Baxter and Ivan have been quarreling about circus lion tamers and the role such a lion tamer might play in the process of drilling discipline into the ranks of the emotions. I'd wanted to talk about struggle as a lion tamer's dilemma. Too much and you got an angry, bitter lion. Too little and you got a big kitty cat that occasionally runs off with a toddler from the audience. Instead I'm going to use today as a chance to address Viktor Frankl's version of Will To as an access to the role of Myth in our Process of Becoming. Nietzsche had his Will to Power, Sigmund Freud had his Will to Pleasure and Viktor Frankl had his Will to Meaning.
'Nuff said really, but as a pompous old fart I'm obliged to go all dog's biscuit and a picture on these pages otherwise it wouldn't be a blog. Viktor Frankl was 92 when he died in 1997. Generally the word precocious was designed around chaps like Viktor, by the time he was 20 years old he'd done more than most people. He was writing to Sigmund Freud, criticizing the assumptions Freud had based his psychoanalysis on, he was already on the verge of being expelled from the Alfred Adler's Individual Psychology Students Circle, he was getting himself ready to find fault with Jung's early ideas, and he was the Leader of the Social Democratic Party of Austria's Youth Movement. Social Democrats in Europe lean to the political left. In the 1930's Social Democrats and Communists were crushed by anti-democratic, authoritarian, corporatist, fascist inspired regime called the Christian Social Party similar to elements in the 2025 frightened white, slightly retarded people or nit-wit side of the current US Republican Party.
Alfred Adler, the organizing mind behind Individual Psychology died in 1937 at the age of 67. Adler Individual understanding of us people may have been grouped under the title Will to Belong. He was trained as a doctor became interested by how in the human body when one part of it went awry other parts developed to compensate. He decided that the same dynamic could be applied to an individual personality. For example a person who felt himself to be inferior to others, he or she would compensate for this sense of inferiority by producing behaviors the individual chose to believe would better adhere him to this or that social group. For Alfred Adler a Malignant Narcissist, or power hungry megalomaniac, would be described as a dangerous manifestation of an intense Inferiority Complex compensating through an unchecked Striving for Personal Superiority.
Frankl's understandings of how Psychotherapy might be pursued, his Will to Meaning, are much informed by Nietzsche's off hand comment: "He who has a why to live for can endure almost any how." Frankl lost his mother, father, two siblings and his first wife to the Holocaust. Over a period of three years he survived four different Concentration Camps. In his understandings of us people he wasn't a reductionist, he didn't like the idea of dehumanizing us by interpreting us as the sum of our parts. We are complicated, ever changing and difficult, we struggle with meaninglessness, emptiness and aimless wandering. Frankl's Logotherapy which addresses our ability to know and his existential analysis which address our ability to make meaning, explored the individual in a slightly more creative and sensuous manner than other explorers of a Phenomena that's the why and how of Human Experience.
