Meaning-Making and Existential Psychology

The Question That Will Not Be Silenced

Viktor Frankl was thirty-nine years old when the Nazis deported him to Auschwitz. His father had already died at Theresienstadt. His mother was sent to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. His wife, Tilly, would die at Bergen-Belsen. His brother perished at Auschwitz. Between 1942 and 1945, Frankl was transported through four concentration camps, enduring forced labor, starvation, typhus, and the daily probability of selection for death.

He emerged with a manuscript hidden in the lining of his coat — notes for a book that would eventually be published as Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), sell over 16 million copies, and establish logotherapy as the third Viennese school of psychotherapy (after Freud’s psychoanalysis and Adler’s individual psychology).

The book’s central argument is deceptively simple: the primary motivational force in human beings is not the pursuit of pleasure (Freud) or the pursuit of power (Adler) but the pursuit of meaning. Those who found meaning — even in the camps — survived psychologically. Those who lost it died, sometimes within days of giving up, their bodies following their souls into collapse.

“He who has a why to live,” Frankl quoted Nietzsche, “can bear almost any how.”

The Three Sources of Meaning

Frankl identified three avenues through which meaning enters a life:

Creative values — What you give to the world. A work of art, a business, a garden, a child raised with attention and love. Any act that brings something into existence that was not there before. This is meaning through contribution.

Experiential values — What you receive from the world. The beauty of a sunset, the depth of a conversation, the experience of love, the encounter with truth or goodness. This is meaning through receptivity. Even a person incapable of creative work can find meaning through what they experience — a piece of music, the face of a beloved person, the first snow of winter.

Attitudinal values — The stance you take toward unavoidable suffering. This is Frankl’s most radical and most hard-won insight. When you can neither create nor experience — when you are stripped of everything — you still possess the freedom to choose your attitude. “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing,” Frankl wrote, “the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”

This is not toxic positivity. Frankl was not suggesting that suffering is good, or that the right attitude makes it painless. He was observing that even in the most extreme circumstances, the capacity to choose meaning persists — and that exercising this capacity is itself a form of human dignity that suffering cannot destroy.

Irvin Yalom’s Four Ultimate Concerns

Irvin Yalom, professor emeritus of psychiatry at Stanford and one of the most influential psychotherapists alive, distilled existential psychology into four ultimate concerns that every human being must confront:

Death — The awareness of mortality. Not as an abstract concept but as a lived reality — the fact that you will die, that the people you love will die, and that this is not negotiable. Death awareness is not morbid. Yalom argues it is the hidden engine of much psychological distress — and, paradoxically, the doorway to authentic living. “Although the physicality of death destroys man,” he writes in Existential Psychotherapy (1980), “the idea of death saves him.”

Freedom — Not political freedom, but existential freedom — the radical responsibility that comes with being the author of your own life. There is no script. No one is coming to rescue you. Every choice is yours, and the weight of that freedom produces what Kierkegaard called “the dizziness of freedom” — existential anxiety.

Isolation — The unbridgeable gap between one consciousness and another. No matter how intimate a relationship, you are ultimately alone in your subjective experience. You entered the world alone and will leave it alone. This existential isolation is distinct from interpersonal isolation (loneliness) or intrapersonal isolation (being cut off from one’s own feelings).

Meaninglessness — The possibility that life has no inherent meaning, that the universe is indifferent, and that any meaning that exists must be created rather than discovered. This is the concern that connects most directly to Frankl’s work.

Yalom’s therapeutic approach doesn’t resolve these concerns. It faces them. The goal is not to eliminate existential anxiety but to live fully in its presence — to use the awareness of death as a catalyst for engagement, the weight of freedom as a spur to responsibility, the fact of isolation as motivation for authentic connection, and the absence of given meaning as an invitation to create it.

Rollo May: Anxiety as Teacher

Rollo May (1909-1994), who introduced European existential philosophy to American psychotherapy, made a critical distinction between neurotic anxiety and existential (or normal) anxiety.

Neurotic anxiety is disproportionate to the situation, paralyzing, and defensive. It constricts life. Existential anxiety is proportionate to the human condition — the natural response to confronting mortality, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. It cannot be eliminated without eliminating awareness itself.

May argued that the attempt to eliminate all anxiety — through medication, avoidance, or distraction — was itself pathological. Existential anxiety is a signal that you are alive, aware, and confronting something that matters. It is the trembling at the edge of growth. “The hallmark of courage in our age,” May wrote in The Courage to Create, “is the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.”

This reframes the therapeutic task. Instead of asking “how do I get rid of this anxiety?” the existential question becomes “what is this anxiety asking me to face?”

Terror Management Theory

Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death (1973), published the year before his own death from cancer, argued that the awareness of mortality is the fundamental motivator of human civilization. Culture itself, Becker proposed, is an elaborate defense against death awareness — a “hero system” that offers symbolic immortality through religion, achievement, nation, family line, or creative legacy.

Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski transformed Becker’s philosophical argument into a testable scientific framework: Terror Management Theory (TMT). Beginning in the late 1980s, they conducted hundreds of experiments using a simple paradigm: remind people of their mortality (mortality salience) and observe what changes in their behavior and attitudes.

