by Dr.Harald Wiesendanger– Klartext
What the mainstream media is hiding
Serious illnesses or disabilities raise questions about meaning – for those affected as well as their families. Doctors remain silent. Does my AUSWEGE foundation/ WAYS OUT charity have answers? How do we help patients who despair about the purpose of their suffering?
“For heaven’s sake, give me a therapy spot!” the caller pleads after I explain to her that our next “Ways Out” camp is completely booked. Why so urgent? The young woman, in her late twenties, has terminal breast cancer. Metastases are spreading everywhere. Hopeless, her doctors say. “What will become of my children when I’m no longer here?” she sobs. “My daughter is five, and my son is not even two. And I’m a single parent.”
Devastated, I agree.
But she doesn’t come. She dies eight days before camp begins.
If she had attended, it would certainly have been for more than one reason. Of course, she hoped until the very end for a therapeutic solution—that with our help, the malignant cell growth could somehow be stopped, or at least slowed down, so that she could buy time. But she must have been just as desperate for answers: Why this terrible disease, at such a young age, under such circumstances, with such consequences? “I’m not afraid of death,” she said, “but I’m terribly afraid for my two little ones. What will become of them without me?”
We are constantly confronted with similarly tragic fates in our daily counseling work at the Foundation; none of them leaves us cold; we empathize with them in awe. The more serious, the more life-threatening the illness, the more often those seeking help are looking for more than symptom relief. They are deeply shaken, and they fall into an existential crisis. Because serious illness thwarts life plans, throws people off track, pushes goals into an unattainable distance, impairs relationships, makes them unable to work, forces them to abandon ingrained habits, and radically questions previous perspectives. It can make them lonely and be associated with constant pain, tormenting fears, and deep despair. It destroys not only the quality of life but also the meaning of life.
Meaning of life? At the end of 2013, a survey showed that only 37 percent of Germans stated that they had asked themselves this question “often.” (Four years earlier, the number had risen to eight percent.) Teenagers and young adults are particularly unconcerned about it: 74 percent said they have never considered it. The importance of the search for meaning increases with age: Almost one in two people over 70 have frequently considered it. (1) However, with chronic illness, this proportion increases dramatically – especially when it drastically changes and threatens their own life.
How the “Why” Question Challenges Us
Of those affected by this, very few sign up for a “Ways Out” camp; some are no longer able to travel, and others shy away from large groups. More often, they ask us to recommend a therapist near where they live. Or they ask us to publish a call for help in our newsletter, hoping that some medical practitioner among our readers might be able to find one who knows more. This was the case with Davido* (pseudonym), a 61-year-old psychotherapist who still wants to help as many patients as possible – but is increasingly hindered by Parkinson’s disease. “I find it increasingly difficult to express myself clearly and distinctly; I often find myself at a loss for words; I speak more quietly and unclearly,” he wrote to us in the summer of 2014. “Stressful situations frighten me and increase the tremors. I notice that I’m losing my mental presence and the ability to empathize.” The question of why this is happening preoccupies him, as does a desperate wife who contacted us in the fall of that same year: “Is there still a way out for my husband?” – despite a particularly malignant, rapidly growing brain tumor, a glioblastoma, which was visible on an MRI in several areas of his left brain hemisphere and had already spread to the meninges? “He’s only 55.” A first tumor in his head had already been discovered and operated on in 1995, and a second in 2002. Why did he have to go through this? Why did his family ultimately lose a devoted father and husband in November 2014?
If these two had found their way to our camps and confronted us with questions of meaning, How would we have dealt with this? How do we treat those who come to us? What do we tell their relatives? How do we explain to someone why their child or partner is seriously ill or disabled?
Among so many other disturbing cases, three-year-old Laura from our very first camp near the North Sea in the summer of 2007 has been indelibly etched in my memory: Why does this premature baby, born in the 24th week of pregnancy, have to live with spastic quadriplegia, with paralysis in all four limbs that jerk and twitch due to abnormally increased muscle tone?
