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Today more than ever before, the psychiatrist is called upon to treat patients who complain of a sense of futility and emptiness, a feeling of meaninglessness, which this paper will describe in terms of the “existential vacuum”.1 There can be no doubt that the existential vacuum is increasing and spreading. In a recent study of 500 youngsters in Vienna it was shown that the percentage of those suffering from it has increased within the last two years from 30 per cent to 80 per cent.2 Even in Africa, the existential vacuum is spreading, particularly among academic youth.3 Freudians as well as Marxists are fully aware of the occurrence of this phenomenon. At a recent conference of psychoanalysts it was reported that more and more patients are suffering from a lack of life content, rather than from clinical symptomatology, and that this state of affairs may well account for so-called interminable analyses because in such cases the psychoanalytic treatment has become the only life content that is available to the patient. As for the Marxists, only recently the Head of the Department of Psychotherapy at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig reported on her investigations which demonstrated the frequency of the existential vacuum. As the Head of the Department of Psychiatry at a Czech university put it, the existential vacuum gets through the borders between capitalist and communist countries, “without a visa.”4
How is the existential vacuum to be explained? Unlike the animal, man is no longer told by his instincts as to what he must do. And in contrast to former times, he is no longer told by traditions and values what he should do. Now, knowing neither what he must do nor what he should do, he sometimes does not even know what it is that he basically wishes to do. Instead, he gets to wish to do what other people do (conformity) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism).
Another effect of the existential vacuum is neuroticism. The existential vacuum is no