Frankl, Viktor E. The suffering of a life without meaning

Abstract

Review of the book O sofrimento de uma vida sem sentido: como encontrar a razão de viver, by Viktor E. Frankl, published in Brazil by É Realizações. The text presents Frankl as a psychiatrist and philosopher who, from a psychoanalytic background and through his contact with Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger and Martin Buber, developed existential analysis and logotherapy, presented as the third Viennese school, after Freud and Adler. It sets out the thesis that each historical moment has its own neuroses and that the feeling of existential emptiness lies at the root of contemporary ones, named by Frankl as noogenic neurosis, arising from conflicts of conscience, collision of values and existential frustration. It describes Frankl's critique of homeostasis in Freud, of social determinism in Adler and of the reduction of man to archetypes in Jung, as well as his assertion that meaning can neither be created nor given, only discovered by the subject. The review also covers anticipatory anxiety and paradoxical intention, hyper-reflection in sexual neuroses, the will to meaning, suffering and the attitude towards destiny, and openness to spirituality, closing by relating Frankl's position to contemporary research on spirituality and health.