I remember eight-year-old Lisa, who, between violent coughing fits, romped around our camp house in the Black Forest in July 2012, full of life and exuberance – unaware that the cystic fibrosis that caused her to repeatedly cough up thick mucus before our very eyes could soon kill her.
I am touched by the fates of dozens of children who were perfectly healthy, bouncy babies and developed magnificently in the first weeks of their lives – until they were injected with a multi-dose vaccination that transformed them into severely mentally retarded epileptics.
I remember five-year-old Mira, who attended a “Ways Out” camp for the first time in the summer of 2008; at the time, she was suffering from severe epileptic seizures and up to 20 seizures a day: She had just been happily playing ball with me in the camp house garden – a few minutes later, sitting next to me at lunch, she suddenly twitched, collapsed, and was apathetic and unresponsive for three-quarters of an hour.
I think of Oliver, whom his mother brought to us for the third time in the summer of 2011: From birth, the bright boy, now ten, suffered from tetra spasticity, which affected all of his limbs, caused his muscles to constantly contract involuntarily and made coordinated movements impossible. He accepted his defective body with an incredibly cheerful matter-of-factness. He proudly showed me the progress he had made after treatment: that he could accurately kick a soccer ball into the goal, eat ice cream for the first time with his spastic tongue, and pull out a dozen pieces of a Swiss Army knife with trembling fingers and fold them back in place.
Little Paula comes to mind, the same age as Mira and the bright ray of sunshine from our 13th camp in November 2013, whom everyone on the team called “our blonde angel.” From birth, the girl was affected by cerebral palsy (from Latin cerebrum: “brain,” Greek parse: “paralysis” ): movement disorders resulting from early childhood brain damage. (In Paula’s case, it was “periventricular leukomalacia/PVL”: damage to the white matter of the brain caused by severe oxygen deficiency.) The resulting disability is accompanied by disorders of the nervous system and muscles in the area of voluntary motor function. Paula suffered from spasticity, predominantly in her legs. Mentally alert, she was fully aware of these massive physical limitations. Nevertheless, she smiled with stunning openness, trustingly, happily competing with each of us, chattering, and playing pranks. The brave, almost natural way she dealt with her severe handicap was a role model for many adult participants who have lost their joy in life due to constantly struggling with a problematic, undeserved fate.
With her infectious joy, her liveliness, and her warmth, the little girl became, in a sense, part of our therapy team. I will never forget that “morning circle” in which she staggered toward me, beaming – until, a meter away from me, her wobbly little legs suddenly gave way; she fell forward, hit her face on the hard floor, her lip split open, and lay screaming before me, her face streaming with blood.
Equally unforgettable for me is a scene from a discussion group six months later, in May 2014: Seven-year-old Peter – blind in both eyes due to severe optic nerve hypoplasia (“DeMorsier syndrome”), a malformation of the optic nerve – slowly felt his way toward me along the row of seats, climbed onto my lap, wrapped his arms around me, snuggled up to me, and remained silently in that position for minutes. Any of these children, I was always aware of this, could have been mine. And each of them might have made me, as a father, despair of the question: Why do they have to suffer so much?
I felt similarly when I saw many of the adult participants. I think of Kristin, who came to us for the second time in October 2014, accompanied by her parents. Having only just turned 30, rapidly progressing multiple sclerosis had long since left her wheelchair-bound – at an age when other young women were just getting their feet under them in their careers, running their first households, meeting the man of their dreams, planning for children, and starting a family. How can we support not only her but also her mother, who suffers from severe depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, constant fatigue, and listlessness because she must helplessly watch her beloved child’s physical deterioration? I remember Joachim*, a nearly 50-year-old insurance salesman who was diagnosed with motor neuron disease in 2011: a relentlessly progressive deterioration of nerve cells that leads to increasingly severe muscle paralysis. He succumbed to it in early 2012 when it spread to his heart. What helpful advice can we give his widow, who has already sought comfort in seven “escape” camps since Joachim died in her arms and who, while finding temporary distraction with us, has so far found no relief from her deep valley of tears?
