Man’s Search for meaning

"At times, lightning decisions had to be made, decisions which spelled
life or death. The prisoner would have preferred to let fate make the
choice for him. This escape from commitment was most apparent when
a prisoner had to make the decision for or against an escape attempt. In
those minutes in which he had to make up his mind—and it was
always a question of minutes—he suffered the tortures of Hell."
"We were grateful for the smallest of mercies. We were glad when
there was time to delouse before going to bed, although this in itself
was no pleasure, as it meant standing naked in an unheated hut where
icicles hung from the ceiling."
"If someone had seen our faces on the journey from Auschwitz to a
Bavarian camp as we beheld the mountains of Salzburg with their summits
glowing in the sunset, through the little barred windows of the
prison carriage, he would never have believed that those were the faces
of men who had given up all hope of life and liberty. Despite that
factor—or maybe because of it—we were carried away by nature's
beauty, which we had missed for so long."

Viktor Frankl's wife, father, mother, and brother died in the concentration
camps of Nazi Germany. Only his sister survived.
Enduring extreme hunger, cold, and brutality, first in Auschwitz
and then Dachau, Frankl himself was under constant threat of going to
the gas ovens. He lost every physical belonging on his first day in the
camps, and was forced to surrender a scientific manuscript that he considered
his life's work.
This is, if there ever was one, a story that could excuse someone
believing that life is meaningless and suicide a reasonable option. Yet
having been lowered into the pits of humanity, Frankl emerged an optimist.
His reasoning was that even in the most terrible circumstances,
people still have the freedom to choose how they see their circumstances
and create meaning out of them. As Gordon Allport notes in
his preface to the third edition, this is what the ancient Stoics called the
"last freedom." The evil of torture is not so much the physical torment,
but the active attempt to extinguish freedom.
Redefining human achievement
A favorite quote of Frankl's was from Nietzsche, "He who has a why to
live can bear with almost any how." The most poignant bits of this classic
are Frankl's recollections of the thoughts that gave him the will to
live. Mental images of his wife provided the only light in the dark days of
the concentration camp, and there is a beautiful scene when he is thinking
of her with such intensity that when a bird hops on to a mound in
front of him, it appears to be her living embodiment. He also imagined
himself after liberation in lecture halls, telling people about what must
never happen again. This proved to be prophetic. Finally, there was the
desire to jot down notes remembered from his lost manuscript.
The men who had given up, in contrast, could be recognized
because they smoked their last cigarettes, which could otherwise have
been traded for a scrap of food. These men had decided that life held
nothing more for them. Yet this thinking struck Frankl as a terrible
mistake. We are not here to judge life according to what we expected
from it and what it has delivered. Rather, he realized, we must find the
courage to ask what life expects of us, day by day. Our task is not
merely to survive, but to find the guiding truth specific to us and our
situation, which can sometimes only be revealed in the worst suffering.
Indeed, Frankl says that "rather than being a symptom of neurosis, suffering
may well be a human achievement."
The book's impact
Man's Search for Meaning has sold over nine million copies and been
translated into 24 languages. It was voted one of America's ten most
influential books by the Library of Congress. Yet Frankl, who originally
wanted the book to be published with only his prisoner number on the
cover, stated that he did not see the work as a great achievement. Its
success was "an expression of the misery of our time," revealing the
ravenous hunger for meaningful existence.
Apart from its bestseller status, Man's Search for Meaning has been
a big influence on the major self-help writers. The emphasis on responsibility
that we find in Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,
for example, is directly inspired by Frankl, and the work is referenced
in a number of books covered in this volume.
The current edition has three parts: the autobiographical "Experiences
in a concentration camp"; a theoretical essay "Logotherapy in a
nutshell" (1962); and a piece titled "The case for a tragic optimism"
(1984). With this structure, the unputdownable personal story leads the
reader on to its intellectual implications.
