The Relationship between Meaning in Life and Mental Well-Being

Abstract

A number of recent studies reported in the literature lent impetus to the research conducted for the current study. The hypothesis addressed is that meaning in life is positively associated with mental well-being irrespective of the nature or topos of the psychopathology. This hypothesis stems from an existential perspective on psychopathology (and consequently psychotherapy) which holds that a sense of meaning in life is a vital element in providing coherence to an individual's worldview and hence to his/her mental well-being. Interestingly, such an hypothesis also serves to challenge, within the existential approach, the view of one of the earliest existential psychologists, namely Victor Frankl that absence of meaning in life is associated only with a specific form of psychopathology which he termed noogenic neurosis. Correlational analyses on data, yielded from a random sample (N = 92) of South African university students at one campus, corroborated that meaning in life is associated with a wide spectrum of conventional categories of psychopathology as measured by the MMPI as well as with general neurosis measured by the revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire - statistically significant correlations were established.