None of the doctors involved have heard anything helpful – as a matter of principle, at least for a century and a half. From pre-Christian priest-physicians to medieval monastic medicine: For millennia, medicine and pastoral care had been one and the same. But when Western medicine submitted to scientific ideals from the 19th century onwards, this connection broke down, and humanism became obsolete: Its “enlightened” view of humanity, in which only objectively measurable things were to be considered, portrayed patients as biochemical-physical mechanisms their psyche was reduced to brain processes or outsourced to the purview of psychologists and pastors. Since then, modern doctors have preferred seeing bipedal biomachines in their consultations, and they are content to repair defective bodily functions rather than impertinently expressing emotional impulses or spiritual needs. Questions of meaning have been labeled “unscientific.”
Is the question of meaning meaningless?
Worse still: They have gained a reputation for being meaningless. And aren’t they? The purpose of something can only be answered within contexts in which actors pursue purposive intentions. Why I place my rook on square a8 is clear from the rules of chess. Why I kick a ball into the goal is explained by the fact that I play soccer. Where there is meaning, the spirit must be at work. If a gust of wind blows the ball into the goal, we don’t ponder why it’s doing it—or why someone is doing it. Why not? Because we would find it absurd to assume that weather phenomena have intentions. The impression of absurdity arises once causal relationships are clarified: Those who know causes stop asking for reasons. They are no longer concerned with why it snows, why water flows downwards, why the moon orbits the Earth, and why iron filings move toward a magnet because they know why. Isn’t that precisely the merit of modern science: to answer “why” questions, replacing faith with knowledge – and thereby making “what for” questions superfluous?
The more strongly such a perspective shapes the zeitgeist, the more difficult it becomes to even publicly acknowledge a personal search for meaning – as if doing so would be outing oneself with an embarrassing condition like athlete’s foot, hemorrhoids, or gonorrhea, something to be ashamed of. When pollsters ask people about their meaning in life, they increasingly find that many respond only with ironic, distant, and joking attitudes. However, When interviewed individually, they react emotionally and become entangled in convoluted explanations. Recently, it seems easier to talk about the most intimate details of one’s sex life than about the meaning of one’s life.
This could happen because the search for meaning now seems outdated, primitive, and infantile. For millennia, humankind’s worldviews were shaped by teleology: always and everywhere, purposes seemed to be at work. Why do stars exist? God placed them in the sky to light up the night. Why does lightning flash? Zeus hurls thunderbolts to warn and, if they strike, to carry out Olympian punishments. Why do tidal waves occur? The enraged sea god takes revenge. Why does the Earth shake? Mother Gaia is angry, and the monster catfish Namazu moves. As soon as scientific explanations are available, religion seems to be in retreat. To this day, belief systems in which meaningful connections are omnipresent persist among ethnic groups in remote regions of Africa, Asia, and South America – but we suspect this is more due to educational gaps than higher insights. Each of us has gone through a teleological phase during our spiritual maturation; The French developmental psychologist Jean Piaget called it “artificialism.” He observed that young children up to the age of six or seven imagine the world as a creation: Everything and anything is artificially created, whether by human hands—with their own parents perceived as (all)powerful co-creators—or by God. However, they leave this developmental stage behind as soon as they start school.
But do such arguments really do justice to the concerns of patients seeking meaning? What they want and need is generally not a philosophically or religiously ultimately grounded “higher” meaning; they are concerned with support and orientation, with overarching goals in their very individual, unique situation—with a “particular” meaning, as the father of logotherapy, Viktor Frankl, called it. What could help them are comforting, encouraging words that make them realize that their suffering and burdens also present opportunities and suggestions that help them set personal goals toward which they can reorient their lives? Such an approach doesn’t prescribe a meaning; it starts with what the affected individuals themselves consider necessary and desirable—be it a happy relationship, wealth, a beautiful home, professional success, self-development, having children, or pursuing specific interests and hobbies—to show them how they can align their lives with these personal priorities despite their health limitations and to encourage them to do so. Whether these priorities are “ultimately” worth pursuing remains unevaluated—logotherapists are not fundamental ethicists.
