5 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
Viktor Frankl's existential psychotherapy positing that the primary human motivation is the search for meaning — and that existential neurosis arises from a failure to find meaning.
Austrian psychoanalyst and Freud's closest associate for 20 years who broke with Freud over the centrality of the birth trauma, developing a will-based psychology that emphasized creativity, individuation, and the heroic self-creation of identity.
Mark Manson's 2016 self-help book arguing that the pursuit of positivity is itself the problem — that a good life comes from choosing meaningful problems to struggle with rather than trying to eliminate struggle.
Austrian psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz and Dachau — losing his wife, parents, and brother — and whose Man's Search for Meaning (1946) argued that the search for meaning (not pleasure or power) is the primary human motivation, founding logotherapy.
Frankl's claim that the primary motivational force in human beings is not pleasure (Freud) or power (Adler) but the search for meaning — and that frustration of this will produces existential distress.