What Are You Really After?

One evening last December, sitting down to write an essay on logotherapy, I caught myself doing something worth examining. Before I had written a single word — before I had even settled on an idea — I was already imagining how impressive the finished piece would be. How superior. My attention had drifted entirely away from the subject and placed itself, with some satisfaction, at the centre of its own reflection.

I noticed this quickly enough to watch what happened next. The moment I saw it, the fantasy collapsed. What had been a pleasant inflation became its opposite — a small, uncomfortable deflation. How embarrassing to be caught out by one’s own vanity, even privately. The whole episode lasted perhaps two minutes, but it played out with the clarity of a parable: superiority, then inferiority, then the faint shame of having wanted the former.

It occurred to me that this little internal drama is exactly what Alfred Adler spent his career describing. The will to power — the drive to move from inferiority toward superiority — is undeniably a force in human psychology, and Adler mapped it with real precision. But its trap is equally precise: there is always someone above you and someone below, always a dimension in which you are improving and another in which you are declining. Comparison, whether with others or with your own past self, is a game with no stable winning position. As a therapeutic lens it is illuminating. As a foundation for living, it is exhausting — and it becomes more so the older you get.

Freud would have read the same episode differently. The desire to impress, he might suggest, is a sublimation of something older — the need for uncontested approval, perhaps traceable to early attachments, surfacing now as the wish to produce something admirable so as to be embraced. The subsequent shame would be the superego doing its work, suppressing what the id had briefly exposed. Freud’s project would be to loosen that tension — to bring the hidden motivation to light, normalise it, and in doing so reduce its power over behaviour. There is something genuinely liberating in that approach, when and if it works.

A cognitive therapist would focus elsewhere — on the specific thought patterns, the irrational assumptions embedded in needing the work to be superior before it was begun. They would offer tools to identify and replace those patterns with more functional ones. While a humanist in the tradition of Carl Rogers would set all frameworks aside, listen without judgement, and trust that the authentic self, given the right conditions, would find its own way through.

Each of these approaches illuminates something real. And yet, sitting at my desk that December evening, none of them was what I actually needed.

What I needed was simpler. I needed someone to ask: what are you actually here for?

That, more or less, is perhaps what Frankl would have done. A short Socratic exchange — why are you writing this, what drew you to this subject, what do you hope it might offer — and the vanity would have dissolved not through analysis or correction, but through irrelevance. When the meaning of the task comes back into focus, the ego’s performance anxiety simply has nowhere to stand. It isn’t suppressed or restructured or traced to its origins. It is rendered beside the point.

This is the move that distinguishes logotherapy from most other approaches. Rather than excavating the past — or maybe exhuming it — this approach redirects attention toward what is still possible. Not what went wrong back there, but what is being asked of you right now. The question is never only where did this come from, but always also: where are you going, and why does it matter?

I did eventually write the short essay. In fact these paragraphs became it. And the moment I stopped wanting it to be special, it became what it needed to be.