We normal thinkers are usually even less so, and most of us don’t understand what those goals are all about. Not only do we do a lot every day—we generally also always know why. We go shopping because the fridge is empty. We go on vacation to relax. We go to the hairdresser to get a new haircut. We fast to lose weight. We work to earn an income to support ourselves and our loved ones. We exercise to stay fit. We go to bed because we’re tired. We meet friends or listen to music because we feel like it. We read a book because its subject or author interests us. We enter into a relationship to be happy. We have children to continue living with them. So where is the problem?
It is that, within our individual lives, we may find plenty of reasons and justifications for our actions—but none of them reveals its meaning as a whole. We usually move uncomplainingly within our personal cage, confined by the particular coordinates of space and time, species, culture, country, organizations, groups, and relationships that characterize our existence. We neither care that we’re in there, nor do we lament it, nor do we ponder how we could escape it, nor do we imagine what it might be like outside, nor do we long for it – normally.
Under what circumstances do we even begin to question ordinary, “particular” meaning? We are driven to do so when it loses its self-evidence. This happens:
– when we lose its content – for example, when we lose our job, our child dies, a marriage breaks up, our best friend deeply disappoints us;
– when it ceases to fulfill us – for example, when our previous job no longer satisfies us, a love suffocates in routine;
– when a changed situation prevents us from pursuing it further – for example, in the case of serious illness or disability;
– when a changed situation prevents us from pursuing it further – such as serious illness or disability;
– when we are overcome by the impression that we have no control over our lives and are victims of a fateful, unpredictable, and random course of events – then we long for something that restores a basic sense of trust and security. (Religious sociologists refer to this as “coping with contingency.”)
– Sometimes, however, it also comes over us “just like that” when we feel like it – melancholic, introverted, sensitive, and thoughtful characters; adolescents and seniors are more prone to such impulses than others.
Then, we begin to examine our previous actions and our entire lives from the outside; we distance ourselves from ourselves to see how meaningful it seems from that perspective. If we are disappointed by what this objective perspective conveys to us, we can fall into disorientation, melancholy, and depression. In the worst case, we consider suicide.
In such phases of life, it becomes clear to us why many philosophers find a “particular” purpose in life worryingly deficient—why they consider it a serious shortcoming to “merely” orient oneself by such a purpose. For no matter what personal meaning in life one follows, it seems constructed, invented, somehow arbitrary, and groundless. And everyone is subject to merciless scrutiny. Why be considered irreplaceable in the workplace? Our cemeteries are full of indispensable people. Why want to own anything? We won’t be able to take any of it with us in the end. Why bring children into the world? They’ll be dead in a hundred years at the latest, unless they’ve already fallen victim to a serious illness or a serious accident. Why help and heal patients, why get well? Whether you get rid of your illness or not, at some point, you will inevitably succumb to another or pass away for some other reason. Why want to be remembered by posterity? This, too, will pass, and with it, any memory of us. Why fight for things that benefit humanity—for environmental protection and peace, against hunger, torture, oppression, and war? It will be destroyed sooner or later anyway. In five billion years, our sun will swell into a red giant, melting mountains on Earth like butter and leaving behind a desolate, moon-like desert landscape. Even if humanity could relocate to other solar systems by then, it would ultimately be of no use: The universe will one day disappear into nothingness. Accordingly, nothing is large enough not to appear tiny. Distance is decisive.
The torment of constant, never-ending questioning awakens the longing for a “final,” “highest,” “absolute,” timeless, and universally valid meaning with which to ward off the emptiness of nihilism. Philosophers have been attempting this very intellectual task for millennia without ever having grasped an indisputably “ultimate” thing, something timelessly given outside of human existence. As with Aladdin, when he unstoppers the magic lamp, a spirit is released that can never be tamed again, as soon as we begin to philosophize and seek to ultimately justify the answers we find to questions of meaning in our lives with “higher” purposes. In doing so, we subject ourselves to epistemological claims that cannot be satisfied—not due to a lack of knowledge but out of logical necessity. For our life as a whole could only make something “higher” meaningful if it had meaning—and that, too, can always be called into question. What is the purpose of the “higher”? Either there is an answer to it—in which case the question arises again. Or there isn’t—in which case, in our search for meaning, we have finally arrived at something that no longer has meaning. If we are willing to accept this shortcoming in that “higher” – why should we apply stricter standards to the ordinary, “particular” purposes of our lives?
