I confess that I have felt a little insecure writing this series of columns based on the thoughts of psychiatrist Viktor Frankl. Because I am neither a psychologist nor a psychiatrist, I was concerned about whether I was interpreting Frankl’s thoughts accurately, but I considered his insights so excellent that I wanted to take a chance and share them with others. 

Also I find that when I write about some thinker’s philosophical or theological insights, I come to understand those insights more deeply. I hope that has happened with Frankl’s philosophical and psychological insights. I think his insights fit in beautifully with what religious faith and theology tell us about God and ourselves. 

There is one insight of Frankl’s that I think is especially important. I found it not in Frankl’s book “Man’s Search for Meaning” (New York: Simon and Schuster, A Clarion Book, 1959, 145 pp.) to which I have been referring in the four earlier columns in this series. 

I found it in another Frankl book: “The Unconscious: Psychotherapy and Theology” (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975). 

Frankl’s vision of the human person emphasizes human freedom, and his therapy, which he calls logotherapy or meaning-therapy, emphasizes the importance of human freedom. A person’s world or horizon, by which I mean the network of meanings that are real to the person, either offers many opportunities for the person’s freedom to grow and deepen or, unfortunately, can limit the person’s freedom. 

What a person believes about God, neighbor, and self can either offer opportunities for personal growth, for a deepening of freedom, or for personal decline. The more deeply I understand myself and my neighbor can greatly influence my image of God, and my image of God can greatly deepen my knowledge of self and neighbor. 

Believing that there is an intrinsic religiousness to human nature, Frankl thought that religiousness can go unnourished in an extremely secular society. Discussing this intrinsic religious consciousness, Frankl wrote the following: 

“To be sure, it is also a reality that can remain, or again become unconscious, or be repressed. Precisely in such cases, however, it is the task of logotherapy to remind the patient of his unconscious religiousness — that is to say, to let it enter his conscious mind again. After all, it is the business of existential analytic logotherapy to trace the neurotic mode of being to its ultimate ground. 

“Sometimes the ground of neurotic existence is to be seen in a deficiency, in that a person’s relation to transcendence is repressed. But although concealed in the ‘transcendent unconscious,’ repressed transcendence shows up and makes itself noticeable in the ‘unrest of the heart’ ” (pp. 67-68). 

Trying to be a Catholic Christian in the contemporary world is not easy. Probably being a Catholic Christian was never easy. Temptations to be discouraged are many. When I was a young parish priest, through the parish census I knew that about one-fourth of the Catholics in the parish did not regularly attend Sunday Eucharist. 

Recent studies in the Diocese of Brooklyn and Queens suggest that only 10% of the Catholics attend the Sunday Eucharist regularly. News like that can be very disappointing and can tempt me to be discouraged. 

However, I find Frankl’s view of the human person encouraging. If Frankl is correct then God has created human persons with a radical need for religious transcendence. I think of this as suggesting that we are magnetized by God. 

I think that two of the most profound truths about the human person are that every person is called to be a lover and that every person has a deep need to be loved. This is the type of being God has created in creating human persons. 

If we join these two truths to Frankl’s views on religious transcendence, then this is additional evidence that we are in the depths of our person magnetized by God. Catholic truths not only do not go against human nature but they can be looked at as speaking to the deepest needs of the human person. 

I believe that to reflect deeply on what it means to be a human person is one way to see how relevant and meaningful Christian revelation is. One reason Christian revelation is good news is because as it tells us what is most true about God, it implicitly tells us what is most true about ourselves. In the depths of our being we have a radical need for God. This is true of every person. When these radical needs are not met in some way, personal growth can be hindered. 

I have come to believe that all literary masterpieces, in one way or another, deal with the mystery of love. Because of Frankl’s insight into religious transcendence, I wonder if those masterpieces also deal, perhaps indirectly, with what Frankl has called religious transcendence.