In a searching, hour-long conversation, former Ohio Governor John Kasich sat down with Rabbi Daniel Schonbuch, LMFT — a Brooklyn-based psychotherapist, rabbi, and leading expert in Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy — to explore what may be the defining psychological challenge of our time: the absence of meaning. The interview, available in full on YouTube, covers Frankl’s place in the history of psychotherapy, the link between meaninglessness and campus radicalization, the relationship between faith and therapy, and practical steps individuals can take toward a more purposeful life.

The crisis nobody is treating

Rabbi Schonbuch opened with a diagnosis. “The greatest challenge facing the United States of America right now, especially our youth, is the absence of meaning — or what I’d call meaninglessness,” he told Kasich. Unlike the dominant streams of psychotherapy, which focus on self-fulfillment, self-awareness, and ego, Frankl’s logotherapy holds that genuine psychological health comes from moving beyond the self rather than toward it.

The rabbi contrasted the three grand theories of human motivation: Freud’s pleasure drive, Adler’s power drive, and Frankl’s meaning drive. He argued that when individuals fail to find meaning, they descend — predictably — toward the pursuit of power or pleasure as substitutes. “That’s where I see a lot of society going,” he said.

What Auschwitz confirmed — but didn’t create

Kasich pressed the rabbi on how much of Frankl’s philosophy was shaped by his time in the Nazi concentration camps. Schonbuch offered a clarification that many find surprising: Frankl developed his core ideas as early as the 1920s — as a teenager corresponding with Sigmund Freud. By the time he arrived at Auschwitz, he was not discovering the search for meaning; he was experiencing what he had already theorized. “Auschwitz was a litmus test, as opposed to the place he discovered it,” Schonbuch said.

Even stripped of all physical freedom, Frankl observed that individuals retained what he called the ultimate freedom: the freedom to choose one’s attitude toward suffering. Those who could find some meaning in their circumstances, however tenuous, survived in spirit even when the body could not. Those who could not, in his memorable phrase, “ran to the wire.”

Faith, therapy, and the religio

The conversation turned to the relationship between faith and psychological treatment — a topic on which Schonbuch has distinctive views. He described how conventional psychotherapy has, by and large, excluded spirituality from its toolkit: therapists trained in Freudian and secular traditions have often rejected or pathologized clients’ spiritual needs. Frankl filled that gap through what he called the religio — a drive deeper than the id, rooted in humanity’s spiritual and transcendent dimension.

“People seek out my help because they say, ‘I am a spiritual person. My therapist doesn’t allow me to experience that,’” Schonbuch said. His method combines classical psychotherapy techniques — EMDR, cognitive behavioral therapy, somatic experiencing — with a pivot, when the client is open to it, toward spiritual resources and meaning-making. “Logotherapy did not come to replace psychotherapy. It came to complete it.”

Key themes from the interview

Practical logotherapy: 30 days toward meaning

Schonbuch shared the concrete tool at the heart of his practice: a 30-day workbook included at the back of his book, built around a daily Viktor Frankl quote, journaling on three core personal values, and documenting three meaningful experiences each day. He said clients who follow the practice consistently show measurable declines in depression and anxiety scores. “Instead of focusing on what you don’t have, focus on what you’re needed for and what you can accomplish through your values,” he said.