Avijit Pramanik1 & Arindam Modak2
1Assistant Professor (W.B.E.S.), Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Purulia Government Engineering College, Purulia, West Bengal, India.
Email: apmanik90@gmail.com
2Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology Durgapur, Durgapur, West Bengal, India. Email ID: arindam_m@yahoo.com
Volume 9, Number 2, 2017 I Full Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v9n2.22
Received April 11, 2017; Revised July 12, 2017; Accepted July 15, 2017; Published August 11, 2017.
Abstract
The Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy, as Viktor E. Frankl’s Logotherapy is commonly hailed, veers around the proposition that the primary motivational force of human existence is neither ‘will to pleasure’ as propounded by Psychoanalysis nor ‘will to power’ of Adlerian concept but a sheer ‘will to meaning’. Logotherapy encapsulates the Greek word ‘logos’ in the sense of meaning, thus making itself a meaning-centred therapy to cure neuroses. Frankl quite sagaciously creates an ontological hiatus between noogenic neuroses and somatogenic neuroses declaring the former an offshoot of lack of meaning in life. Logotherapy aims to unlock the will to meaning and to assist the patient in seeing a meaning in his life under any miserable condition. This paper seeks to read Paul Auster’s novel The Brooklyn Follies in juxtaposition with the fundamental aspects of Logotherapy to discover the journey of the characters from noogenic neuroses to amiable social existence, from dark pessimism to bright optimism, from solipsistic life to family life, and from existential vacuum to richness of survival.
Key-words: Logotherapy, Noogenic Neuroses, Homeostasis, Noo-dynamics, Existential Vacuum.