Transcendent meaning-making has no advantage over secular meaning-making; it doesn’t lead decisively further. When theologians assure me that, at least with God as the ultimate justifying authority, as the definitive explanatory ground, things are quite different, I have little confidence that I will ever understand what they actually mean—or whether they themselves have truly understood it. Does my life achieve its “ultimate” purpose by pleasing God and fulfilling his plan in a way that no longer requires or permits any further, overriding purpose? Can there be something that, on the one hand, gives meaning to everything else by encompassing it, but itself neither can nor must have a purpose? Something whose purpose cannot be determined from the outside because there is no longer an outside? An inside without an outside makes no more sense than a down without an up, a left without a right, a front without a back, or a bottom without a top. Shouldn’t we be allowed to expect fundamental, profound insights to be presented in a way that doesn’t profoundly violate basic linguistic logic? A meaning of life that I cannot comprehend offers me scant consolation: It replaces the discomfort of a questionable answer with the discomfort of one where every questioning fails because it is questionable whether the statement is meaningful at all. If belief in God includes the conviction that my existence is understandable, just not for me, then I am evidently exchanging one vacuum for another. Does that make sense?
Therefore, a “final,” “highest,” “absolute” meaning is impossible. Another reason for this was already mentioned above: Outside of contexts whose participants follow predetermined purposes and norms, the search for meaning makes as much sense as the question of whether there is a cognitive goal beyond football, independent of its rules, from which it ultimately follows why corners, free kicks, and penalties are “actually” taken. The philosophical question of meaning cannot be solved, only resolved, with an existence so satisfying and fulfilling that one grows weary of pursuing it. Then it evaporates, like a bad mood. If everything I find essential, valuable, and desirable in my life seems insignificant and insignificant from a higher perspective – what do I even want up there? Nothing, and no one, forces me to do it. If my existence seems insignificant from there – does it have to be significant to me? Anyone who says yes to life can take the liberty of ignoring intellectual calls to delve deeper, which impairs quality of life without need or recourse.
Does this mean that we should break the habit of taking an external perspective? Do we simply have to abolish it? We can’t. The ability to view ourselves and our entire lives as if from above arises from the fact that we are self-conscious beings. The insight into the absurdity of our existence from a higher perspective is the price we must pay for the ability to distance ourselves. Even if we don’t ask the question of meaning incessantly, but generally only under special circumstances, we cannot escape it; it constantly lurks around us. And in this respect, the Aladdin analogy fails: The genie, which we can neither tame nor banish, is not one we could ever have imprisoned and kept in permanent captivity. It leads a rebellious life of its own, hovers around us incessantly, belongs to us like a second self, and at any time, our waking self can decide to switch over to it. Not being irritated by this possibility is one of the most essential prerequisites for a life that is perceived as fulfilling.
Against this background, it becomes clear why the secularization thesis necessarily fails: Even if the importance of traditional churches and religions is diminishing in modern societies, this does not mean that the need for spirituality ends. It inevitably arises from the ability to reflect, which simultaneously ensures that it must remain unsatisfied – unless we stop further reflection at some point because we are satisfied with what we have discovered so far.
Patients seeking meaning in medicine
What prevents a large portion of the medical profession from taking the need for meaning seriously and addressing it is less philosophical depth than simply a lack of time, communicative competence, and empathy. Training and everyday practice favor a type of doctor who doesn’t care whether they appear insensitive, cold-hearted, and emotionally crippled to those seeking help – they see themselves as experts in what remains of the whole person after subtracting everything psychological, and they limit themselves to that.
