Meaning-making

Viktor Frankl, author of Man's Search for Meaning

Psychiatrist and holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, founder of logotherapy in the 1940s, posited in his 1946 book Man's Search for Meaning that the primary motivation of a person is to discover meaning in life.[6] Frankl insisted that meaning can be discovered under all circumstances, even in the most miserable experiences of loss and tragedy. He said that people could discover meaning through doing a deed, experiencing a value, and experiencing suffering. Although Frankl did not use the term "meaning-making", his emphasis on the making of meaning influenced later psychologists.[7]

Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, both of whom were educational critics and promoters of inquiry education, published a chapter called "Meaning Making" in their 1969 book Teaching as a Subversive Activity.[8] In this chapter, they described why they preferred the term "meaning making" to any other metaphors for teaching and learning:

In the light of all this, perhaps you will understand why we prefer the metaphor "meaning making" to most of the metaphors of the mind that are operative in the schools. It is, to begin with, much less static than the others. It stresses a process view of minding, including the fact that "minding" is undergoing constant change. "Meaning making" also forces us to focus on the individuality and the uniqueness of the meaning maker (the minder). In most of the other metaphors there is an assumption of "sameness" in all learners. The "garden" to be cultivated, the darkness to be lighted, the foundation to be built upon, the clay to be molded—there is always the implication that all learning will occur in the same way. The flowers will be the same color, the light will reveal the same room, the clay will take the same shape, and so on. Moreover, such metaphors imply boundaries, a limit to learning. How many flowers can a garden hold? How much water can a bucket take? What happens to the learner after his mind has been molded? How large can a building be, even if constructed on a solid foundation? The "meaning maker" has no such limitation. There is no end to his educative process. He continues to create new meanings...

— Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, "Meaning Making"[9]

By the end of the 1970s, the term "meaning-making" was used with increasing frequency,[10] especially in constructivist learning theory which posits that knowledge is something that is actively created by people as they experience new things and integrate new information with their current knowledge.[4] Developmental psychologist Robert Kegan used the term "meaning-making" as a key concept in several widely cited texts on counseling and human development published in the late 1970s and early 1980s.[11] Kegan wrote: "Human being is meaning making. For the human, what evolving amounts to is the evolving of systems of meaning; the business of organisms is to organize, as Perry (1970) says."[12] The term "meaning-making" has also been used by psychologists influenced by George Kelly's personal construct theory.[13]

In a review of the meaning-making literature published in 2010, psychologist Crystal L. Park noted that there was a rich body of theory on meaning-making, but empirical research had not kept pace with theory development.[14] In 2014, the first Congress on the Construction of Personal Meaning[15] was held as part of the eighth Biennial International Meaning Conference convened by the International Network on Personal Meaning.[16]

The term meaning-making has been used in constructivist educational psychology to refer to the personal epistemology that people create to help them to make sense of the influences, relationships and sources of knowledge in their world.[4]

For example, psychologist Robert Kegan developed a theoretical framework that posited five levels of meaning-making; each level describes a more advanced way of understanding experiences, and people may come to master each level as they develop psychologically.[11] Similarly, according to the transformative learning theory of sociologist and educator Jack Mezirow, adults interpret the meaning of their experiences through a lens of deeply held assumptions.[17] When they experience something that contradicts or challenges their way of negotiating the world they have to go through the transformative process of evaluating their assumptions and processes of making meaning. Experiences that force individuals to engage in this critical self-reflection, or what Mezirow called "disorienting dilemmas",[17] can be events such as loss, trauma, stressful life transitions or other interruptions.

With the experience of a death, people often have to create new meaning of their loss. Interventions that promote meaning-making may be beneficial to grievers, as some interventions have been found to improve both mental health and physical health.[18] However, according to some researchers, "for certain individuals from challenging backgrounds, efforts after meaning might not be psychologically healthy" when those efforts are "more similar to rumination than to resolution" of problems.[19]

Some researchers report that meaning-making can help people feel less distressed, and allows people to become more resilient in the face of loss.[20] On the converse, failing to attribute meaning to death leads to more long-term distress for some people.[21]

There are various strategies people can utilize for meaning-making; many of them are summarized in the book Techniques of Grief Therapy.[22] One study developed a "Meaning of Loss Codebook" which clusters common meaning-making strategies into 30 categories.[23] Amongst these meaning-making strategies, the most frequently used categories include: personal growth, family bonds, spirituality, valuing life, negative affect, impermanence, lifestyle changes, compassion, and release from suffering.[24]

• "Death and dying". American Psychological Association. Retrieved 12 December 2015.