Man’s Search For Meaning
By Viktor Frankl
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Foreword
This book is for people who have an interest in both psychology and history like me. This book is now one of my favourite books of all time. The book is divided into two parts. The first part is a small autobiography of the author’s time in the concentration camp. The second part focuses solely on the psychological part. The author of the book is Dr Viktor Frankl who is famous for founding logotherapy. Dr Viktor Frankl was very famous to ask his patients a very peculiar question “Why don’t you commit suicide?” This book explains how asking this question to someone who is depressed helps them start feeling better.
Summary
At the beginning of the book, Dr Frankl recalls the time when America had invited him to America so that he could stay safe when Germany invaded his country. At first, he had thought of accepting the offer; this is something his parents wanted him to do as well but later on, after reading a text from a religious book, he decided to stay in Austria and face whatever happens.
The author then describes a journey to the concentration camp on the train. The whole compartment was filled with people; there was not even space to sit down. All of them were anxious and scared about what would happen to them. Will they be sent to the gas chambers immediately? Will they ever be free again?
The moment they got down at the camp, Auschwitz, they were made to stand in line and separated into two groups; The first group consisted of healthy people who would be used as slaves to work, and the second group consisted of sick-looking and weak people. The second group was immediately sent to the gas chambers. Before the first group was taken to their tent, they were asked to give up all of their possessions. Their clothes were taken and instead, they were given rags to wear. In the beginning, everyone had the fear of getting gassed.
He talks about how in the camps they all were given numbers and this number was treated as their name by the guards and warden. In the camps, they were made to work tirelessly and then they would be given food which was less than the bare minimum in quantity and of inedible quality. The soup was as thin as water and the bread stale. The sanitary conditions were not good as well. Everyone was sick in one way or another. The ones who were in a condition in which they won’t be able to move would simply just lie in their urine and faeces. Because of the hard-working condition with just rags as clothes, their bodies would take a toll. They would suffer from edema which made it harder for them to wear their shoes. At first, they would tie the shoelaces a little until they were just unable to tie them. Some used small pieces of wire as a substitute for their shoelaces while others had to give up their shoes because they would be unable to wear them. Along with everything, they would be subject to harsh treatment and hitting by the guards.
These conditions are some of the worst conditions someone can face. These conditions would push people to a point where they give up their will to live. Some people were gone as far as being suicidal. The most preferred way of suicide in the camps was to hold the electric fence. An interesting thing about the will to live is that when people would lose it, they would soon die eventually because of one reason or another. They would fall sick and won’t be able to get up in the morning. Any time someone would die, other people would take things off his body which could be helpful for them. This was not looked down upon but in fact, encouraged.
The author divides a prisoner’s mental reaction to camp life into three phases: the period following his admission; the period when he is well entrenched in camp routine; and the period following his release and liberation.
The first phase is shock. The author gives his own experience of the shock he observed. In the camps, they had gallows on which they would hang the other prisoners for public display to show other people what can happen to them if they don’t do things according to the guards.
Here, Dr. explains the delusion of reprieve. Delusion of reprieve states that a condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute. This term was coined by Dr. himself for the prisoners of the camp.
If you want to stay alive, there is only one way: look fit for work.
Apathy, the main symptom of the second phase, was a necessary mechanism of self-defence. The prisoner’s sole motive in the camp was to survive themselves and help their fellow prisoners to survive too. After some time in the camp, the prisoners were so used to everything that when they would be coming back to camp after working you could hear some of them say “Finally, another day is over.” This amount of strain along with the constant necessity on the task of staying alive forced prisoners to tone down their life to the primitive level.
There were two schools of thought regarding the consumption of food. They already got the bare minimum of food, so the first school of thought was in favour to eat all of the food at one time while the other was in favour to save it and eat it in small portions throughout the whole day.
The author recalls an incident where he witnessed one of the bravest men of the whole camp cry like a child in the morning because his edema had grown so bad that he was not able to wear his shoes and would have to work barefoot in the cold. While this was happening, the author found a small piece of bread in his coat, he took it out and ate it with delight.
The author also noted one interesting fact about the prisoners of the camp. All of them had no sexual desire or libido, not even in their dreams.
Love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.
The author would often find himself talking to his wife while working and any other time he would find himself alone. She too had been taken to a concentration camp. He didn’t know if she was alive or not but he would still talk to her as if she could hear him. She would even talk back to him. The author says this part is one of the reasons for his survival in the camp.
The author says love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.
The author also talks about the power of humour. He tells how he helped his friend to be humorous. He believes that humour, more than anything else in human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.
The attempt to develop a sense of humour and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living.
“There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky
If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death, human life cannot be complete.
