yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Viktor Frankl's Method to Overcome Fear (Paradoxical Intention)


3m read
·Nov 4, 2024

Processing might take a few minutes. Refresh later.

The neurotic who learns to laugh at himself may be on the way to self-management, perhaps to cure. Austrian psychiatrist, philosopher, and author Viktor Frankl spent four years in different concentration camps during the second world war. From the ashes of his horrific experiences during his imprisonment arose a school of psychotherapy called logotherapy. Logotherapy aims to help people find personal meaning in their lives, assuming that meaning is what ultimately keeps us going.

Working as a psychiatrist, Frankl experienced patients who suffered from neuroses (as he described in his book Man’s Search for Meaning). One of his patients was a young physician who feared sweating profusely in the company of other people. But his fear of sweating made him even more fearful, which only made him sweat more. Frankl, then, used a pretty unconventional method that ultimately cured his patient: “paradoxical intention.”

Paradoxical intention is one of the techniques found in logotherapy. Therapists can use paradoxical intention to treat people with anxiety, fear, phobias, and even insomnia. Instead of escaping or minimizing the fear, paradoxical intention encourages us to face it head-on and actually desire and wish for it as a means of conquering it (how strange this may sound). But this reverse psychology that tricks the mind out of its neurosis makes Frankl’s approach interesting and worth examining.

This video explores the ideas behind this technique and how it works. It's not surprising that people tend to avoid situations that evoke fear in them. We generally experience fear as deeply unpleasant, often more so than the situations that produce it. But according to Frankl, this “flight from fear” is “the starting point of any anxiety neurosis.” The very endeavor of avoiding fear ironically strengthens it. As soon as we fear the fear, we tumble down a rabbit hole of never-ending dread.

In the book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, author Mark Manson describes what he called the “feedback loop from hell.” I quote: There’s an insidious quirk to your brain that, if you let it, can drive you absolutely batty. Tell me if this sounds familiar to you: You get anxious about confronting somebody in your life. That anxiety cripples you and you start wondering why you’re so anxious. Now you’re becoming anxious about being anxious. Oh no! Doubly anxious! Now you’re anxious about your anxiety, which is causing more anxiety. Quick, where’s the whiskey? End quote.

Viktor Frankl argued that even though someone who has a phobia tends to “flight from fear,” as in avoiding the situations that usually evoke fear, there’s also an element of “fighting against fear” involved. So, the sufferer tries to remove the fear forcefully. A prevalent example we often see nowadays is social anxiety. When we experience the discomfort of fear (or even a panic attack) when giving a presentation, for example, we likely try to avoid it in the future. We can avoid it by refraining from giving presentations altogether until we die.

But when that isn’t an option, we will have to face fear nevertheless. So, how do we deal with this? First, we try to reason ourselves out of it. If we use common sense, we can intellectually comprehend that most social situations are not life-threatening. There’s generally nothing to fear when giving a presentation unless, perhaps, we’re doing it in front of an audience carrying guns that they’ll use to shoot us when we fail.

But despite our rational understanding, the prospect of these situations still evokes fear. It's a fear that we cannot seem to subdue with sheer effort or thought. Frankl called this “anticipatory anxiety.” When we experience anticipatory anxiety, we fear a specific outcome. In this case, it’s not the situation itself (which is pretty harmless); it’s the uncontrollable, absurd, and, first and foremost, unwanted fear it evokes.

After an employee who fears public speaking hears that she needs to give a presentation in front of her colleagues, she experiences antic...

More Articles

View All
Can You Overdose on Vitamins?
If you eat just one carrot every day, that provides all the vitamin A you need to survive. But in some parts of the world, that’s not easy to come by. There are an estimated 250 million preschool-aged children who are vitamin A deficient. Most of them are…
Bobi Wine: The People’s President | Official Trailer | National Geographic Documentary Films
Election [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] This is a message to the government. University, I didn’t know he was a musician. He was different. I didn’t have so many dreams; she impacted my life. She made me realize we had to impact other lives. I’ve …
Ordering fractions | Math | 4th grade | Khan Academy
Order the fractions from least to greatest. So we have three fractions and we want to decide which one is the smallest, which one’s in the middle, and which is the greatest. One thing we could do is look at the fractions, think about what they mean, and…
Howard Marks: 5 Strategies to Outperform the Market in 2021
Or number five, you can try to look for exceptions. What I call special niches, special people, who hopefully can produce a good return with safety in a low return world. But those people are truly exceptional and not easy to find. What inning do you see…
United Nations Messenger of Peace | Before the Flood
Hi, how are you? Pleasure, pleasure, great to great pleasure to see you. We can remove this, this can be, oh wow, this is for height control for shorter leaders like this. Taller leaders, what specific message do you think is the most important? Climate …
TIL: Wild Lions Live in India | Today I Learned
[Music] Most people think about lions in Africa, but very few people know that they actually exist in India too. It looks, uh, not very different from the African lion. It is, however, a bit smaller. It does have flappy skin on the stomach that looks diff…