Behavior-modification therapy can offer help in Values Therapy by building the habit of interposing the discovered value in front of the depression-causing value whenever you feel sad.

The result of the values-discovery process may be that a person becomes "twice born," as in the cases described by William James. Clearly this is radical therapy, like surgery that implants a second heart in a person to aid the leaky and failing original heart.

What About Innate Wants?

There is a school of thought--two prominent representatives of which are Maslow4 and Selye5--who believe that the most important and basic values are biologically inherent in the human animal. This implies that there are inherent goals which are the same for all people. For this school of thought the explanation of depression and other ills is that "life must be allowed to run its natural course toward the fulfillment of its innate potential."(6) Or in Frankl's words, "I think the meaning of our existence is not invented by ourselves, but rather detected."(7) For Selye, one's innate potential is a capacity to do productive work with a feeling of success. For Maslow8 the potential is for "self-actualization," which is basically the state of freedom to experience one's life fully and enjoyably.

I think the better view is that though one's values and aims are inevitably influenced by the physical make-up of homo sapiens and the social conditions of human society, there is a wide range of possible basic values. And I think one will do better in discovering what one's own values are, and what they ought to be, by looking into oneself, rather than by looking at human experience in general and then deducing what one's basic values "really" are or ought to be.

The very fact that different observers such as Maslow and Selye point to different basic "innate" values should warn us of the difficulty or impossibility of making such deductions soundly. And if a person exhibits basic values that do not jibe with Maslow's self-actualization--for example, if a person sacrifices family for religion or country, and is never sorry afterward--Maslow simply assumes that this is not healthy and that the person will inevitably have to pay a price later on. But that kind of reasoning only proves what one wishes to prove. I prefer to accept the simple evidence of my eyes that people differ greatly in their values. I believe that neither I nor anyone else can determine which values are "inherent" and hence "healthy," and which are not.

I recommend, therefore, that you look into yourself--but with diligence and with the urge to find some truth--to determine what are your basic values and priorities. This is quite consistent with believing that a more fundamental source of one's values is outside oneself, of religious or natural or cultural origin.

The Value of Doing Good For Others

Saying that a person should look into herself or himself for one's basic values does not imply that the basic values are, or ought to be, those that refer only to the individual or the family. With the possible exception of Maslow, all the philosophical-psychological writers--whether or not they believe in "inherent" values, and whether they are religious or secular-- make clear that a person's best chance to shake off depression and instead lead a satisfying life is to seek life meaning in contributing to others. As Frankl put it:

We have to beware of the tendency to deal with values in terms of the mere self-expression of man himself. For logos, or "meaning," is not only an emergence from existence itself but rather something confronting existence. If the meaning that is waiting to be fulfilled by man were really nothing but a mere expression of self, or no more than a projection of his wishful thinking, it would immediately lose its demanding and challenging character, it could no longer call man forth or summon him...

I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be found in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. By the same token, the real aim of human existence cannot be found in what is called self-actualization. Human existence is essentially self-transcendence rather than self-actualization. Self-actualization is not a possible aim at all, for the simple reason that the more a man would strive for it, the more he would miss it. For only to the extent to which man commits himself to the fulfillment of his life's meaning, to this extent he also actualizes himself. In other words, self-actualization cannot be attained if it is made an end in itself, but only as a side effect of self- transcendence.(9)

Britain's brilliant and famous writer Oscar Wilde descended into the depths of despair when he was sent to jail for perjury, sex offenses, and complicity in England's underworld. His story of how he came "out of the depths" (as he titled his essay in Latin) reveals how his salvation lay in re-ordering his priorities:

I have lain in prison for nearly two years. Out of my nature has come wild despair; an abandonment to grief that was piteous even to look at; terrible and impotent rage; bitterness and scorn; anguish that wept aloud; misery that could find no voice; sorrow that was dumb. I have passed through every possible mood of suffering. Better than Wordsworth himself I know what Wordsworth meant when he said, "Suffering is permanent, obscure, and dark, and has the nature of infinity." But while there were times when I rejoiced in the idea that my sufferings were to be endless, I could not bear them to be without meaning. Now I find hidden somewhere away in my nature something that tells me that nothing in the whole world is meaningless, and suffering least of all. That something hidden away in my nature, like a treasure in a field, is Humility.

It is the last thing left in me, and the best: the ultimate discovery at which I have arrived, the starting- point for a fresh development. It has come to me right out of myself, so I know that it has come at the proper time. It could not have come before, nor later. Had any one told me of it, I would have rejected it. Had it been brought to me, I would have refused it. As I found it, I want to keep it. I must do so. It is the one thing that has in it the elements of life, of a new life, a Vita Nuova for me. Of all things it is the strangest; one cannot give it away and another may not give it to one. One cannot acquire it except by surrendering every- thing that one has. It is only when one has lost all things, that one knows that one possesses it.