man’s search for meaning

Many circumstances in our lives can lead to a loss of hope. We often despair at unemployment, illness, death, loneliness, destitution, and dreams deferred. These are real sources of suffering in our lives and often we lack the resources to navigate them. In Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search Meaning, we find these resources in ample measure. Frankl was born on 26 March 1905 in Vienna, Austria. He earned his medical doctorate in 1930 and, in 1937, opened his own neurology and psychiatry practice. The following year, German troops entered Austria during the Anschluss, incorporating the country into the German Reich. Soon after, during Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”), Nazis and their collaborators burned synagogues, looted Jewish homes and businesses, killed at least 91 people, and arrested around 30,000 Jewish men, sending them to the Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and Mauthausen concentration camps.

In 1941, Frankl married his first wife, Tilly Grosser. That same year, on 22 June, Germany and its Axis allies invaded the Soviet Union. As they advanced, Einsatzgruppen killing squads followed, murdering Jews between the front lines, while SS personnel carried out the first gassing experiments at Auschwitz. In 1942, Frankl, along with his wife, father, mother, and brother, was arrested and deported to the Theresienstadt camp in Bohemia. On 20 January that year, senior Nazi officials convened at the Wannsee Conference near Berlin to coordinate the “Final Solution.” In 1944, Frankl and Tilly were transported to Auschwitz. His mother followed a week later and was murdered immediately in the gas chamber. Tilly was later sent to Bergen-Belsen, where she died at age 24. In 1945, Frankl was liberated and returned to Vienna, where he learned of the deaths of his family. That year, on 30 April, Hitler committed suicide in Berlin, and on 2 September the Second World War officially ended.

In 1946, Frankl published Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationslager, translated into English in 1959 as From Death-Camp to Existentialism, and later reissued in 1963 under the title Man’s Search for Meaning. The book is an extraordinary rumination on the ways in which privation precipitates a profound encounter with love, hope, and inner freedom. Frankl writes that during his time as a prisoner; he was transfixed by the thought that “love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.” According to Frankl, “the salvation of man is through love and in love.” This realisation was catalysed by contemplation of his beloved Tilly, which provided him with a sense of fulfilment. Through recollections of how prisoners cared for their friends in the concentration camps, prioritising their wellbeing above all else, the book highlights the truth of Frankl’s realisation. Love is the saving grace of us all.

Frankl’s book is irreducible to reflections on why suffering proffers meaning in life. Instead, it is about the resources people draw upon to imbue life with meaning in the midst of suffering. Love of the other, self, and life are the primary interior resources that prisoners could draw upon to exercise the strength needed to endure the daily struggles and trials of life in a concentration camp. Frankl writes about the possibility of artistic experiences in a camp and notes a prisoner who, upon witnessing some clouds, remarks, “How beautiful the world could be!” How beautiful it could be if love were recognised as the powerhouse of endurance, one that invites us to invest in the minutiae of the everyday, no matter how painful. Freedom, therefore, lies in one’s capacity to love despite the character’s of one’s surroundings. To love and invest in living is perhaps the greatest form of freedom there is. Accordingly, Frankl writes that “the last of the human freedoms [is] to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” This attitude, love, is the principal disposition one must take in all circumstances.

For Frankl, the way one bears his suffering is “a genuine inner achievement” that represents a form of spiritual freedom that cannot be taken away. This spiritual freedom grants life its sense of meaning and purpose. Frankl emphasises one’s attitude to existence or life, particularly in situations where it is restricted by external forces. He labours to ascribe meaning to suffering, putting forth the incompleteness of human life without suffering or death. These two companions allow us to appreciate the beauty of living. In other words, suffering imbues life with meaning because it opens our hearts to a love and appreciation of life and existence. Still, Frankl notes that life in a concentration camp could be defined as a “provisional existence of unknown limit” because of the uncertainty surrounding the liberation of the prisoners. Those who could not see the end of their ‘provisional existence’ were not able to find an ultimate goal in life. Those who could not manufacture a goal for themselves that encouraged them to keep on living, succumbed to the exacting pain of the camp. This is why Frankl argued that life in a camp required a fundamental change in the prisoner’s attitude toward life. The prisoner had to relinquish every expectation they had from life and ask instead what life expected from him. No matter the circumstances, life expects to be honoured, lived, appreciated, celebrated, and loved. Frankl reminds us that life and existence are a gift that should not be easily dispensed with no matter how difficult it may all seem. The future always awaits us – whatever it may hold.

***

Frankl, therefore, provides an account of logotherapy, which focuses “on the meanings to be fulfilled by the patient in his future.” He characterises it as “a meaning-centred psychotherapy.” During logotherapy, patients are forced to confront and recognise the meaning in their lives, which can aid in overcoming neuroses. For logotherapy, articulating the meaning of human existence and individuals’ search for meaning is the primary motivational force in the individual. We all have a will to meaning; that is, we all seek to find the sources of meaning and purpose in our life. This will can be frustrated resulting in existential frustration which can further result in neuroses. For Frankl, if suffering grows out of existential frustration, it may be understood to be a human achievement as it reveals that we care about our lives. Logotherapy seeks “to make the patient aware of what he actually longs for in the depth of his being.” It excavates the hidden logos – reason and order – of his existence. The aim of logotherapy is to help patients find meaning in their lives.