A man who let himself decline because he could not see any future goal found himself occupied with retrospective thoughts. In a different connection, we have already spoken of the tendency there was to look into the past, to help make the present, with all its horrors, less real. But in robbing the present of its reality there lay a certain danger. It became easy to overlook the opportunities to make something positive of camp life, opportunities which really did exist.
Such people forgot that often it is just such an exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself. Instead of taking the camp’s difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised it as something of no consequence. They preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past. Life for such people became meaningless.
It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future — And this is his salvation in the most difficult moments of his existence, although he sometimes has to force his mind to the task.
An interesting event was recorded at the year-end of 1944. The death rate in the week between Christmas, 1944, and New Year’s, 1945, increased in the camp beyond all previous experiences. In his opinion, the explanation for this increase did not lie in the harder working conditions or the deterioration of our food supplies or a change of weather or new epidemics. It was simply that the majority of the prisoners had lived in the naive hope that they would be home again by Christmas. As the time drew near and there was no encouraging news, the prisoners lost courage and disappointment overcame them. This had a dangerous influence on their powers of resistance and a great number of them died.
He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how. - Nietzsche
We now come to the third stage of a prisoner’s mental reactions: the psychology of the prisoner after his liberation. But before he talks about it, the author answers a question he faces very often. The question is: What can you tell us about the psychological make-up of the camp guards?
First, among the guards, there were some sadists, sadists in the purest clinical sense. Second, these sadists were always selected when a severe detachment of guards was needed. Third, the feelings of the majority of the guards had been dulled by the number of years in which, in ever-increasing doses, they had witnessed the brutal methods of the camp. These morally and mentally hardened men at least refused to take active part in sadistic measures. But they did not prevent others from carrying them out. Fourth, it must be stated that even among the guards there were some who took pity on us. I shall only mention the commander of the camp from which I was liberated. It was found after the liberation—only the camp doctor, a prisoner himself, had known of it previously—that this man had paid no small sum of money from his own pocket in order to purchase medicines for his prisoners from the nearest market town.
Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn. The boundaries between groups overlapped and we must not try to simplify matters by saying that these men were angels and those were devils.
Now coming to the third phase. The author says we had said this word so often during all the years we dreamed about it, that it had lost its meaning. Its reality did not penetrate into our consciousness; we could not grasp the fact that freedom was ours. We had literally lost the ability to feel pleased and had to relearn it slowly. Psychologically, what was happening to the liberated prisoners could be called “depersonalization.” Everything appeared unreal, unlikely, as in a dream. We could not believe it was true. During this psychological phase one observed that people with natures of a more primitive kind could not escape the influences of the brutality which had surrounded them in camp life. Now, being free, they thought they could use their freedom licentiously and ruthlessly. The only thing that had changed for them was that they were now the oppressors instead of the oppressed. They became instigators, not objects, of willful force and injustice. They justified their behaviour with their own terrible experiences.
With this, the first part of the book ends. In the second part, Dr Frankl talks about his post-camp life related to the therapy.
Man’s will to meaning can also be frustrated, in which case logotherapy speaks of “existential frustration.” The term “existential” may be used in three ways: to refer to (1) existence itself, i. e., the specifically human mode of being; (2) the meaning of existence; and (3) the striving to find a concrete meaning in personal existence, that is to say, the will to meaning.
Existential frustration is in itself neither pathological nor pathogenic. A man’s concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease. It may well be that interpreting the first in terms of the latter motivates a doctor to bury his patient’s existential despair under a heap of tranquillizing drugs. It is his task, rather, to pilot the patient through his existential crises of growth and development.
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load which is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together. So if therapists wish to foster their patients’ mental health, they should not be afraid to create a sound amount of tension through a reorientation toward the meaning of one’s life.
The feeling of which so many patients complain today, namely, the feeling of the total and ultimate meaninglessness of their lives. They lack the awareness of a meaning worth living for. They are haunted by the experience of their inner emptiness, a void within themselves; they are caught in that situation which I have called the “existential vacuum.”
The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom. For this, he gives an example of “Sunday neurosis,” that kind of depression which afflicts people who become aware of the lack of contentment in their lives when the rush of the busy week is over and the void within themselves becomes manifest. Such widespread phenomena as depression, aggression and addiction are not understandable unless we recognize the existential vacuum underlying them. This is also true of the crises of pensioners and ageing people.
e can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering. The first, the way of achievement or accomplishment, is quite obvious. The second and third need further elaboration.
The second way of finding meaning in life is by experiencing something—such as goodness, truth and beauty—by experiencing nature and culture or, last but not least, by experiencing another human being in his very uniqueness—by loving him. Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him.
The third way of finding meaning in life is by suffering. In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.
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