's words: "He who has a why to live for, can bear almost any how."

But this must not be taken to mean that the logotherapist imposes his personal values on the patient. Rather, he strives to shore up the patient's sense of autonomy, not giving him a life meaning, but enabling him to find his own personal life task, by opening up the full range of possibilities. True to his existential élan, Dr. Frankl insists that life's meaning includes the meaning of suffering and death. Here logotherapy comes to grips with the current attitude which sloughs off suffering and denigrates death. Up to the last moment of life, he states, suffering offers the opportunity for the fulfillment of meaning and the realization of value. It is not for man to question the meaning of his life; instead "it is he who is questioned by life; it is he who has to answer, by answering for life. His role is to respond—to be responsible." The psychotherapist cannot, of course, dictate that to which the patient is to be responsible. Each individual must decide whether he will be accountable to his fellows, his conscience, or to God.

Dr. Frankl rails against what he terms "homunculism," a sort of nihilism which misinterprets man as a mere product, whose psychic life is to be explored solely by method and technique. He pleads for a humanism which will look behind the disease to rediscover the genuinely human, the Homo humanus. This is a rightful criticism of the reductionist theories, which say to man, "you are nothing but …," explaining him from one point of view. And yet a note of caution must be injected here. Dr. Frankl seems to be open to the charge that he protests too strongly the more empirical approaches to the psyche. Granted such an accusation runs the risk of setting up dogmatic and a priori criteria to which all knowledge is supposed to conform: strictly ready-made notions of what constitutes valid knowledge seem to border on Platonism. Certainly extreme caution must be exercised lest the dichotomy be accepted: either science, which is knowledge, or mythology, which is nonsense. The assumption that a theory must be either science or mythology is an overt or cryptopositivism. And yet without some grounding in the empirical, a psychotherapy is in danger of transgressing its proper limits, to become the vehicle for considerable gratuitous and unsophisticated philosophizing.

Logotherapy is intended as a supplement rather than a substitute for the more traditional forms of psychotherapy. The urgency of Dr. Frankl's message for mid-twentieth-century man cannot easily be dismissed. Logotherapy, the third Viennese school, can undoubtedly help fill in the picture of the whole man, of man in all his dimensions, including the spiritual. But only if it resists the tendency to construct a Weltanschauung, which has been the penchant of its predecessors.