ABSTRACT
Among the profoundly significant messages of Man’s Search for Meaning (Frankl, 1946/1992) was the observation that those individuals who maintained a sense that life had meaning and purpose, even amid the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp, survived longer. As a physician, Frankl reflected on this idea in terms of the workings of the body’s biological systems and, in particular, immune processes. In this chapter, scientific evidence suggesting that possessing a strong existential well-being is, in fact, accompanied by (and possibly promotes) better biological regulation and better health is examined. This agenda, for which emerging empirical findings are preliminary and partial at best, converges with efforts to foster a perspective on “positive health” that is fundamentally concerned with explicating the physiological substrates of human flourishing (Ryff & Singer, 1998). Thus, rather than define human health as the absence of illness, the positive-health approach begins with the presence of wellness and then probes the neural circuitry and biological processes that underlie it. Probing the inner workings between well-being, the brain, and biology is the essential quest for understanding positive health.
