A commentary on Avoiding the Existential Vacuum
Paul Blaschko’s article in Psychology Today draws attention to an important issue: modern therapy often skirts around questions of meaning, morality, and purpose. Therapists aim to improve coping and reduce distress, but frequently leave untouched the deeper hunger that Viktor Frankl called the “existential vacuum.”
This insight is valuable, but incomplete. The article still treats meaning and purpose as something to be added to or clarified within the psychological self. But the psychological self is a construct — a memory-stream identity built of impressions, sensations, thoughts, and memories. It has no ontological ground.
The reason this construct feels real is twofold.
- First, spiraling continuity: the familiar sense of “me” carries forward each day, reinforced by the body and its inner experiences.
- Second, misattribution of beingness: the ground of existence — pure presence — is mistaken by the mind as belonging to the construct. The result is that the puppet borrows life from the hand that moves it.
This is why psychological approaches that aim to stabilize and strengthen the construct ultimately miss the mark. Agency does not belong to the memory stream. True agency arises from essence, from being itself. Purpose and meaning are not projects of identity but natural radiances of presence.
This is precisely where the Diamond Approach® differs. It uses psychological exploration not to reinforce the construct, but to make it transparent. Through inquiry, what seems solid is revealed as permeable, and its essence shines through. The so-called existential vacuum is then seen not as lack, but as the openness of reality itself.
From the ego’s perspective, separation from being feels like emptiness. But when presence recognizes itself, the vacuum is revealed as fullness. The very “void” that terrifies the self is the ground of freedom.
This is why psychological work, when harnessed to essential realization, becomes transformative. Not to patch the self, but to reveal its transparency. Not to give it meaning, but to see that meaning is the fragrance of being itself.
John Harper is a Diamond Approach® teacher, Enneagram guide, and student of human development whose work bridges psychology, spirituality, and deep experiential inquiry. His newest book, Nurturing Essence: A Compass for Essential Parenting, invites parents to rediscover the soul beneath behavior. He is also the author of The Enneagram World of the Child: Nurturing Resilience and Self-Compassion in Early Life and Good Vibrations: Primordial Sounds of Existence, available on Amazon.