Definition
The will to meaning is Viktor Frankl's name for what he held to be the deepest and most distinctly human motivation: the drive to find a meaning in one's life. He set it deliberately against the two dominant psychologies of his Vienna. Where Freud's psychoanalysis traced human striving to a will to pleasure, and Adler's individual psychology to a will to power, Frankl argued that meaning is the more fundamental concern.
A person does not seek meaning as a substitute for blocked pleasure or thwarted ambition. Meaning is the primary aim; pleasure and power are, at best, side effects of living a meaningful life and, at worst, the consolations a person turns to when meaning is absent.
Why it matters
How it works
Frankl observed the will to meaning at work in extreme conditions. In the concentration camps he saw that prisoners who held to a meaning — an unfinished task, a person waiting for them, an inner commitment — were measurably more able to endure. The will to meaning is not a comfortable optimism but a load-bearing structure: it gives a person a reason to go on.
Crucially, meaning cannot be invented at will or prescribed by a therapist. It must be discovered in the actual circumstances of a life — through what one creates, what one experiences, and the stance one takes toward unavoidable suffering.