Increasing opposition is no longer coming solely from “alternative” quarters but even from within their own ranks, primarily from psychosomatics, which established itself as an independent discipline in the 1930s, as well as from medical ethics. Giovanni Maio, Professor of Medical Ethics at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, laments an “increasing alienation between medicine and the sick person.” “While the sick person himself tends to interpret the illness, to attribute meaning to it, to integrate it into a larger horizon of meaning, modern medicine, with its absolutized scientific explanations, comes along and tells the patient that his attributions of meaning are irrational because this or that illness is the result of a cause-and-effect mechanism. (…) The doctor doesn’t respond with answers but with prescriptions, schemes, and evidence-based medicine – and ultimately leaves the patient alone with his distress. (…) This is precisely what modern man perceives as being at the mercy of modern medicine, as disempowerment, as being alone. (…) If modern medicine “doesn’t want to be speechless and helpless, it will inevitably have to face the question of meaning.” (2)
This is precisely what many doctors who belong to the therapist network of the Auswege Foundation strive for: They combine symptom-oriented treatment with holistic support, which benefits the patient and ultimately significantly increases their professional satisfaction. Dr. Dorothea Fuckert, for example, a specialist in psychotherapy and spiritual healer, is particularly interested in “continuous balancing and harmonization in body, mind and soul” – these “are the benchmark for the long-term healing effect of a method,” which is why she wants to convey “fundamental physical recovery, liberating emotional healing and illuminating spiritual experiences” on the “basis of the awareness of a higher intelligent order, a meaningful unity of all being, an all-connecting divine source of creative power, wisdom, and love.” The radiologist and holistic physician Dr. Horst Schöll, medical director of numerous “Auswege” camps since 2010, wants to convey to patients what he learned from his own existential drama: “that everything I encounter is not luck, bad luck, or coincidence, but that behind it lies great wisdom, profound information, an important invitation that must be discovered. Since this also applies to every other life, I made it my life’s work to support those seeking help in learning to see these lost messages, decipher them, and use them to cope with illnesses, life crises, or so-called strokes of fate. Without this deep understanding of the connections between psychological and energetic causes and the current emotional suffering, the problems will not be resolved.”
This approach is by no means a refined, therapeutically irrelevant luxury that doctors can confidently pass on. A fundamental feeling of bitterness, despair, hopelessness, and meaninglessness, along with constant struggle and brooding, paralyzes the ability and willingness to cope positively with suffering (3), which in turn has a fatal impact not only on the subjective experience of illness but also—easily verifiable with medical technology—on the symptoms themselves. No one who acknowledges the ever-growing research findings on the close connections between the psyche, brain, nervous, hormonal, and immune systems can seriously deny that a deeply felt sense of meaninglessness can have drastic, medically highly relevant physical effects.
“Spiritual Turn” in Psychotherapy
And what can patients in existential crises expect from psychotherapy? As long as Freud’s psychoanalysis dominated it, the chances of those questioning the meaning of life were miserable. “The moment one asks about the meaning and value of life,” as Sigmund Freud concluded, “one is ill, for neither objectively exists; one has only admitted that one has a store of unsatisfied libido.” (4) Behavioral therapy brushed it aside even more radically: its founder, John B. Watson (1878–1958), opposed depth psychology methods and preferred a “black box model,” according to which inner processes remain inscrutable to outsiders and therefore should not be analyzed; philosophical behaviorists went so far as to declare the box empty: descriptions of inner psychological processes, they deduced from linguistic analyses, mean nothing more than dispositions toward certain behaviors. (5)
An increasingly influential countermovement emerged in the 1960s with humanistic psychology, inspired by Abraham Maslow, whose “hierarchy of basic human needs” places happiness, fulfillment, and personal development at the top. (6) The Gestalt therapy of the Perls couple, Ken Wilber’s transpersonal psychology, and Buddhist mindfulness therapies also contributed to this reorientation. Questions of meaning took center stage in Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy. All of this has led to a veritable “spiritual turn” in psychotherapy since the end of the 1960s. (7) Two out of three German psychotherapists now state that spirituality and religiosity are of “moderate” (27%), “fairly” (22%), or “very high” (16%) importance to them. And over half confirm that this influences their therapeutic work. (8)
We build on such approaches in the “Ways Out” camps. We never ignore the medical causes of serious illnesses – but beyond that, we also take into account the need of those affected to know the reasons. Because everyone asks us: Why? Why me? Why this wonderful person, whom I love more than anything? Why this particular illness? Why now, of all times?
