What the Timelessness of Modern Malaise Reveals About the Human Condition

This article, “Collective Neuroses,” was published in the Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift in 1955,* when Viktor E. Frankl was the head of the Neurological Department of the General Policlinic in Vienna. In it, Frankl describes the general social uncertainty and fear, as well as the feelings of purposelessness and existential emptiness, in the lives of many people at the time. Their symptoms, such as fatalism, fanaticism, and flight from freedom and responsibility, show parallels to today.

*VE Frankl, “Collective Neuroses,” Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift 38/39 (1955): 772–76. Courtesy of the Viktor Frankl Archive.

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In a letter to Hans Blüher in 1923, Sigmund Freud spoke of “this upside-down time of ours.” But even today there is still a lot of talk about a “sickness of our times,” an illness of the zeitgeist, a zeitgeist pathology. Might this sickness of our times be identical to the one that all psychotherapy is concerned with—neurosis? Has our time fallen sick with nervous tension? As it turns out, there is a book—the author’s name is F.C. Weinke—that is entitled Der nervöse Zustand, das Siechthum unserer Zeit (The Nervous Condition, the Infirmity of Our Time). This book was published in Vienna by J.G. Heubner in the year ’53—but not 1953; it was, in fact, 1853. In German, Siechtum [infirmity] was still written with the old-fashioned spelling “th” [Siechthum]. We can see that in terms of the relevance of neurosis, things have not changed all that much. It’s not just our own contemporaries who are nervous!

Johannes Hirschmann proved that neuroses have not increased, but in fact, in terms of their prevalence, have stayed the same for decades, and, among the various neuroses, the incidence of anxiety neuroses has in fact decreased. However, the clinical picture of the neuroses has changed, the symptomatology has altered, and as far as we can see, the incidence of fear and anxiety has in fact decreased.

Nevertheless, it is not just neurotic anxiety but anxiety per se that has not increased. [Julius] Freyhan has pointed out that past centuries, for example, the times of slavery, of religious wars, of witch burnings, of mass migration and huge epidemics—that all these “good old days” cannot have been any more fear-free than our own time. Indeed, presumably people in earlier centuries felt more fear and had many more reasons to be afraid than we do in our own century. It seems that describing our era as “The Age of Anxiety” is actually off the mark.

Thus, we cannot conclude that nowadays there are more people with neurotic illnesses than before. The only thing that has increased is something rather different: the psychotherapeutic need of the masses to turn to a neurologist when they are in mental, moral or spiritual distress. But behind this psychotherapeutic need, there is probably something else, namely the ancient and perpetual metaphysical need of human beings. It is obvious that in a secularized century, spiritual and mental health will also be secularized.

Today, people go to a psychiatrist with issues about which they would previously have gone to a priest, and that should in fact still belong to the realm of the priest. In these circumstances, the doctor, who has more or less been forced into the position of providing something akin to “medical spiritual care,” should therefore be very cautious in giving the patient any advice that should properly have come from a priest.

It is well-known that the percentage of endogenous psychoses has remained remarkably constant. The only thing that fluctuates is the number of admissions into institutions. But there are good reasons for this. For example, when, in 1931, at the Am Steinhof mental hospital in Vienna, there were 5,000 admissions (the highest number in more than 40 years)—whereas, in contrast, in 1942 there were 2,000 admissions, the lowest number—this is very easy to explain: in the 1930s, in the middle of the Great Depression, patients were left in the hospital for as long as possible by their relatives for understandable economic reasons. In fact, the patients themselves were often glad to have a roof over their heads and a hot meal in their bellies. The situation was completely different in the early 1940s. Because of the equally understandable and well-founded fear of being euthanized, sick family members were brought back home as soon as possible, or were discharged as early as possible—or, if feasible, were not placed in residential institutional care in the first place.

Not only has the clinical picture of neuroses altered and not only has their symptomatology changed, but we can also see similar trends with psychoses (Heinrich Kranz). It has become evident that people who are ill with melancholia nowadays are less likely to suffer from feelings of guilt, especially guilt before God. Rather, their main worries are about their job or their ability to work. These are the sources of melancholia today (A.V. Orelli) but presumably only because they—not God and guilt but health and work—are the concerns of the average person nowadays.

