“Man Is Spirit”: Viktor Frankl on What Helps Us Go Beyond the Biopsychological
Based on the lecture “Dynamics and Values” from Viktor Frankl’s book “Psychotherapy and Existentialism”
Viktor Frankl, in his lecture “Dynamics and Values,” challenges psychoanalysis and other psychological theories by arguing that human beings are more than just their psyche—they are spirit. He explores why personality, unpredictable by nature, cannot be determined solely by heredity, instincts, or environment, and how the values and meanings a person realizes and actualizes help them transcend the “limits of the purely biopsychological.”
Dynamics and Values
Lecture delivered at the University of Chicago, October 22, 1960
Psychoanalysis, especially in its early stages, was often accused of so-called pansexualism. I doubt this criticism was ever truly justified, even in Freud’s time. In modern psychoanalysis, there is even less evidence of pansexualism in the literal sense. However, there is another assumption, much more erroneous in my view, at the core of psychoanalytic theory and practice. I call it pandeterminism: any view of human nature that ignores or neglects our inherent capacity for free choice and interprets existence solely in terms of simple dynamics. (Often, the term “dynamism” is just a euphemism for “mechanicism.” Yet, I do not believe even orthodox Freudian psychoanalysts were or remain “incorrigible mechanists and materialists,” as Freud himself once described them.)
Man, by nature a finite being, will never be free from the bonds that tie him to various spheres where he faces unchangeable conditions. Nevertheless, he is always free to make decisions. Within the constraints that bind him, he can move freely; by his attitude toward any circumstances he encounters, he proves he is truly human. This applies to biological, psychological, and social phenomena and factors. Other people, heredity, and instinctual drives may limit freedom, but they cannot completely eradicate a person’s ability to resist them.
Let me illustrate with a concrete example. A few months ago, I was sitting with a well-known American psychoanalyst in a Viennese café. It was a beautiful Sunday morning, and I invited him to go hiking in the mountains. He irritably refused, explaining that a negative childhood experience had turned him off from mountaineering. As a child, his father took him on long mountain hikes, and he soon grew to hate them. He attributed his aversion to an infantile process of conditioning. I then confessed that I, too, was taken on such hikes as a child and also resented them because they were exhausting. Yet, despite this, I became a mountain guide in an alpine club.
Whether internal or external factors influence a person, and in what direction, depends on free personal choice. It is not the conditions that determine me, but I who decide whether to yield to them or fight back. Nothing can completely subjugate a person, leaving them with no freedom at all. No force or circumstance can fully determine the meaning of existence. Rather, it is the person who determines not only their fate but also themselves, for they shape and organize not only the course of their life but their very self. In this sense, a person is responsible not only for what they do but for who they are, since they become who they are as a result of their actions. (Of course, a person’s responsibility is as limited as their freedom. For example, I am not responsible for having gray hair; however, I am certainly responsible if I do not go to a hairdresser to dye it, as many women would in similar “circumstances.”) Ultimately, a person will be what they make of themselves. They are capable of constructing themselves, rather than simply submitting to circumstances. Any conditions and factors are merely raw material—tools or means to achieve the goal the person sets for themselves. Their entire life is an unbroken chain of self-creative acts.
This perspective is the flip side of the concept that sees a person as the result or consequence of a chain of various causes. By viewing existence as an act of self-creation, we assert that a person is not just “being,” but is always deciding what they will become next. They are constantly shaping and forging their character. Thus, everyone has the chance to change at any moment. There is freedom to change, and no one should be denied the right to use it. We can never predict a person’s future—doing so would require a statistical study with a vast sample. Individuality is, by its nature, unpredictable. Any predictions are based on biological, psychological, or sociological influences. However, one of the main features of human existence is the ability to transcend these conditions, to rise above them. In this sense, a person ultimately transcends themselves. They overcome themselves to the extent that they reshape their own character.
