That Nothing Feeling

"The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life," wrote Sigmund Freud in a letter to Princess Marie Bonaparte, "he is sick."

By that token, and according to the findings of Psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl of the University of Vienna, Americans really need to have their heads examined. Addressing the annual meeting of the Academy of Religion and Mental Health in Manhattan a fortnight ago, Dr. Frankl said that psychoanalysts are more and more frequently encountering a new neurosis characterized by loss of interest and lack of initiative, against which conventional psychoanalysis is ineffective.

"Time and again, the psychiatrist is consulted by patients who doubt that life has any meaning," said Dr. Frankl. "This condition I have called 'existential vacuum.'" And in a survey of his own students, Dr. Frankl found that while 40% of the Germans, Swiss and Austrians report existential vacuum, no less than 81% of the Americans say they have felt it.

Said Dr. Frankl, "We must not draw the conclusion that the existential vacuum is predominantly an American disease, but rather that it is apparently a concomitant of industrialization." It results, he thinks, from a loss of the instinctual security of the animal world on the one hand and of social tradition on the other. "At present, instincts do not tell man what he has to do, nor do traditions direct him toward what he ought to do; soon he will not even know what he wants to do, thus completely succumbing to conformism."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.