4 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
American Jungian analyst who has written over a dozen accessible books on Jungian psychology — The Middle Passage, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, What Matters Most, Swamplands of the Soul — making analytical psychology accessible to a general educated audience.
Viktor Frankl's 1946 account of surviving Auschwitz — arguing that finding meaning in suffering is the primary human drive — founding logotherapy — one of the most widely read books of the 20th century (16M copies).
Alan Watts's 1951 argument that the pursuit of psychological security is itself the source of insecurity — and that accepting impermanence and uncertainty is the only path to genuine peace — drawing on Zen Buddhism and Western philosophy.
John Vervaeke's philosophical framework — developed primarily through his YouTube lecture series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (2019) — describing the historically traceable loss of meaning, connectedness, and participatory knowing in modernity — the most systematic contemporary philosophical diagnosis of existential alienation.