Do we actually have satisfactory answers to these questions? Which ones?
Finding Meaning in “Escape” Camps
If our therapy camps were held a hundred years earlier, both those seeking help and those helping would still be united by the same interpretive consensus that Christianity ensured in the West well into the 20th century. Illness and suffering were seen partly as God’s punishment for sinful actions; partly as a “test” of the firmness of faith under challenging circumstances, as Jesus, nailed to the cross, had exemplary passed; partly as a “dark night of the soul,” a purifying transitional stage leading to an encounter with God, as in Christian mysticism. Camp participants whose thinking is so steeped in religion aren’t tormented by any question of meaning—it would already have been answered, and where doubts arose, a clergyman on the team would be the sole, universally respected contact person.
But those days are over. Very few patients who come to our camps have retained the devout, fervent Christian faith of their childhood. Their suffering has shaken some of them rather than strengthened them; “I despise and hate God for what he has done to me,” confesses 49-year-old Pamela*, from whom her beloved Joachim was “taken away.” The statements of most participants reflect the rapid decline in the authority of the official churches, which has transformed the Western world into a neo-pagan cultural space with Christian remnants. Three groups predominate: Some believe, more or less uncertainly, a little of what their Christian parents, parish priest, or religious teacher had tried to impart to them; others prove to be avowed atheists; still others adhere to an individually composed mix of worldviews in which Christian beliefs, Far Eastern and esoteric wisdom teachings form idiosyncratic combinations.
What do we have to offer these people? Where do they find comfort and new hope—finally, meaning again? Do we have a pastoral panacea? In our camps, those seeking help meet 15 to 25 helpers who are just as far removed from a common ideological denominator as they are (without this shortcoming being detrimental to team spirit). Whenever questions of meaning are raised – during healing sessions, life coaching sessions, lectures, seminars, and discussion groups – team members come to the fore, offering those seeking help edifying, comforting worldviews based on their own deep convictions.
Trained psychotherapists are rare among them; they are predominately experienced, wise lay psychologists – with an average age well over sixty – by whom the vast majority of camp participants feel more attentive, loving, and empathetically accepted and supported than by professionals to whom they had previously confided for years. Some interpret pain as a “signal,” the symptom as the expression of “organic language,” illness as a “teacher” (Nietzsche), as a “message” and “lesson” sent by a “Higher Self” that knows better what this suffering is good for: as a fateful opportunity for self-reflection and inner growth. They explain “spiritual laws” that, in their view, determine the course of the world and every individual’s destiny no less than physical ones – and ensure that nothing happens in vain or purely by chance. They rarely bring the heavenly Lord into play, but occasionally, spirit guides, angels, and other otherworldly beings. To the extent that they adhere to reincarnation doctrines, they attribute current misery to “karmic” connections that can reach back to “previous lives”; they incorporate spiritualistic beliefs that, they claim, are based on proven quantum mechanical and parapsychological findings. They (re)awaken in participants a basic sense of gratitude for life as a “gift.” They help with self-knowledge. They encourage people to shed old baggage and take new paths.
From a scientific perspective, these are indeed “empty formulas.” For under no circumstances can they fail in the face of experience, and this fundamental non-falsifiability is one of the main characteristics of statements without empirical content. (9) With “spiritual principles,” “God’s will,” “karma,” and the like, all and any events, processes, and states can be justified—as well as their opposites. Because any proof of error is excluded, they remain immune to any criticism.
Of course, neither we nor those who entrust themselves to us suffer from this shortcoming. Our camps are neither scientific research institutions nor epistemological symposia but charitable events whose value is measured by whether they achieve their purpose: to help however they can. And they succeed.