The findings are consistent and unsettling. When mortality is made salient — through questionnaires about death, proximity to funeral homes, or subliminal death-related primes — people become more nationalistic, more punitive toward moral transgressors, more attracted to charismatic leaders, more hostile toward out-groups, and more rigid in their worldview defense.

In other words: the fear of death, operating outside awareness, drives tribalism, aggression, and ideological rigidity. The implications for politics, religious conflict, and intergroup violence are profound. TMT research has been replicated in over 500 studies across 25 countries.

But there is a counterpoint. When mortality awareness is conscious rather than suppressed — when people engage deliberately with the reality of death through contemplation, meditation, or therapeutic work — the defensive reactions diminish. Conscious death awareness tends to produce not rigidity but openness, not aggression but compassion, not clinging but appreciation.

This aligns with every contemplative tradition that includes death meditation — from the Buddhist maranasati to the Stoic memento mori to the Christian ars moriendi. Conscious awareness of death does not produce terror. It produces clarity.

Meaning Protects Health

The research on meaning and health outcomes has moved well beyond philosophical speculation. Michael Steger developed the Meaning in Life Questionnaire (MLQ), a validated instrument that distinguishes between the presence of meaning and the search for meaning. Both dimensions predict distinct health and well-being outcomes.

Patricia Boyle and colleagues at Rush University Medical Center published a landmark study in 2009 in the Archives of General Psychiatry showing that people with a high sense of purpose in life had a 2.4 times reduced risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease compared to those with low purpose — even after controlling for depression, neuroticism, social network size, and chronic medical conditions. Purpose didn’t just correlate with slower cognitive decline. It appeared to protect the brain itself.

A 2019 meta-analysis by Alimujiang and colleagues (published in JAMA Network Open) examined data from 136,000 participants across multiple prospective studies and found that a strong sense of purpose was associated with reduced all-cause mortality. People with purpose lived longer — not by a trivial margin, but meaningfully, across diverse populations and controlling for confounders.

The biological pathways are beginning to be mapped. Steve Cole’s research on human social genomics shows that eudaimonic well-being (meaning-based) produces a gene expression profile associated with lower inflammation and stronger antiviral defense. Meaninglessness, conversely, produces a pro-inflammatory profile — the same molecular signature associated with chronic disease.

The Existential Vacuum and Addiction

Frankl coined the term “existential vacuum” to describe the state of inner emptiness, boredom, and meaninglessness that he saw as the defining condition of modern life. Without the constraints and traditions that once structured meaning — religion, community, vocation — individuals are cast into a void that they attempt to fill with consumption, stimulation, and substances.

He was writing in the 1950s and 1960s. The condition he described has only intensified. Bruce Alexander’s “Rat Park” experiments (1978-1981) at Simon Fraser University demonstrated that rats in enriched social environments largely ignored morphine-laced water, while isolated rats in bare cages drank it compulsively. Alexander concluded that addiction is not primarily a chemical phenomenon but an adaptation to an impoverished environment — a response to the absence of connection and meaning.

Johann Hari, in Chasing the Scream (2015) and Lost Connections (2018), extended this argument to human populations, arguing that addiction is fundamentally a response to disconnection — from meaning, from community, from purpose, from nature. The opposite of addiction, in this frame, is not sobriety. It is connection.

Frankl anticipated this: “Ever more patients complain of what they call an inner void, and that is the reason I have termed this condition the ‘existential vacuum.’ In contrast to the peak-experience so aptly described by Maslow, one could speak of an ‘abyss-experience.’”

Tragic Optimism

In the postscript to later editions of Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl introduced the concept of tragic optimism — the capacity to maintain hope and find meaning in the face of the “tragic triad”: pain, guilt, and death. This is not optimism that denies tragedy. It is optimism that exists because of and within tragedy.

Tragic optimism asks: Can suffering be transformed into achievement? Can guilt be transformed into change? Can the awareness of mortality be transformed into responsible action?

The answer, Frankl insisted, is yes — but only through the individual’s choice. Meaning cannot be prescribed. It must be discovered by each person in each situation. The therapist cannot give a patient meaning any more than a comedian can give an audience a sense of humor. What the therapist can do is help the patient see the meaning that is already latent in their situation.

Finding Meaning Without Glorifying Suffering

There is a dangerous distortion of Frankl’s message that must be addressed: the idea that suffering is somehow necessary for meaning, or that meaning redeems all suffering. This is not what Frankl taught.

Frankl was unequivocal: “If suffering is avoidable, the meaningful thing to do is to remove it — to remove the cause, be it biological, psychological, or political. To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.”

Meaning in suffering is a last resort — the attitudinal value that remains when creative and experiential values have been stripped away. A person facing unavoidable illness can find meaning in how they face it. But that does not make illness meaningful in itself. A society that tells the poor their poverty is “meaningful” is not offering existential therapy — it is offering ideological sedation.

The existential psychologists offer something harder than either despair or false comfort. They offer the recognition that life is finite, freedom is terrifying, isolation is real, and given meaning is absent — and that within these conditions, a meaningful life is still possible. Not guaranteed. Not easy. But possible, for anyone who is willing to face the four ultimate concerns without flinching and create meaning rather than waiting for it to be delivered.

If you were to strip away every external source of meaning in your life — title, role, relationship, achievement — what, if anything, would remain as irreducibly yours?