Existentialism: Embracing Life’s Ultimate Questions
“It Is Death Itself That Makes Life Meaningful” — Viktor Frankl
The months following my mom’s death were some of the darkest in my life. I was hit with potent waves of sorrow, but simultaneously I felt connected to her, the power of her love opening my heart in the depths of grief. Having a loved one die is a callous lesson in how deeply ingrained our society’s avoidance of death is; subjects change at the first mention of death, once close friends disappear completely. Our culture avoids grief, supporting the denial and fear of death on every level.
My mom’s death served as an ‘awakening experience’ in my life, putting me face-to-face with my own mortality and propelling me into a period of accelerated growth.
Facing my biggest fear provided clarity regarding what I valued in life, drove me to go for what I wanted and empowered me to shed my fear of failure, criticism and rejection.
Working through my grief cracked me open and allowed me to connect with life in a more meaningful way, forging deeper connections with friends and family, going back to school, changing my career path, and tuning into my creative energy, resulting in beautiful forms of expression and progress towards goals that were previously distant daydreams.
I know firsthand that looking unflinchingly at death and facing what comes up can improve your life.
It can also empower you to provide a supportive and grounding presence to others when they are facing their own mortality, grief, and sorrow. My experiences led me to volunteer with hospice and pursue a career in counselling, cultivating meaningful connections and a life rich in experience. My intention in writing this article is to shed light on the power of existentialism and finding meaning in life’s suffering.
Suffering is an inevitability in life, and I am grateful for my experiences. Pain is an important part of our path and is essential to our growth. The ‘obstacles’ on our paths are our most powerful teachers.
Viktor Frankl
Viktor Frankl was an Austrian-born Jewish psychiatrist who experienced profound suffering in his lifetime and recognized that humans were uniquely equipped to find meaning in adversity.
The most human of all human capacities [is] the ability to turn suffering into a human triumph. — Frankl
Frankl recognized suffering as an inevitability in life and believed that meaning could be found in life’s most difficult circumstances. He developed his theories prior to entering Nazi concentration camps at the age of 37, where he was able to verify some of his theories regarding self-transcendence and the ‘will to meaning’ concepts (I will explore these further in this article).
I highly recommend Viktor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning. This book moves and inspires me in different ways each time I read it.
Existential Philosophy
Existentialism is a philosophical movement that defies simple explanation, as it represents a framework for thinking about the human experience that rejects systematization and classification. Existentialist theory cannot be attributed to any specific philosopher, but its roots can be found in the works of Pascal, Kirkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Heidegger, Sartre and Husserl, and became dominant in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s.
Common themes in existentialist theory include the rejection of rational certainty, subjective self-awareness, freedom, responsibility, meaning, and striving for authenticity.
Existentialists reject the notion that each human life has an inherent purpose, placing the burden (or opportunity) on the individual to create meaning.
Self-Transcendence and Serving Others
Frankl conceptualized self-transcendence as getting outside of the self and the psyche and contributing to humanity by serving others, whether it was through relationships, causes or projects. Maslow expanded on the concept, regarding self-transcendence as a spiritual resource and the pinnacle of human consciousness, which is crucial in confronting suffering and death.
Frankl believed one could never find meaning in life through self-absorbed striving for actualization, rather actualization was a side-effect of transcending one’s self in service of others.
The Main Task of Dying
The Tension of Existence and Non-Existence
Humans beings’ ability to contemplate their own existence and inevitable non-existence results in a vast array of cognitive, emotional and behavioural responses.
The absence of structure imposed upon the trajectory of an individual’s life creates an existential groundlessness, whereby the only certainty in life and relief from responsibility is what Frankl referred to as the main task of dying.
Hence, the questions that become of interest to the existentialist are:
- How does one find meaning in a purposeless, temporary existence?
- How does one handle the vast responsibility of choice and meaning creation? And,
- How does one overcome anxiety, anger, fear and ambivalence with the awareness of life’s groundless and temporary nature?’
Choose your own adventure!
Existential Guilt
The existential principle of responsibility refers to the human ability to respond to the awareness of existence by creating a unique life, authentic to the individual, and living up to their self and culturally-defined potential. When an individual perceives that they have fallen short of meeting these responsibilities, they experience existential guilt, which Breitbart proposed is the root of anxiety and anger surrounding death.
The greater the discrepancy between one’s idealized life trajectory and the one that unfolds, the greater the experience of existential guilt will be.
Obstacles that knock people off their desired course, such as disease, loss, trauma, and proximity to death, create existential guilt. Existential guilt manifests as shame, depression, anger and overt ‘death anxiety’, all of which are rooted in the ultimate fear of loss.
Death Anxiety
In her book, When Things Fall Apart, Buddhist nun and spiritual teacher Pema Chödrön (another life-changing book that I can’t recommend enough) summed up death anxiety, stating, “Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth”. The certainty of death is a source of both motivation and angst that some are aware of, but for many, lingers just beneath the surface of awareness, creating a base level of anxiety, which existential therapists refer to as death anxiety.
Death is always the distant thunder at our picnic, however much we may wish to deny it. - Yalom & Joselleson
Existential Therapy
Existential therapy is a subjective, human-centred approach that assumes all humans are self-aware and possess an innate drive towards growth, meaning and self-actualization.
Base assumptions include:
- Each individual has a unique existence;
- Identity is formed through interactions; and,
- Each person will confront the ultimate concerns: death, freedom, isolation, and meaning.