The fact that we consciously refrain from coordinating the diverse interpretive patterns of the various camp therapists in advance and creating a coherent whole from them is not a disadvantage but somewhat helpful for those seeking advice. In this way, we give them the freedom to decide which approach they want to adopt; their beliefs and attitudes influence their choice, as well as the sympathy, appreciation, and trust they have in individual team members. And if none of these approaches convinces them more than what they have already found meaningful for themselves, that’s perfectly fine with us, too.
But doesn’t this diversity of interpretation create more confusion than clarity? Doesn’t the vacuum of meaning, in which Frankl saw the main spiritual evil of our time, arise precisely from an abundance of competing concepts of meaning, which the individual is faced with, perplexed and confused? (10) Isn’t this “new confusion” fatally reflected in our camp offerings?
What, pray tell, would be the alternative? An indoctrination camp dedicated to a unified ideology that some patients would find appealing while the rest would find rather repulsive? Their diaries and the information they provided in the final questionnaires unanimously suggest that our heterogeneous offerings satisfy virtually all camp participants seeking meaning. Over 90 percent of campers declare that their mental state and general well-being have significantly improved; they finally see “light at the end of the tunnel,” have found a way out, and have gained new courage to face life. Their final statements, which we publish in detail on our website after each camp, leave no doubt about this. They confirm a peculiar dialectic: Illnesses can cause a profound loss of meaning—but can also contribute decisively to the search for meaning. How is such exuberance possible? How can it be that seriously ill patients come to us with the most tormenting questions about meaning—and leave us nine days later feeling relieved, almost liberated?
We don’t persuade, and we can’t convince—but we can inspire and suggest. We offer interpretations that place illness and suffering in a context where they cease to be mysterious. In other words, we create myths, and their value is based on their usefulness, not on redeemable truth claims. Such pragmatism prevents us from appearing with missionary zeal. No patient, no family member, will hear from us: “You have to believe this as long as our compelling arguments make sense to you.” Instead, the message is: “If you can believe this, it will relieve you, help you find inner peace, and make you happier.” And this is clearly what is happening.
Notes
1 Based on a representative survey by the market research institute GfK Nuremberg among 1,952 men and women aged 14 and over.
2 G. Maio: “Economized Spirituality? On the Suffocation of the Question of Meaning in Modern Medicine,” in Erwin Möde (ed.): Christian Spirituality and Psychotherapy. Regensburg 2013, pp. 28-35.
3 This view is vehemently advocated by the physician Lawrence LeShan: Diagnosis of Cancer – Turning Point and New Beginning, Stuttgart 1993.
4 Quoted in Viktor Frankl: The Question of Meaning in Psychotherapy, Munich 1981, p. 27.
5 See the manifesto of philosophical behaviorism, Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind, Chicago 1949; German: Der Begriff des Geistes.
6 “A Theory of Human Motivation,” Psychological Review 50 (4) 1943, pp. 370-396. ibid.: Motivation and Personality, 12th ed. Reinbek 1981.
7 D. Houtman/S. Aupers, “The spiritual turn and the decline of tradition: The spread of post-Christian spirituality in 14 western countries, 1981-2000,” Journal of the Scientific Study of Religion 46/2007, pp. 305-320.
8 L. Hofmann/H. Walach, “Spirituality and religiosity in psychotherapy – A representative survey among German psychotherapists,” Psychotherapy Research 21 (2) 2011, pp. 179-192. Over 900 psychotherapists were surveyed.
9 Karl R. Popper: Logik der Wissenschaft, 1934, 11th ed. 2005; Ernst Topitsch, “On Empty Formulas,” in the same (ed.): Problems of Scientific Theory, Vienna 1960.
10 Heiko Ernst: Psychotrends – The Self in the 21st Century, Munich/Zurich 1996, p. 189.
(Harald Wiesendanger)
This article contains excerpts from Harald Wiesendanger’s book Ways Out – Helping the Sick Differently (2015)