Now and then I ask myself about my purpose, my needs and expectations, and about whom I choose, after all, as partner in the relentless passage of time. Two masters inspire me, humanist psychiatrists, human beings very attentive to others. They are two almost parallel stories. One was born five years before the other, and both live simultaneous experiences arising from the same scourge, the second world war (in lowercase, on purpose!).

Psychiatrists Viktor Emil Frankl and Eric Berne, one European, the other American, mark their lives with differences and similarities. The first, Frankl, was born and died in Vienna. Berne was born in Montreal and died in California. Frankl created logotherapy (a philosophical thought based on the search for the meaning of life) and existential analysis. Berne established transactional analysis (whose philosophical thought guides interventions toward autonomy).

During the war, Eric Berne served as a medical major in the US forces, far from the front lines. Viktor Frankl, also far from the battles, went through unimaginable experiences in four concentration and extermination camps, between 1942 and 1945, including Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, the cruelest.

Frankl learns, through intense attention, to build within himself a space of freedom. He creates a meaning for himself, to find his wife again, and, even in extreme conditions, keeps his thinking focused on that purpose. Writing about that moment of his life, he states that everything can be taken from a person except one thing: the freedom to choose their attitude in any circumstance.

In his observation, identifying and sustaining meaning makes the difference in giving survival strength to the human beings with whom he shares the years of ignominy. At the end of the war, weighing only 25 kilograms (about 55 pounds), he is freed and discovers that his wife, brothers and father had been murdered by the Nazis. Although it might seem natural for him to give up, the horrors he lived through do not keep him from consolidating his philosophy and the therapeutic intervention of logotherapy. Understanding the language of suffering, about which he writes in depth, leads him to develop a powerful and deeply respectful intervention, focused on supporting people to find their meaning in life.

At this point in the journey, I see the dialogue between the two as fundamental. Berne sees cure as the attainment of autonomy and realizes that attaining it is not so simple. Much of what seems autonomous is the automatic repetition of patterns programmed in childhood. Treating soldiers who leave for and return from war, he sees up close how being enslaved to the past increases the intensity of damage and drains the energy needed for healing.

I think of a powerful connection between the two thoughts: to identify my purpose, I need autonomy. I see the conquest of autonomy as a fundamental part of identifying and taking on meaning. The first step, therefore, is the expansion of awareness.

Who am I? What do I want or not, what do I need or not, what do I feel or not. Reducing the force of those patterns from the past can shift that force to thinking creatively about the future. However, writing or speaking about it is simple compared with doing it. Escaping patterns is a complex act.

Healthy or harmful, patterns offer us reasonable stability. That does us a world of good. Getting to know those patterns can be an uncomfortable activity, with a special gain at the end: the possibility opens of experiencing more lucid thoughts, less automatic decisions and contact with one’s own desires and needs. On the journey, other experiments are constituent. Authentic relationships are one of them.

In getting to know myself, I develop a grammar that lets me look at the other and open myself to the movement of knowing them. I think that defining a purpose can be liberating and that it is reached as a consequence of conquering autonomy. Otherwise, I will defend the banner of my meaning stamped with someone else’s meaning. With access barred to my own meaning, I will defend to the death the one who controls me.

I imagine Frankl and Berne’s gaze on the humans lost in this endless head-banging, this universal blind man’s buff of sick children sheltered in adult bodies. Both, determined (almost obstinate) scholars who define as the meaning of life the healing of human beings, observe those who are without meaning, without purpose, without a future.

I do not believe that autonomy and meaning automatically bring happiness or protect us from life’s entanglements. Nor that studying these two sages automatically leads us to the illuminated space of self-knowledge, not least because many of those in madness have studied them. The operation is a little different.

I believe that experimenting, in the tiniest things, with new alternatives of action and coexistence can lead us to an autonomy stitched from small events, with the thread of a meaning strengthened by living. I believe we can make, in our microcosm, movements that include the people around us and, who knows, who knows (now I know it is a dream!), one day we will dialogue with less exasperation.

To psychiatrists Eric Berne and Viktor Frankl, my reverence and thanks. With them I learn to recognize the edge of the abyss and, when I am very close to falling, I look for clues to healing in the wise words of both, clues for my own rescue.