Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” -- Nietzsche

Since I had just heard about Barbara Ehrenreich’s new work against the rhetoric of “positive thinking,” I was more skeptical than ever about a self-help book as I boarded my plane to England in late June 2010. But A. had passed me the book, and I figured if it made it past his excruciatingly sensitive bullshit-meter, it must have some kind of substance. Indeed it does: it locates meaning in suffering.

Suffering isn’t the only way to find meaning in one’s life; one can do something, like write a book, or have other kinds of experiences, like falling in love. But Frankl’s opening autobiographical essay about his experiences in the holocaust elegantly illustrate that if a person can come up with ways to deal with suffering, they perhaps have a bedrock of meaning that can help them through any other aspect of life. (Full disclosure: I am biased in favor of this perspective on life because I remember well that it is exactly what my grandparents taught me.)

I’d like to mention just a few of Frankl’s experiences of suffering, and the means with which he responded to what life asked of him.

As he was led to the concentration camp at Dachau, Frankl couldn’t help but be consumed by curiosity. He wonders about the stories behind all the people, Nazis and prisoners. He notices detachedly that when malnutrition becomes a fact of life, movement of the body degrades, but ultimately the human body finds a way around it. Curiosity about one’s circumstances allows for the detachment from the distressed affective response, and gives a measure of control over, not the situation, but the response to it. Also the sheer force of life is inspiring, and can be found anywhere if one takes the time to observe it. It brings tears of pain and joy to my eyes to remember how my Grandma suffered through cancer three times, and yet even as she watched her own body consumed, was always able to observe her own self-consuming flesh with great detachment. We would even laugh over it!

Second, one must make the most of one’s attachments. Frankl does not use this word or even dwell on this at length as part of his logotherapy practice, but he clearly illustrates that his fellow prisoners form a close-knit community that enables a few of them to survive -- Frankl’s own life was saved many times because of attachments that he formed. Love, the strongest possible attachments between humans, makes only a single appearance in Frankl’s text, as he contemplates his wife from his camp, and overcomes the perplexing thought that she was quite likely already dead with the thought on this attachment, love. He quotes from the Song of Solomon: “Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death.”

Finally, genuine religious devotion, which I would now define simply as the attachment to God, is apparent all around the camp, and is an answer to the question of what one makes of one’s sufferings. Again, Frankl does not describe this in detail, but rather gives only anecdotes of how some of the men in the camp would gather in prayer, the most pious and genuine prayer that Frankl had ever witnessed. To bring up my Grandma again, it was she who taught me to pray, and looking back it is clear that prayer aided greatly in her conceptualization of the mind as an entity distinct from the body, and further with a central purpose: to return to God. God may or may not be real, but my Grandma’s attachment to Him certainly was. I lament (lament, the word is etymologically correct) that this, I could not inherit from Grandma. My interrogative mind has struck down the certitude of God’s existence, and I think I can never gain it back again.

Those are just some of the great lessons to be learned from suffering specifically; we might also mention that it is of great use to contemplate suffering even when we are not suffering. On my flight to England, I was served a meal that was quite terrible -- one of those lasagnas that comes in a tin, with noodles that taste roughly like tin, along with some leathery green beans and a hard roll of bleached flour. But my mind flew to my reading, in which Frankl gives a thorough contemplation of concentration camp soup: the thin, watery soup, which was the mainstay of camp prisoners (52), the cook who dealt the soup evenly, scooping to the bottom for peas (58), the value of cigarettes as currency for soup (81), soup for good cheer in a rare camp theatrical revue, soup as payment for medical services. “Soup” occurs eleven times in Frankl’s short essay, which shows how the stuff symbolized the life of the camp, life not to the fullest, but not death either. I thought of these things, and as I returned to my lasagna, I found that I ate it with gusto, scraping up the last dregs of cold tomato with my crust of bread. How grand life is!

These comments all refer to the first of two parts in this book. The second part is an expository introduction to Frankl’s medical philosophy, which he calls logotherapy. It turns out that Frankl was a certifiable prodigy of psychology -- certifiable since he opened correspondence with Freud at age 16, and was soon formulating his own model of neurosis in distinction to Freud’s. Freud thought that at base, most neuroses were ailments of the psyche traceable to childhood family relations and sexual experience. Frankl early on felt what drives humans was not sex, but the search for meaning, of which even sex was only a part. Many neurotic responses are “noögenic,” or born from the mind, the mind which drives itself towards meaning but cannot locate it. Frankl’s basic treatment is to teach the subject “self transcendence,” or as my mother taught it, “get over yourself.”

Among the many topics Frankl touches on in a very small space, paradoxical intention particularly rings true to me. I think of how I’ve always had trouble using urinals, and paradoxical intention immediately suggests a solution: when I approach the urinal and find myself unable to pee, I’m frequently concerned that it may take a long time to get started, and this makes me unable to start. So I may think to myself, “Aha, I can take the longest of all to pee. Watch, as I stand here for minutes, nay, over an hour!” Immediately I see there is no need for this, and I am able. Amazingly, clinical studies show that this short-term fix works over the long term as well. Patients with much worse disorders than I have testify to its enduring power.

Getting over yourself, self transcendence, means seeing yourself in the world, and locating the ways you can gain a sense of self-determination. We must actively wonder what possibilities there are. Frankl likes to say that it is not about asking what the meaning of life is, but rather thinking of the possibly the world is asking something of us. By speaking of it this way, Frankl emphasizes the need for all of us to be responsible for our own response to the world. Being a responsible person, and feeling responsible, are thus key features of any meaningful life as much as the need for self-determination.

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