Frankl often equates ‘meaning’ with something to look forward to, such as when he was a prisoner in a concentration camp and looked forward to rewriting a manuscript of his that had been confiscated. He further equates it to the process of becoming, stating that mental health is based on the tension between “what one is and what one should become.” Therefore, insofar as we are embroiled in an endless process of becoming, we owe it to ourselves to live and see what we can become and this is something worthwhile to look forward to. For Frankl, the individual is goal-oriented and should seek to find a goal to strive towards, which is a process that is fraught with tension. Therefore, Frankl is not concerned about the meaning of life in general, but that of a person’s life at specific moments in time. Meaning-making requires that one accepts responsibility for his life, allowing himself to be questioned by life which, as discussed above, has expectations of us.

Frankl encourages readers to avoid the ‘existential vacuum’ characterised by nihilism and the sense that life is meaningless and empty. He is concerned with encouraging readers and patients to fall in love with life anew. This can be done through the creation of a work or the performance of an act or deed, by experiencing or encountering another person or goodness, truth, and beauty, and by the attitude one chooses to take towards unavoidable suffering. For Frankl, there is always a reason to live, and we simply need to find the most appropriate goal and end towards which to direct our efforts. We must and can take a stand in relation to the conditions we find ourselves in. We do not have to be defined by our circumstances and the external constraints that blind us to the meaningfulness of life and existence. This is why there “is nothing conceivable which so conditions a man as to leave him without the slightest freedom.”

Frankl believes in the individual’s unending capacity to be self-determining; that is, to make choices that are not merely the product of his environment or circumstances. While he believes that one must look outside themselves when manufacturing meaning, he does not believe circumstance is so limiting a reality that it cannot be transcended. He observes that prisoners in concentration camps who could not see beyond their immediate circumstances were quick to lose hope which resulted in the deterioration of their state, sometimes leading to premature death. This, he tells us, was the majority of prisoners, while only a few were able to look forward to the future or take comfort in the past, remembering loved ones or imagining the lives they could lead outside of the camps. Indeed, it is easy to see why Man’s Search for Meaning is often characterised as a tribute to hope. Perhaps more poignantly, it is a tribute to love, for hope springs out of love and out of the latter comes freedom. If a person can learn to love life or existence, understanding themselves to be the unfolding locus of possibility, then this process of becoming becomes a goal in itself, one that is supplemented by yet other goals and loves. To understand life and existence to always already be imbued with potential and possibility is the greatest form of freedom, no matter the circumstances and suffering that seemingly define one’s reality from time to time.

Still, it can be overwhelming to think of life as having expectations of us and of ourselves as being responsible for life and our existence. To be confronted with possibility is to be faced with the looming spectre of potential suffering. Yet, Frankl invites us to relinquish fear and recognise the transitoriness of all things. Possibility and transience go hand in hand. Indeed, the latter creates the conditions of possibility for possibility. Without the transient nature of suffering, whether through death or other forms of overcoming, each person’s capacity to endure and determine goals towards which to strive would be undermined. Each person’s capacity to practice a loving disposition towards life and existence would be compromised. Therefore, despite their seemingly ‘provisional existence’, the prisoners in concentration camps could still choose their disposition towards their circumstances despite uncertainty about their liberation. Still, at times Frankl appears to be advocating enduring for endurance’s sake, for how precisely is someone in undignified circumstances supposed to find the beauty and meaning in their condition?

In the final analysis, Frankl can be understood to be saying that the attitude one takes to his suffering and circumstances can either exacerbate or alleviate his pain. This pain, a product of one’s inability to identify and enact the sources of meaning in his life at any given time, can be alleviated by recognising and acknowledging the responsibility we all have to life and living. The latter requires a certain degree of appreciation and love so that the individual may cultivate or manufacture goals towards which to direct himself. This is possible in the concentration camp as it is in the halls and corridors of the homes of suburban nuclear families who have never been affected by the vagaries of war. Indeed, one’s goals and aspirations in life can vary from time to time; however, these goals must be underpinned by an abiding recognition that life is invariably meaningful.

Accordingly, Frankl succeeds in his efforts to open our eyes to the merits of logotherapy as a ‘meaning-centred psychotherapy’, and to the plight of the prisoner as that of a fundamental loss of meaning. His writings are timeless and can provide contemporary readers with the resources they need to navigate periods of suffering in their life. By attending to the question of meaning, each person is invited to take a renewed interest in his life; that is, to invest in life and the business of living in the spirit of love and in the knowledge that a love of life is the wellspring from which true freedom is born. Perhaps, in times of suffering we must all declare, “How beautiful the world could be!” For in so doing our eyes are opened to possibility and the transience of our present and seemingly insurmountable circumstances. This is the heart of Frankl’s work, that we must all learn to love, so that we may live.