A Response-Ability to Fatalism, Fanaticism, and Tranquilization--What's a Doctor to Do? Case Studies and Conversation with Viktor Frankl’s The Doctor and the Soul
Janeta Tansey, MD, PhD, Principal, Virtue Medicine PC, Iowa City, Iowa
Viktor Frankl, neuropsychiatrist and author of Man’s Search for Meaning, also published in 1955 the manuscript that he tried to hide in his overcoat as he was sent to the concentration camps, and for which he willed himself to survive, in part, that it might have voice. This manuscript, titled The Doctor and the Soul in its U.S. release, is a love-song to the power of the spiritual dimension of human being, which he argued is the faculty that freely wills-to-meaning in the face of guilt, suffering, and death. In this, and other works, Frankl invited his fellow healers to attend to the existential suffering of his era, which he characterized as a terrible anxiety pressed into the thoughts and behaviors of fanaticism, fatalism, and collective-individual tranquilization. His insights are highly relevant to today’s companion ills: our polemics and polarization, despair and demoralization, and frantic paths to ease pain, including social media, narcissism-hedonism, and the use of psychotropic medications, both prescribed and illicit. Frankl argues that it is inescapably the role of the physician to accurately diagnose this existential neurosis or crisis of meaning, noting that its manifestation can phenomenologically mimic or impact the diseases of the body and mind. To ignore the human spirit as a faculty in patient healing, he suggests, reflects Medicine’s reductionistic bias, immaturity as a humanistic endeavor, empirical/phenomenological ignorance, and clinical incompetence. However, Frankl also actively resisted prescribing Religion as the tool to address the needs of the human spirit. A Jewish man, married to a Christian woman, with conversation partners in Medicine, Psychology, Philosophy, and Theology, Frankl suggests firmly and repeatedly that theism is unnecessary to spiritual care in Medicine. The patient might find meaning in religious belief, practice, or experience, but Frankl argues that it is not the physician’s place to offer religion as a source of meaning. He suggests instead that orienting the patient toward Ultimate Meaning in Self-Transcendence, along with Meaning-in-the-Moment, permits physicians to attend to the patient’s spirit without invoking Religion at all.
Frankl has very specific and practical prescriptives and strategies for the physician to use to catalyze will-to-meaning, for healing and health. This paper will briefly present the ontological claims of Frankl, with particular attention to the clinical “toolkit” that he recommends physicians learn and understand for activating the spiritual power of patients. In the presentation, these tools will be applied, Franklian style, to explore applications in clinical case studies of fanaticism, fatalism, and tranquilization, as the examples par excellence of existential dysfunction entwined with physical and psychological pathology. Brief comparison of Frankl’s approach with other complimentary existentialists will be offered to encourage participants to explore their own prescriptive toolkit for care of the human spirit, setting the stage for additional discussion and sharing. The author of this paper is a practicing physician and ethicist, with a Religious Studies background in Jewish Existentialism.
Viktor Frankl, neuropsychiatrist and author of Man’s Search for Meaning, also published in 1955 the manuscript that he tried to hide in his overcoat as he was sent to the concentration camps, and for which he willed himself to survive, in part, that it might have voice. This manuscript, titled The Doctor and the Soul in its U.S. release, is a love-song to the power of the spiritual dimension of human being, which he argued is the faculty that freely wills-to-meaning in the face of guilt, suffering, and death. In this, and other works, Frankl invited his fellow healers to attend to the existential suffering of his era, which he characterized as a terrible anxiety pressed into the thoughts and behaviors of fanaticism, fatalism, and collective-individual tranquilization. His insights are highly relevant to today’s companion ills: our polemics and polarization, despair and demoralization, and frantic paths to ease pain, including social media, narcissism-hedonism, and the use of psychotropic medications, both prescribed and illicit. Frankl argues that it is inescapably the role of the physician to accurately diagnose this existential neurosis or crisis of meaning, noting that its manifestation can phenomenologically mimic or impact the diseases of the body and mind. To ignore the human spirit as a faculty in patient healing, he suggests, reflects Medicine’s reductionistic bias, immaturity as a humanistic endeavor, empirical/phenomenological ignorance, and clinical incompetence. However, Frankl also actively resisted prescribing Religion as the tool to address the needs of the human spirit. A Jewish man, married to a Christian woman, with conversation partners in Medicine, Psychology, Philosophy, and Theology, Frankl suggests firmly and repeatedly that theism is unnecessary to spiritual care in Medicine. The patient might find meaning in religious belief, practice, or experience, but Frankl argues that it is not the physician’s place to offer religion as a source of meaning. He suggests instead that orienting the patient toward Ultimate Meaning in Self-Transcendence, along with Meaning-in-the-Moment, permits physicians to attend to the patient’s spirit without invoking Religion at all.
Frankl has very specific and practical prescriptives and strategies for the physician to use to catalyze will-to-meaning, for healing and health. This paper will briefly present the ontological claims of Frankl, with particular attention to the clinical “toolkit” that he recommends physicians learn and understand for activating the spiritual power of patients. In the presentation, these tools will be applied, Franklian style, to explore applications in clinical case studies of fanaticism, fatalism, and tranquilization, as the examples par excellence of existential dysfunction entwined with physical and psychological pathology. Brief comparison of Frankl’s approach with other complimentary existentialists will be offered to encourage participants to explore their own prescriptive toolkit for care of the human spirit, setting the stage for additional discussion and sharing. The author of this paper is a practicing physician and ethicist, with a Religious Studies background in Jewish Existentialism.