The Unpredictability of Human Nature
Let me give an example: Dr. J. I have never known another person who could be called “the devil himself.” In the days I knew him, he was known as the “mass murderer of Steinhof,” named after a large psychiatric hospital in Vienna. When the Nazis launched their “euthanasia” program, he concentrated all power in his hands and fanatically carried out his orders so that no mentally ill patient would escape the gas chamber. Paradoxically, the few patients who did survive were Jews. Dr. J. was unaware of a small ward in a Jewish nursing home. Although the Gestapo strictly forbade admitting psychiatric patients there, I secretly brought in patients and hid them, falsifying diagnoses to indicate aphasia rather than schizophrenia. The patients also received banned metrazol shock therapy. In this way, these Jewish patients were safe, even as relatives of Nazi officials were killed “out of mercy.”
When I returned to Vienna after surviving Auschwitz, I inquired about Dr. J.’s fate. “The Russians put him in solitary confinement at Steinhof,” I was told. “But the next day, they found the door open, and Dr. J. had disappeared—no one ever saw him again.” Later, I heard that accomplices helped him escape to South America. Not long ago, a former high-ranking Austrian diplomat came to me for a consultation. He had spent many years behind the Iron Curtain, first in Siberia, then in Moscow’s infamous Lubyanka prison. During a neurological exam, he suddenly asked if I knew Dr. J. I said yes, and he continued: “I met him in Lubyanka. He died there of bladder cancer at about forty. But before his death, he was the best comrade anyone could ask for! He comforted the other prisoners. Dr. J. lived by the highest moral standards imaginable. In all my years in prison, I never had a better friend than him!”
And this is the same Dr. J.—the “mass murderer of Steinhof.” Can we really claim to predict human behavior? We can predict the workings of a machine, a device, an automaton. Sometimes we can even forecast the mechanisms or “dynamics” of the human psyche. But a person is more than just a psyche: a person is spirit. By performing an act of self-transcendence, they leave the limits of the purely biopsychological and enter the specifically human sphere—the noological dimension. Our existence is, by its nature, noetic. Human existence is not just another thing among many: things in the world condition each other, but a person determines their own existence. In reality, they possess freedom and responsibility, which constitute their spirituality and should not be obscured by what is called the objectification or depersonalization of man.
Freedom, Responsibility, and Meaning
In the process of objectification or depersonalization, the subject becomes an object. When a person is treated simply as a psychological mechanism governed by cause and effect, they lose their essential quality as a subject capable of self-determination (as Thomas Aquinas said, personality is forged by actions). Thus, any strictly psychodynamic interpretation loses sight of a key characteristic of human existence—free will. The subject who “wants” is transformed into an object who “must.”
However, in the later (phenomenological) analytic approach, freedom is understood as the subjective side of a whole phenomenon, and it must be complemented by the objective aspect—responsibility. Freedom of choice, as I have emphasized, will never be complete unless it is transformed into the freedom to take responsibility. The human capacity to simply “want” is empty until it is complemented by the objective counterpart: wanting what one “ought” to want. And what “I ought” is to actualize my own values and fulfill the specific meaning of my existence. The world of meanings and values can rightly be called the logos. The logos is the objective correlate of the subjective phenomenon called human existence. A person is free to take responsibility, and they are responsible for realizing the meaning of their life, the logos of their being.
But another question arises: to what extent are the values we actualize or the meanings we realize “objective”? By “objective,” we mean that values are necessarily more than just self-expression. They are broader than a projection of a person’s inner life, whether as sublimation or as a secondary rationalization of instinctual drives in Freudian psychoanalysis, or as innate archetypes of the collective unconscious in Jung’s theory (archetypes are also just interpretations, only of humanity as a whole). If meanings and values came only from the subject, not from an extra-human or supra-human sphere, they would instantly lose their obligatory quality. They could no longer present a real challenge to a person, could not mobilize or call them forward. If what we are responsible for is to retain its obligatory quality, it must be considered objective.
This objective quality of meanings and values, which explains their obligatory nature, is lost if we see in them “nothing but” subjective intention or a projection of instincts or archetypes. We must understand that, along with the objectification and depersonalization of the human personality (i.e., the objectification of being), there is also a subjectivization of the logos (i.e., the subjectivization of meaning and values).
This dual process was generated by psychoanalysis: an exclusively psychodynamic interpretation of personality leads to the objectification of what is by nature subjective, while an exclusively psychogenetic interpretation of meanings and values leads to the subjectivization of what is essentially objective.
