Making Meanings or Discovering Meanings? A Study, Assessment, and Reconciliation of the Views of Irvin Yalom and Viktor Frankl about the Meaningfulness of Life in the context of Philosophical Therapy

Existentialist therapy is a new method of psychotherapy aimed at an identification and resolution of human concerns. Two prominent scholars of the field are Irvin Yalom and Viktor Frankl who, despite their disagreements, pushes the boundaries of this new-fangled field of psychotherapy with their remarkable research. Yalom believes that, on the existentialist approach, meaning should be created in life, whereas Frankl as the founder of the method of logotherapy believes that the nature of humans is religious, and the meaning of life should be found or discovered, and not created. However, this meaning is either momentary and subjective or universal, which is the super-meaning. Drawing on the descriptive-analytic method, we try in this paper to consider the views of these psychotherapists, identifying their weak and strong points. It turns out that while Yalom sees religion and tradition as proper sources of the meaningfulness of life, he never allows them into his own theory. In contrast, Frankl makes much of the institution of religion and God in the human life, clarifying his spiritual tendency with the theory of super-meaning and the possibility of there being a super-world. We conclude that, despite their prima facie differences, the meaning-making and meaning-finding views are not contradictory. Instead, they can be reconciled and rendered supplementary.