Even the number of suicides has not significantly increased. Insofar as the suicide rate shows any fluctuations it decreases in times of economic hardship, but also in times of political crisis. This fact—which researchers [Émile] Durkheim and [Harald] Höffding have referred to—has recently been confirmed: not only that for decades Switzerland and Sweden have held the European record for suicide rates (i.e., precisely the countries that have enjoyed the longest periods of peace), but it has become apparent that in northern Germany since 1946 the suicide rate has been lower than in the Wilhelmine period. And another statistic, published by G. Zigeuner, concludes that in Graz, or rather, in Styria, the suicide rate between 1946 and 1947 reached a low point at exactly the time of a particularly large decline in the population’s standard of living.

“The experience of two world wars,” said Johannes Hirschmann, has shown that under the extraordinary strain of hardship and fighting, the number of mentally ill people (especially schizophrenics) did not increase. Going by the research material we have worked with, this is probably also true of chronic neuroses—as far as neurotic disorders are concerned—that have been identified in the course of a pension application procedure. On the whole, apart from acute anxiety and shock syndromes, the particular environmental factors that operate in times of severe crisis do not appear to have a specific neurogenic effect. If this were the case, the number of neuroses would have shown a significant and measurable increase.

The example of the prison camp would actually lead us to assume that coercion, threat, incarceration and brutal violence are more likely to inhibit the development of neuroses. Environmental factors—such as material deprivation, the lack of the most basic necessities, loss of livelihood, the misery of being a refugee, or being uprooted—do not have a significant measurable impact on the occurrence of neuroses. H. Schulte also talks about “the side effect of all sociological emergencies, the well-known lower incidence of divorce, suicide, addiction and serious neuroses.” You will find similar references in the work of E. Menninger-Lerchenthal regarding suicide rates in politically unstable times. In my opinion, the best way to explain this is through an allegory: I once heard that an arch that has become unsafe can be reinforced and stabilized, paradoxically, by increasing the load on it. It’s a similar situation for human beings: when experiencing external difficulties, our inner strength and resilience apparently grows.

As for the etiology of the “sickness of our times,” experts claim that it’s the sheer pace of our lives that makes people so ill. The well-known sociologist Hendrik de Man, no less, states, “We cannot with impunity accelerate the pace beyond a certain limit.” Well, the idea that people would not be able to tolerate a faster pace, say, the pace of mechanized travel—and that they would not be able to keep up with technical progress—is nothing new, but it was a false prophecy. When, in the nineteenth century, the first trains took to the rails, medical experts thought it impossible that the human body could endure the rapid acceleration experienced when traveling by train without falling ill. And until a few years ago, experts still had doubts about whether it was medically possible to fly at supersonic speeds in an airplane.

We see—I mean, now we see, now that the skepticism and the prophecies have been proven wrong—how right Dostoevsky was when he defined man as a creature who can get used to anything. So, today’s tempo cannot in any way be blamed for being the cause of this sickness of our times, or indeed the cause of any sickness. In fact, I would venture to declare that the accelerated pace of our lives today represents an attempt at self-healing, albeit a failed attempt at self-healing. Certainly, the frantic pace of our lives can be understood perfectly well if we comprehend it as an attempt to anesthetize ourselves. Every person is fleeing from an inner bleakness and emptiness and, during this flight, plunges into turmoil.

The French psychologist Pierre Janet described what he called a sentiment de vide in neurotic individuals he had diagnosed as psychasthenic. This meant a feeling of emptiness and lack of content in life. Now, this feeling of emptiness also exists in a figurative sense, and by this I mean a feeling of existential emptiness, a feeling of the aimlessness and vacuousness of existence. The average person today experiences what could perhaps be most accurately characterized by changing a few words from Egmont by Goethe: he hardly knows where he came from—let alone where he is going. And we could add, the less he knows about the destination of his journey, the faster he travels along that road.

This feeling of existential emptiness, the feeling of the aimlessness and vacuousness of life, we have called existential frustration, arising from the failure to fulfill an innate will to meaning that lies deep within us, and through which we as human beings are originally and ultimately motivated—not to say inspired—through a longing for the greatest possible fulfillment of meaning in our lives, so that we strive for a purpose in a life worth living, and wrest all this meaning from our lives.

