An Experimental Study in Existentialism: the Psychometric Approach to Frankl's Concept of Noogenic Neurosis.

Fraiikl's^'̂ "• ̂ ' '̂ method of psychotherapeusis, logotherapy, is an application of the principles of existential philosophy to clinical practice. His basic contention is that a new type of neurosis is increasingly seen in the clinics today in contrast to the hysterias and other classical patterns, and that this new syndrome—which he terms noogcnic neurosis, and which supposedly constitutes about 55 per cent of the typical present-day case load^^^ — arises largely as a response to a complete emptiness of purpose in life. The chief dynamic is "existential frustration" created by a vacuum of perceived meaning in personal existence, and manifested by the symptom of boredom. According to Frankl, the essence of human motivation is the "will to meaning" {Der Wille zum Sinn); when meaning is not found, the individual becomes "existentially frustrated." This may or may not lead to psychopathology, depending upon other dynamic factors, but he feels that the incidence of clinical cases thus rooted is of major significance.^ The fact that existentialism accepts intuitive as well as rational and empirical knowledge in arriving at values and meanings has been anathema to American behavioral scientists, who have tended to write it off as a conglomeration of widely divergent speculations with little thread of consistency or operational sense. If, however, one may, by approaching mental illness from this frame of reference, specify a symptomatic condition which is measurable by an instrument constructed from this orientation, but which is not identical with any condition measured from the usual orientations, then there is evidence that we are in truth dealing with a new and different syndrome. Frankl has specified such a condition, but has made only rather informal and loosely quantitative attempts to measure it (as will be shown later). Kotchen^*^ has published a quantitative attack upon the relation of mental illness to existential concepts. He analysed the literature for the traits pertinent to mental health as conceived by the existential writers, found seven characteristics of the kind of life meaning which is supposed to be present in good mental health (such as uniqueness, responsibility, etc.), and then constructed an attitude scale with items representing each of these seven categories. He predicted that the level of mental health operationally defined by the nature of each of five population samples of 30 cases each, from locked-ward patients in a mental hospital to Harvard summer school students, would agree with the scoring level on the (questionnaire. The prediction was affirmed at a generally satisfactory level of statistical significance. His scale, however, had some open-end items which could be quantified only by a rating code, and three items applied only to hospital patients and had to be omitted from the scoring. Further, his samples were composed entirely of males, and this is an area in which there may well be sex differences, as will be seen later.