The will to meaning and logotherapy
What is amazing about Frankl's experiences is that they caused him to
live out the ideas about which, as a doctor before the outbreak of the
Second World War, he had been theorizing. The theory and the practice
became the Third School of Viennese psychotherapy, logotherapy (from
the Greek logos, "meaning"), following Freud's psychoanalysis and
Adler's individual psychology. Whereas psychoanalysis requires introspection
and self-centeredness to reveal the basis of someone's neurosis,logotherapy tries to take the person out of themselves and see their life
in a broader perspective. Where psychoanalysis focuses on the "will to
pleasure" and Adlerian psychology on the "will to power," logotherapy
sees the prime motivating force in human beings as a "will to meaning."
Frankl remembers an American diplomat coming to his office in
Vienna who had spent five years in psychoanalysis. Discontented with
his job and uncomfortable about implementing US foreign policy, this
man's analyst had laid the blame on the relationship with his father:
The United States government represented the father image and was
therefore the superficial object of his angst, but the real issue was his
feelings toward his biological father. Frankl, however, simply diagnosed
a lack of purpose in the man's work and suggested a career change.
The diplomat took his advice and never looked back.
The point of the anecdote is that in logotherapy, existential distress
is not neurosis or mental disease, but a sign that we are becoming more
human in the desire for meaning. In contrast to Freud or Adler, Frankl
chose not to see life simply as the satisfaction of drives or instincts, or
even as becoming "well adjusted" to society. Instead, he (and humanistic
psychology in general, for example Abraham Maslow and Carl
Rogers) believed that the outstanding feature of human beings is their
free will.
Sources of meaning
Logotherapy says that mental health arises when we learn how to close
the gap between what we are and what we could become. But what if we
are yet to identify what we could become? Frankl noted that the modern
person has almost too much freedom to deal with. We no longer live
through instinct, but tradition is no guide either. This is the existential
vacuum, in which the frustrated will to meaning is compensated for in
the urge for money, sex, entertainment, even violence. We are not open to
the various sources of meaning, which according to Frankl are:
1 Creating a work or doing a deed.
2 Experiencing something or encountering someone (love).
3 The attitude we take to unavoidable suffering.
The first is a classic source, defined as "life purpose" in the self-help literature.
Our culture expects happiness, yet Frankl says that this is not
something that we should seek directly. He defines happiness as a byproduct
of forgetting ourselves in a task that draws on all our imagination
and talents.
The second is important as it makes experience (inner and outer) a
legitimate alternative to achievement in a society built around achieving.
The third gives suffering a meaning, but what meaning? Frankl admits
that we may never know, or at least not until later in life. Just because
we do not comprehend meaning, it does not mean that there is none.
To the people who say that life is meaningless because it is transitory,
Frankl's response is "only the unfulfilment of potential is meaningless,
not life itself." Our culture worships the young, yet it is age
that is to be admired, since the older person has loved, suffered, and
fulfilled so much. Fulfillment of your own potential, however humble,
will make a permanent imprint on the history of the world, and the
decision to make that imprint defines responsibility. Freedom is only
one half of the equation. The other half is responsibility to act on it.
Final comments
If there is a thread running through personal development writing, it is
a belief in the changeability of the individual. Determinism, in contrast,
says that we can never arise above our childhood or our genetic makeup.
Freud believed that if a group of people were all to be deprived of
food, their individual differences would lessen, to be replaced by a single
mass urge. But Frankl's concentration camp experience often
revealed to him the opposite. The hunger, torture, and filth did serve to
desensitize the prisoners, but despite being herded as animals, many
somehow avoided a mob mentality. We can never predict the behavior
of an individual and can make few generalizations about what it means
to be human:
"Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he
really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of
Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers
upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips."
What makes humans different as a species is that we can live for ideals
and values. How else, as Frankl noted, would you be able to hold your
head up as you entered the gas chamber? Aware that most of us would never even come close to such a horrible fate, he used it as a reference
point, a symbol of personal responsibility that could guide the decisions
we make in our everyday lives. No matter what the circumstances, his
book says, we can be free.