I believe that among the main achievements of ontological analysis is the ability to correct the first of psychoanalysis’s shortcomings. The new school of thought helps restore the view of personality as a phenomenon that eludes any attempt to treat it as entirely determined and predictable, like other things. Thus, ontological analysis has reclaimed for itself what is fully subjective. The second aspect—the devaluation of the objective quality of meaning and values, the subjectivization of the objective—remains uncorrected. In ontological analysis, the subjective, that is, existence, is re-subjectivized. The goal of logotherapy, then, is the re-objectivization of the objective, that is, the logos.
Only in this way will the whole phenomenon of man be restored in its dual manifestation: being in its subjectivity and logos in its objectivity.
The Will to Meaning and Mental Health
For logotherapy, meaning is not only “ought” but also “want.” Logotherapists speak of the “will to meaning.” This is not just an idealistic hypothesis. Consider the experiments of Davis, McCourt, and Solomon, who studied how visual stimulation affects hallucinations during sensory deprivation. They concluded: “Our results are consistent with the hypothesis of the importance of the meaning parameter. Hallucinations arise from isolation when there is no meaningful contact with the external world. For normal brain function, this contact—continuous and meaningful—is necessary.”
Long before this research, logotherapists had noticed this effect. We know the harmful impact of what we call the “existential vacuum”—it arises when the will to meaning is frustrated. The sense of complete and utter meaninglessness often leads to a specific type of neurosis, known in logotherapy as noogenic. At its core is a spiritual problem, a moral conflict, or an existential vacuum. But other types of neuroses also invade this vacuum! No psychotherapy can be complete, and no neurosis of any kind can be fully and finally overcome, unless this inner emptiness—where neurotic symptoms thrive—is filled, consciously or unconsciously, with logotherapy.
I do not want you to think that the existential vacuum is a mental illness. Doubt that life has meaning is existential despair. It is better described as a spiritual imbalance than a mental disorder. In this case, logotherapy is broader than just a treatment method: it sets a task for all counseling professionals. It is natural for people to seek meaning in life and even to doubt whether it can be found. There is nothing pathological about this.
Now we see how much mental health depends on adequate tension, which arises, for example, from the unbridgeable gap between what a person has already achieved and what they still have to accomplish. The gap between who I am and who I ought to become is part of existence and, therefore, necessary for mental well-being. We should not be timid or hesitant about confronting a person with the potential meaning they must realize, nor about awakening their will to meaning from its latent state. Logotherapy helps people become aware of both: 1) the meaning that, so to speak, awaits realization by the person, and 2) the will to meaning, which, so to speak, awaits a task or even a mission. That is why logotherapy is an analytic procedure: it makes both processes conscious. However, this is not something merely psychological, but noetic—not just subhuman, but truly human.
If we are tasked with fulfilling a unique meaning, this is not something to avoid or fear. Psychodynamic interpretation puts the principle of homeostasis at the forefront. According to it, human behavior is driven by the need to satisfy drives and instincts and to reconcile the id, ego, and superego. It is also aimed at adapting to society and maintaining one’s own biopsychosocial balance. But in essence, human existence is self-transcendence and cannot be reduced to self-actualization. The main goal is not the actualization of the “self,” but the realization of values and meaning, which must be sought in the world, not within oneself or one’s psyche as a closed system.
In reality, what a person needs is not homeostasis, but what I call noodynamics: a tension that maintains their steady orientation toward actualizing specific values and realizing the meaning of their personal existence. This is how mental health is ensured. Fleeing from any kind of stress can lead a person to become a victim of the existential vacuum.
A person needs not so much a state of rest and lack of tension, but rather striving to achieve something worthwhile. They require not so much the discharge of tension as a challenge from the specific meaning of their personal existence. Only the person themselves can realize this meaning—no one else. The tension between subject and object does not undermine mental well-being and integrity; on the contrary, it supports them. In the case of neurosis, this is even more true. The integration of the subject presupposes orientation toward the object. When architects want to strengthen a weak arch, they increase the load on it to ensure a tighter fit. Likewise, therapists who want to strengthen their patients’ mental health should not be afraid to increase the burden of responsibility so that they realize the meaning of their existence.