We, affluent humans have developed a secular and unstable
lifestyle that frustrates and disappoints many
psychologically normal persons as they fail to make life
meaningful, because it does not meet our crucial
psychospiritual needs.
CULTURAL FAILURE
We recall no one who discussed this widespread existential frustration that complicates life more clearly than
Catherine Hendricks. This mining company executive attended a FRONTIERS OF FULFILLMENT program we conducted at the
University of Arizona in Tucson for the Affiliated Women’s Clubs Of Arizona. Catherine lamented when she spoke with us
after the program;
"I’m one woman who did everything well. I stayed out of
trouble in school, married the right guy and joined a great
company when it started taking women seriously. I’ve made
sound business decisions along the way and shall surely
become a V P before I’m forty. I live in a home my parents
think a mansion and have two beautiful children. I do a job
thousands envy. Obviously, I have everything. Right? Wrong!
Much of my life feels incomplete and caught up in trivia. My
kids are rebelling with sex and drugs and I’m almost certain
my husband is having an affair with a little twerp. I feel
deeply dissatisfied at the most inopportune times, as if
nothing counts except for my sixty hour work weeks and
paying for the house and the Mercedes. There must be more to
life than this but when my therapist asks what‘s missing, I
can’t even tell her.
I worry that I’m going mad to feel this way despite my
accomplishments in my company and my prestige in the
community. What do I do when I’ve won everything I’ve ever
wanted and it isn’t enough to keep me happy?"
What indeed? Catherine’s all too common frustration with her
life and its limitations despite a fine career and a good
family, are the painful by-products of a secular society
awash in deep confusion about values and choices rather than
from personal psychological ailments per se. Research among
graduates from Harvard, Washington and Idaho State and
Southern Methodist Universities reveal that a high
percentage of successful alumni twenty years after
graduation, feel that the best times of their lives are
behind them, that the joy of life has vanished and all they
have left are the repetitive and meaningless
responsibilities of life. By middle age their work has
become the only passion of many souls although our work is
only one of several vital aspects of life that we must
manage with knowledge and wisdom.
It has become obvious to many physicians, therapists,
pastors and teachers in the helping business that we humans
have inadvertently created a wealthy secular-minded
civilization that complicates our lives with a great many
counter-productive demands that weaken our ability to live
wisely and well. Secular values and incessant changes keep
multitudes of humans unhappy and off balance despite their
affluence because as Catherine discovered, their crucial
psychospiritually needs remain unmet.
Far too many persons feel as if they are not much better off
than worker bees in a hive, completing meaningless tasks in
shallow and transitory relationships that leave them feeling
stuck in the midst of a life that is passing them by.
Obviously, the above have little to do with neuroticism and
mental illness but they do relate to the best way to make
our lives meaningful and significant.
At one time, virtually everyone knew what the meaning of
life was. Humans had to work like galley slaves to grow and
store enough food and firewood so families wouldn’t starve
or freeze during the winter moons. They had to fight off the
raiders from across the river intent on stealing their
livestock and grain. Half of the children died early in life
from diseases and malnutrition and our ancestors knew they
must placate the always capricious and often angry gods who
sent famines, bad weather, plagues and epidemics to punish
ungrateful and disobedient people and turn them back to the
truth. The fires of perdition were awaiting any foolhardy
soul who didn’t pray and pay and obey the gimlet-eyed,
always watching priests who claimed the knowledge and wisdom
needed to determine who entered Paradise. But when they got
it right and the crops were good – our ancestors felt secure
from belonging in the clan with grain in the barns, God in
his heaven and wise King Winceslas on his throne. The cast
of players in the great drama of life came and vanished from
generation to generation but life went on in its recurring
cycles as they gathered around bonfires after a good harvest
to sing and dance, to get jolly with their beer and tell
stories and to ponder who they were, where they came from
and where they were going. Every society shared at least two
things in common. They learned how to make alcohol to ease
the pain of an uncertain existence and they developed forms
of worship to connect with those gods who quite obviously
were more wise and powerful than they themselves. We
however, echo the lament uttered by Heller in Herman Hesse’s
important novel about existential frustration, STEPPENWULF.
