I have recently fin­ished read­ing Man’s Search for Mean­ing by Vik­tor Frankl; an excel­lent book that is at once an account of Frankl’s time in Nazi con­cen­tra­tion camps dur­ing WWII and an intro­duc­tion to his psy­chother­a­peu­tic the­o­ries of logother­apy.

Accord­ing to Frankl’s logother­apy, the way to find mean­ing in life is to ded­i­cate one­self to a cause (“cre­at­ing a work or doing a deed”), find mean­ing in suf­fer­ing (“the atti­tude we take toward unavoid­able suf­fer­ing”), and in learn­ing to love (“expe­ri­enc­ing a some­thing or encoun­ter­ing some­one”). In fact, Frankl states that “love is the ulti­mate and the high­est goal to which man can aspire”.

Now, 60 years later, research into how we deal with exis­ten­tial angst is start­ing to show that Frankl was cor­rect; love is actu­ally one of the most sig­nif­i­cant ways in which we deal with exis­ten­tial anx­i­ety:

In an inge­nious 2002 study, [it was] found that remind­ing peo­ple of their demise increased their self-professed roman­tic com­mit­ment, that think­ing about a com­mit­ted rela­tion­ship reduced the effects of moral­ity salience on harsh social judge­ments, and that think­ing about the end of a rela­tion­ship increased thoughts of death.

A year later, they reviewed research on love and death and came to the con­clu­sion that close rela­tion­ships help us man­age the anx­i­ety of mor­tal­ity, partly through the strength of the bond, but partly through the fact that roman­tic part­ner­ships give us a sym­bolic way of tran­scend­ing death — as fam­i­lies pro­vide a way for our con­tri­bu­tion to ‘live on’ after the final curtain.

You can’t men­tion Vik­tor Frankl (who believes that self actu­al­i­sa­tion is the effect of ‘mean­ing ful­fil­ment’) with­out point­ing out Maslow’s hier­ar­chy of needs; a psy­cho­log­i­cal the­ory worth a cur­sory browse, although please excuse me if I refrain from comment.