We have compared this will to meaning with the will to power, which Alfred Adler rightly elucidates in his individual Psychology in the form of a striving for recognition. And we have also compared the will to meaning with another “will,” the will to pleasure, which Freud’s psychoanalysis is so convinced is ultimately predominant in the form of the pleasure principle.

And we can see how, precisely at the point where the will to meaning is frustrated because it remains unfulfilled, the will to pleasure must step in and at least conceal the existential unfulfilledness of a person from his own conscience and numb his awareness of it. In other words, the will to pleasure only appears on the scene when the person’s will to meaning has been thwarted; only then does the person start to be subordinated to the pleasure principle as defined in psychoanalysis.

Sexual libido only proliferates in an existential vacuum! If someone experiences a disappointment, such as an existential disappointment relating to their innate instinct to strive for a meaning in an existence that’s worth living for, they will compensate for this disappointment vicariously by entering a state of sexual narcosis, and this occurs in all cases in which a person’s will to meaning founders. The more his need for meaning in life remains unfulfilled, the more he throws himself into the arms of the will to pleasure (not only sexuality but also criminality can serve as the vicarious compensation for an existential frustration, as evidenced by Hedwig R. Farmer who, reporting from New York on the increase in crimes committed by young people, stated that people there feel that they are living in an interwar period [provisional attitude to life!]).

The fact that these examples of criminality are so avidly imitated points to a lack of collective ideals within this “vacuum of meaning” (existential frustration!). Only then do we get to something like what psychoanalysis calls the pleasure principle, only then does the satisfaction of base instincts become a means to an end—in fact, it becomes the actual aim (or end) of enjoyment, and thus the means of enjoyment. but more than this, in this situation, enjoyment itself has long since become only a means to an end, and that end is anesthesia.

The person who is oriented towards meaning and aspires to strong values then becomes dominated by base instincts and driven by desire. Both the opposite and the counterpart of his pleasure-seeking behavior is the self-pity that underlies drug and medication abuse.

The nothingness that a person fears is not only outside him but also deep within himself. He is gripped by fear of this inner nothingness and is running away from himself out of fear of himself. He is fleeing from solitude, because being alone means being alone with himself. And when is he usually forced to spend time alone with himself? Whenever business and busyness slow down or even stop—at the weekend, on Sunday. “Einsamer Sonntag” (“Gloomy Sunday”) is the title of a notorious, soulful hit—notorious because of the many suicides that it led to, and that were certainly not attributed to it solely by an enterprising music publisher. That’s because we neurologists know very well the syndrome that we call Sunday neurosis.

This consists of a feeling of desolation and emptiness, of the vacuousness and pointlessness of life, that breaks out and appears within us precisely when the hustle and bustle of our weekday work comes to a standstill. (Compare the conclusion of a social institute in Hamburg that 58 percent of the young people they had surveyed literally “did not know what to do with themselves” in their free time. This figure does not even include sports fanatics, who must surely account for another 30 percent. The rest also preferred to attend collective events. Another survey apparently found that 43.6 percent of all cinema goers in the world only go to the cinema because they “don’t know what to do with their time.”)

H. Plügge was able to show that existential frustration in general, but so-called Sunday neurosis in particular, can end in voluntary death, i.e., suicide. In a study of 50 suicide attempts, he proved that they were ultimately neither the result of illness, nor financial hardship, neither of troubles at work nor other conflicts. Instead, surprisingly, they could be traced back to one thing: excessive boredom—in other words, unfulfilled human longing, human struggle for a valid purpose in life. Such boredom can be deadly.

And so Karl Bednarik may also be right when he writes: “The problem of the material hardship of the masses has turned into the problem of affluence, the problem of leisure.” Considering this issue in relation to the neurosis problem, however, Paul Polak pointed out years ago that we should not be under the illusion that neurotic illnesses would go away by themselves when all the social questions have been resolved. The opposite would be true: only once the social questions have been resolved would the existential ones emerge into people’s consciousness: “The solution to the social question would truly liberate the spiritual problem, would mobilise it. A person would only then become free to really take himself in hand and would recognize the problematic aspects of himself, the problems inherent in his own existence.”

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Excerpted from Embracing Hope: On Freedom, Responsibility & the Meaning of Life by Viktor E. Frankl. Copyright 2024. Excerpted with permission by Beacon Press.