We paraphrase –
There come times when men are caught between two ages – when
we no longer know what is right and what is wrong, what we
should do and how we ought to live.
In our era, multitudes of persons who ignore or reject their
spiritual needs still ponder the purpose of their existence
because a fragmented secular society makes it difficult to
find consistent satisfaction. Many psychologically normal
persons who automatically accept our civilization’s secular
values and expedient choices as the most important aspects
of life, are starving spiritually because they are seeking
emotional security and spiritual assurance in situations and
relationships where they cannot be found. Then, to
complicate our lives still more – this complex industrial
society continues to shift faster than we humans can
comfortably adapt. Confusing changes rush over us at the
speed of a child’s kaleidoscopic toy shifting its scenes. We
no sooner become comfortable with our lives than society
changes again and we are forced to abandon the familiar and
change our careers, locations and even exchange our
families. Many frustrated souls have unknowingly accepted
too pragmatic a life-style that materialistic values,
attitudes and expectations cannot satisfy for long.
Especially as we grow past the awe of childhood and
adolescence in order to meet the demanding responsibilities
and repetitive duties of an adult life.
We are pleased to report that Catherine who had neither
neurotic nor psychotic tendencies as she feared, delved
deeply into Viktor Frankl’s Logotherapy classic volumes
MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING and THE DOCTOR AND THE SOUL and
completed our FRONTIERS OF FULFILLMENT study course and made
a successful effort to recover the psychospiritually
elements of life she had let slip in her unthinking reliance
on a secular life-style. She and her husband rekindled their
love affair, started worshipping in a faith community that
met their spiritual needs and saw their children safely
through college. She and Harold began making regular
contributions to society for the good of their souls and she
went on to assume a major leadership role in her mining
company. They internalized the benefits of Logotherapy to
make their way joyfully through the challenges of life
forced on all persons by our very existence. In other words
- she and her family had learned that consistent
satisfaction and fulfillment are not found by chance like a
coin along a roadside but occur as the result of planning
wisely and developing legitimate reasons for one’s life,
love and labor to become consistently purposeful.
And now -- in order to help persons find satisfaction by
maturing psychospiritually and to help others develop their
sense of meaning, we of The DeVille Logotherapy Learning
Center have researched and developed a Logotherapy
curriculum of eighteen graduate Logotherapy courses in five
majors to help persons like yourself make life deeply
meaningful and consistently rewarding in your love, labor
and career.
WE OFFER THE BEST TRAINING BY INTEGRATING HUMAN NEED FOR
MEANING
AND BELONGING INTO ACTION LOGOTHERAPY
PSYCHOSPIRITUAL EMPOWERMENT
Logotherapy is a psychospiritual philosophy of a satisfying
life-style that includes a consciously applied regimen of
ethical virtues, positive attitudes and powerful methods
that are deliberately focused toward making life more
meaningful for psychologically normal persons. It enables
the person to deal wisely and well with the many challenges
within a fast shifting society’s secular value system that
fails to meet our deepest human needs. Unlike a psychology
degree that does little to heal neurotic wounds, our
Logotherapy training offers lifestyle improvements for
normal persons from the beginning. The development of a
purposeful lifestyle relieves a great many secular
frustrations and most spiritual bankruptcies. Logotherapy
enables women and men to create a fulfilling life despite
the secular failures and the self-defeating patterns of
existence that multitudes of otherwise normal persons have
naively chosen or had thrust on them by society.
Actually, we define ‘normal’ as the broad boulevard of human
personality and behavior, rather than a narrow line, from
which no one should deviate, along the very center of the
highway of life. We rejoice in the widespread diversity of
human personalities, attitudes and activities that make life
so rich and stimulating for persons who are mature enough
spiritually and emotionally to enjoy them.