Navigating these ultimate concerns, especially awareness of death, creates a level of anxiety that is inherent in human nature. Yalom and Josselson called the fear of death, “the profound dread of nonbeing”, and noted that this dread overshadows the other ultimate concerns and manifested in various symptoms. However, confronting the reality of our own finite nature and that of those around us can serve to integrate and normalize the fear of death, reveal purpose in living and enrich our lives.
Existential therapists follow the tenets of the ‘I-Thou’ relationship in regards to the level of unconditional positive regard and respect that characterizes the therapeutic relationship, and regard clients as expert decision-and-meaning-makers in their own lives.
Logotherapy
Viktor Frankl created logotherapy, named after the Greek word for meaning, ‘logos’, which is a form of psychotherapy centred around the belief that the search for meaning is the fundamental motivating force for all humans. When this pursuit is blocked or interrupted, individuals experience the ‘existential vacuum’, a state of meaninglessness resulting in feelings of ambivalence, emptiness, alienation and futility.
The goal of logotherapy is to assist clients in finding personal meaning in life, which is unique, contextual and continually evolving.
Three basic assumptions of logotherapy include:
- ‘Freedom of will’ refers to the issue of determinism; in that individuals hold the freedom to choose and the responsibility for how they act and react in every circumstance;
- ‘Will to meaning’ refers to the pursuit of meaning as the main driving force behind human motivation; and,
- ‘Meaning of life’ refers to the contextual and situational nature of meaning, and that purpose can be found in all of life’s circumstances.
Contrary to the dead-end that is nihilism, these assumptions bring with them limitless possibility and hope in the face of inevitable suffering.
Frankl believed that meaning is unique to each person and therefore, it cannot be created or given (be wary of any person, ideology, or product that promises otherwise). Rather, meaning must be discovered in one of three ways:
- Creating or doing something impactful;
- Experiencing a relationship or situation that holds meaning; and,
- Changing one’s mindset towards suffering.
Additionally, Frankl proposed that humans were composed of three dimensions: body, mind, and spirit. The spirit differentiates humans from other mammals, in that it creates a pull to seek meaning and equips humans with a number of spiritual resources: humour, conscience, freedom, morality and the ability to love and learn from mistakes.
Logotherapy is commonly a brief therapy with the goals of helping clients to embrace responsibility for their path in life and aid them in discovering meaning. While therapists with an existential orientation may employ a wide variety of methods, Frankl focused on the use of humour, paradoxical intention, dereflection and Socratic dialogue. Humour was combined with other techniques and used to create distance between the client and their problems; dereflection involved re-directing the client’s attention away from the self or goal in order to gain perspective; paradoxical attention combined hyper-intention, humour and hyperbole that the client directed at their biggest fear in order to relieve anxious symptoms; and Socratic dialogue involved conversational questioning techniques used to raise awareness regarding the client’s attitudes and patterns.
With the knowledge that confrontations with death can catalyze a perspective shift and empower clients to own their responsibility and freedom of will, some existential therapists employ interventions designed to raise the client’s awareness of their mortality.
Such interventions can take structured forms, such as tasking clients with writing their own obituaries, whereas other techniques assist clients in tuning into the signs and symbols in their waking and dream lives that point to the temporary nature of life, and the anxiety that this evokes.
As a sense of existential guilt; the feeling that one has not lived up to their full potential, is hypothesized to be one of the root causes of death anxiety, existential therapists working with end-of-life clients can utilize interventions focused on cultivating a sense of acceptance, including completing life tasks and exercising forgiveness.
How Embracing Death Can Improve Your Life
Frankl believed that a lack of purpose is the factor that leads people to the depths of despair, sorrow, depression, addiction and suicide. He also believed that each individual’s path to meaning is unique and each person holds the responsibility to forge this path. There are no easy answers or shortcuts. There is no escaping the inevitable suffering in life or facing the ultimate concerns of death, freedom, isolation, and meaning.
Frankl observed the resilience of the human spirit and man’s ability to create meaning in the most dire of circumstances, spending three years in Nazi death camps in World War II. Frankl suggested that meaning could not be found through self-absorbed striving, rather it was a result of impactful work, connections, transcending one’s self in the service of others, and leaning into suffering by making use of spiritual resources.
Additionally, turning away from your own suffering or the suffering of others is a path to dissociation, isolation, and meaninglessness. Leaning into life’s inherent uncertainty by cultivating an awareness of the interplay of existential guilt and death anxiety and how these manifest in our thoughts, feelings and behaviours can help us gain an understanding of ourselves, and work towards creating a meaningful existence.
In accepting that suffering, sickness, ageing and death are woven into the fabric of life, we can ground into the groundlessness, finding strength in the face of life’s most difficult questions and circumstances.
Ask For Help!
Existentially-oriented therapists recognize the uniqueness of each client; view them from a holistic perspective; carefully build respectful therapeutic relationships and utilize appropriate techniques with the goals of assisting clients in creating authentic meaning and closing the gaps between their idealized and actual life trajectories. A mental health professional that is on the same page as you is an invaluable resource in building a life full of meaning.
Lots of love!
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Frankl, V. E. (1946). Man’s search for meaning. Washington Square Press.
I appreciate your support! Here are some links to other articles I’ve written:
Simple Practices to Improve Your Life (Part 1)
What’s Your Story? Why the Answer Really Matters.
The Benefits of Breaking Out of Polarized Patterns of Thinking
References:
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Munteanu, M. A. (2019). Existential Therapy — Viktor Frankl, Rollo May, Irvin Yalom [Lecture notes]. https://courses.yorkvilleu.ca/mod/book/view.php?id=1672250&chapterid=347841
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