The God of the Unconscious Man and His Search for Ultimate Meaning

Victor Frankl published “The God of the Unconscious” two years after his most famous book, “Man and His Search for Meaning.” In some respects, it complemented his thesis, while in others, it elaborated and deepened it. Here, Frankl directly addresses the relationship between religiosity and mental health, and how human tendencies toward religiosity and spirituality are not unrelated to mental health. On the contrary, this spiritual tendency is an inherent human instinct embedded in the deeper layers of human consciousness. In some places in the book, Frankl referred to this instinct as “repressed religiosity,” which may rust and turn into a pathological phenomenon if it is not realized in human experience. Therefore, he argued that the goal of psychotherapy is not only to elevate instinctual phenomena to awareness and human responsibility, but also to spirituality. In “The God of the Unconscious,” Frankl focused on analyzing the phenomenon of conscience as a manifestation of spiritual awareness. Conscience is an irrational phenomenon, meaning that, at its deepest levels, it relies on intuition rather than calculating moral rules or external preaching. Conscience relies on the expectation and intuition of what is not there but should be. Thus, like love, it is a feeling of the unfulfilled that leads to the realization of one’s repressed potential. Frankl called this process self-transcendence, which is the human being’s turning to something or someone other than himself. Through this turning, the human being attains fulfillment and self-realization through interaction and integration with the world and people outside of himself.