Therapeutic Alliance Part 2: Meaning and Viktor Frankl’s Logotherapy

In the celebrated book Man’s Search for Meaning, author Viktor Frankl wrote about his intimate and horrific Holocaust experience. He found that meaning often came from the prisoners’ small choices—to maintain belief in human dignity in the midst of being tortured and starved and bravely face these hardships together.

There are no conflicts of interest for this episode.

[djsgolfer]

I love your position that everything a patient does has meaning bc it is SO TRUE! I have a crude example that I hope doesn’t trigger anyone reading but it demonstrates this well. I had a patient with schizophrenia in the unit who had a very distressing delusion about aliens raping him at night, which could have easily been dismissed as ramblings not grounded in reality or assumed to be related to his history of horrendous abuse. However, by being present with the patient with an attitude of curiosity about meaning, I learned that he had very large painful hemorrhoids from the constipation from antipsychotics. If I were dismissive, I would have missed the opportunity for a very simple fix of one thing causing him suffering. Talk about building a therapeutic alliance… as anyone who’s ever had hemorrhoids would attest ;-) but in all seriousness, he knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that I cared and took his suffering seriously from that moment on.

[someonesomeone]

How does one find meaning and purpose?