The Seba library treats Will To Meaning in 8 passages, across 4 authors (including Yalom, Irvin D., Nietzsche, Friedrich, Noel, Daniel C.).
V. Frankl, The Will to Meaning (New York: World, 1969), p. 90; and V. Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), p. xi.
This bibliographic citation anchors the will to meaning as a named, book-length theoretical construct in Frankl’s oeuvre, situating it within Yalom’s critical engagement with existential approaches to meaninglessness.
, Existential Psychotherapy, 1980thesis
Viktor Frankl states that 20 percent of the neuroses he encounters in clinical practice are “noogenic” in origin — that is, they derive from a lack of meaning in life.
Yalom documents Frankl’s core clinical claim that a significant portion of neurotic suffering originates not in drives or complexes but in existential meaninglessness, the direct therapeutic target of the will to meaning.
, Existential Psychotherapy, 1980thesis
How does a being who needs meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
Yalom sharpens the existential tension underlying the will to meaning: if meaning is needed but the cosmos provides none, the will to meaning becomes an act of self-constitution against ontological indifference.
, Existential Psychotherapy, 1980supporting
V. Frankl, “The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy,” American Journal of Psychoanalysis (1972) 32:85-89
Frankl’s framing of meaninglessness as a direct challenge to psychotherapy — not merely a symptom but a primary clinical problem — grounds the therapeutic necessity of the will to meaning concept.
, Existential Psychotherapy, 1980supporting
Where I found a living creature, there I found will to power… And life itself told me this secret: ‘Behold,’ it said, ‘I am that which must overcome itself again and again.’
Nietzsche’s will to power provides the philosophical antecedent against which Frankl’s will to meaning is explicitly positioned, with life’s self-overcoming serving as the rival telos to meaning-seeking in the depth-psychological tradition.
, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883supporting
Absence of meaning in life plays a crucial role in the etiology of neurosis. A neurosis must be understood, ultimately, as a suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.
Jung’s independent diagnosis of meaninglessness as etiologically central to neurosis lends cross-theoretical weight to Frankl’s will to meaning, suggesting the construct addresses a problem recognized across Jungian and logotherapeutic traditions.
, Existential Psychotherapy, 1980supporting
experiences of existential meaning involve the rapturous living Campbell stresses… we will develop conceptuality in the service of theoretical insight.
Campbell’s emphasis on intensity of living over explicit meaning-seeking is read here as a variant engagement with existential meaning, tangentially illuminating the will to meaning’s relationship to lived experience rather than abstract purpose.
, Paths to the Power of Myth: Joseph Campbell and the Study of Religion, 1990aside
meaning reconstruction in response to loss is the central process in grieving
Neimeyer’s meaning reconstruction model extends the clinical domain of meaning-seeking beyond logotherapy into grief theory, showing how the drive toward coherent meaning persists as an organising force even under conditions of profound loss.