Recommended Reading: Man's Search for Meaning

In the Afterword of Viktor Frankl's 1959 book, Man's Search for Meaning, William J. Winslade writes that Frankl's book sold more than 12 million copies, has been published in twenty-four languages, and is listed as among the ten most influential books in America. Even though, as Winslade says, the book is "routinely assigned to college, graduate, and high school students," up until a couple of months ago, I'd never heard of it, let alone read it. Once again I'm late to the party.

I suppose if someone were to ask me what the meaning of my life was, at the moment I'd have to say, "catching up." I feel as if I've just woken up out of a decades-long slumber--my teens dulled by marijuana and adolescent rebellion, my twenties by religious conversion muddled by cultic legalism, and my thirties by the attempts to disentangle lies and distortions from truth, or truth as I understood it. The best years of my life are a fog.

Now here I am in my mid-fifties, attempting to learn or re-learn everything I've either never learned or have forgotten, about history, literature, philosophy, mathematics, science, religion, geography. A verse from the Bible has been haunting me lately: "Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom." It's from Psalm 90, and in context the writer (Moses) is keenly aware of how fleeting life is. "Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty . . . they quickly pass, and we fly away." I'm 56. Suddenly 70 or 80 doesn't seem that far away. I'm running out of time.

Back to Frankl's book. It's very short, divided into two main sections. Part I ("Experiences in a Concentration Camp") and Part II ("Logotherapy in a Nutshell"). This edition also includes a Postscript, written in 1984 and based on a lecture the author gave at the Third World Congress of Logotherapy in West Germany in 1983 titled "The Case for a Tragic Optimism," and the previously-mentioned Afterword by William Winslade, which neatly encapsulates the entire book. 

Part I was tough reading. How long have I averted my eyes from the Holocaust? But it's time I looked it square in the face. Frankl actually survived four camps: Theresienstadt, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Kaufering, and Turkheim. At the time of his arrest, he was a practicing psychiatrist, had already been writing and lecturing on his theories of the importance of meaning as a key element to mental health--i.e., logotherapy. He apparently had a chance to escape Austria but chose to let his visa expire in order to remain with his aging parents. Eventually his entire family would die in the concentration camps--his parents, his brother, his pregnant wife. Throughout those years he clung to the hope of reuniting with his wife and was nourished by memories of his love for her. He himself, by fate, luck, chance, or God's purpose, survived, but barely. He nearly died of typhus.

One of the more poignant stories Frankl tells comes early in the book, when he was first arrested and the new prisoners were told to strip naked and deposit all their belongings. Frankl had carried with him upon his arrest the manuscript he was working on--essentially this book--naively thinking he would be able to continue writing in prison. Of course the manuscript was destroyed.

Frankl writes about "the great army of unknown and unrecorded victims," about things that happened not in the "large and famous camps, but in the small ones where most of the real extermination took place." He describes the sadistic treatment of prisoners by both SS guards and prisoners themselves who were "promoted" (Capos, they're called). He writes about the "hard fight for existence...the unrelenting struggle for daily bread."

But what's most interesting about this section is that, because he's a psychiatrist, he writes not only as one who experienced these horrors--a survivor--but also as a detached observer. Perhaps it was his ability to distance himself and remain objective that contributed to his survival--his attempts to help others not give up hope inoculating him from the hopelessness which he believes may have contributed to many prisoners' deaths, either by suicide or, quite literally, by simply giving up.

Frankl's observations about self-determination are fascinating. Here are some excerpts (all italics are Frankl's). At the end of Part II he writes:

"A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes--within the limits of endowment and environment--he has made out of himself. In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.

"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." 

Referring to Sigmund Freud's theory that if people from all walks of life were exposed uniformly to hunger, "individual differences [would] blur, and in their stead [would] appear the uniform expression of the one unstilled urge" (implying, I suppose, that hunger will reduce all people--wealthy or poor, beautiful or homely, godly or agnostic--to animalistic urge for survival), Frankl writes:

"Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz. There, the 'individual differences' did not blur but, on the contrary, people became more different; people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints."

At the core of these observations are the theories that ultimately form the basis of logotherapy. And while I don't pretend to understand it, at the very least I think I get the fundamentals. Meaning, Frankl says, can be discovered in three different ways:

1. by creating a work or doing a deed
2. by experiencing something or encountering someone (in other words, by loving)
3. by how we deal with unavoidable suffering

That last point is perhaps his most profound. Frankl does not argue, let alone believe, that one needs to experience suffering to find meaning in life but rather that in the face of unavoidable suffering, one's response determines one's meaning. The excerpt quoted above, describing the dignity of those who entered the gas chambers with prayer on their lips, is, perhaps, the most eloquent example of what he's referring to here.