The seeds of Logotherapy, were taught verbally to ordinary
men and women by Jesus in his brilliant parables, sermons,
debates and stern challenges to narcissistic religious and
political rulers. For example, a great many scholars
including Mahatma Gandhi call Jesus’ sermons on the
mountainside of Galilee the most valuable discourse ever
given to humanity. Other early spiritualists like Paul the
Apostle and Augustine can be considered early existential
counselors. So can Buddha and Lao Tzu. Their wisdom and
knowledge, along with more recent spiritual developments by
Soren Kierkegaard, Carl Jung and Otto Rank, were eventually
drawn together by the saintly Viktor Frankl during a
terrible period of human history and his own life. Like
hundreds of millions of innocent souls, Viktor suffered
through two World Wars, the Great Depression, the Cold War
and the revolt of the world’s desperately poor now called
Terrorism, plus the rise of the three evil ideologies that
exponentially increased human suffering, guilt, rage and
death. Viktor first survived the Holocaust and the hundred
million war-time deaths of the twentieth century and then
lived victoriously despite the ruthless fanaticism of Nazi
Fascism, Soviet Communism and Global (Laissez Faire)
Capitalism – all of which had their day in the sun but
eventually proved disastrous to our civilization. The
ideologues of these Isms used and abused humans as cannon
fodder for their wars, as wage slaves to produce their vast
wealth and as breeding stock to replenish the fallen
soldiers and exhausted workers whom they wasted like pocket
change by the millions.
Only someone with vested interests in the secular status quo
or seduced by a relentless mammon ideology, fails to see
that a depersonalized commercial life has become very
difficult for each individual or family to keep meaningful
and satisfying. Or how can one explain why over eighty
percent of North Americans, Asians, Latin Americans,
Africans and Europeans currently report that they are losing
ground and are often frustrated and frightened in a culture
of greed that is steadily squeezing its poor and middle
class families into oblivion under the delusion of raising
all boats large and small? And what does global warming and
the fading ozone layer, the loss of topsoil, the desperate
shortage of fresh water, the starvation of millions and the
squandering of irreplaceable resources portend for
humanity’s future? We are all given a finite number of years
in which to make our lives count for something significant
and satisfying before moving off the stage to be replaced by
the eager young newcomers waiting in the wings. Logotherapy
helps thoughtful persons contribute all during the years at
our disposal.
WE HAVE LEARNED NOTHING DEVISED BY HUMANS SERVES
INDIVIDUALS AS WELL AS LOGOTHERAPY’S SPIRIT WELLNESS
APPROACH --
ESPECIALLY WHEN IT IS EMPOWERED BY THE INTERACTION OF A
LIVING FAITH,
HOPE AND LOVE SPIRITUALITY.
Logotherapy goes beyond the often nihilistic and always
fragmented limitations of traditional psychology and
psychiatry which some say first lost their souls by
promoting secularism as a cure for spiritually conflicted
humans and then lost their minds by focusing on overt
behavior rather than embracing the potent elements of a
psychospiritual life style. Many early psychological
scholars were contaminated by the secular Germanic
philosophy of scientism or rationalism that deliberately
rejected faith and worship – replacing them with a
counter-productive nihilistic philosophy of meaninglessness
that Frankl and DeVille insist led step by step to the World
Wars, the Holocaust, the Cold War and the Terror Wars of
Darkness. Among the ideologies of the narcissistic German
professors were the assumptions that we are responsible to
no higher power than our rulers because God is dead, might
makes right and the authority to rule comes from the barrel
of a gun. Even Freud wrote his critique of religion in his
book The Future Of An Illusion. But while the German
nihilistic professors were teaching and writing
hypothetically – their disciples like Stalin, Mao, Hitler,
Pol Pot and Saddam were deadly serious in their
determination to rule or to ruin their societies. The
ultimate results of atheistic nihilism or the philosophy of
meaninglessness were the hundred million or so battle deaths
of the twentieth century.
Our Logotherapy Learning Center graduate programs have been
developed so scholars can apply the combined psychological
knowledge and philosophical wisdom needed – first to endow
one’s own life with meaning, second to use Logotherapy
methods in a career that leads, teaches and counsels others
to apply its potent psychospiritually principles and third,
to educate enough competent men and women to protect
ourselves from the narcissistic triad of reactionary
politicians, ideological plutocrats and fundamental
preachers who have connived together to cripple the world’s
middle class for their own reasons.
