Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl (1945; 1992)
There are plenty of claims on the internet that “this book
saved my life” and many more that "this book changed my life". It is easy to see why.
Frankl was a Jewish psychiatrist living in Austria before
the Second World War. After the Anschluss,
he and his whole family were arrested and taken to concentration camps. Viktor
himself survived, but his parents, wife, and siblings were killed. The first
part of this very short book describes, fairly briefly, his horrific experiences
in the concentration camps, together with some of the reflections and lessons
that he drew from them. The second part is an even briefer account of
logotherapy, the school of psychotherapy which he founded.
Although it is so short, the first part of the book touches
on many subjects: religion and spiritualism; love; beauty; inner life; the
meaning of life; death; “the last human freedom”, much quoted (“everything can
be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose
one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s way”); hope;
time; suffering; “collective psychotherapy”; the dividing-line between good and
evil; and morality. A quotation from Nietzsche is key: “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” Prisoners who had a reason for
living were more likely to survive the starvation and brutality of the camps. Frankl’s
understanding of love, which he describes almost in terms of a revelation, is
perhaps the most striking of all:
But my mind clung to my wife's
image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw
her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look then was more
luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise (...)
A thought transfixed me: for the
first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets,
proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth — that 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. In a position of utter
desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only
achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way — an
honorable way — in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the
image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my
life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, "The angels are
lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory."
In the second part Frankl explains the fundamental approach
of logotherapy, which is the conviction of the “will to meaning” as being the most
essential driving force in the human mind, more so than the will to power or
the will to pleasure. He then describes how this is applied to all sorts of
different situations and problems. He covers freedom and conditioning;
responsibleness, which he terms “the very essence of human
existence” (“I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the east coast be
supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast”); the existential
vacuum; love; happiness; the meaning of suffering; the error of Freudian
psychotherapy; freedom; euthanasia; “paradoxical intention” as a means of
combating phobias or compulsive behaviour.
A very important point is what he calls “the
self-transcendence of human existence”. He says: “What is called
self-actualization [self-fulfilment] is not an attainable aim at all, for the
simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it.
In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of
self-transcendence.” Or, in the words of the Second Vatican Council often
quoted by Pope John Paul II among others, “Man can only find himself through
the sincere gift of self”.
Frankl says very much the same about happiness. It is not to
be aimed for directly; it comes as the result of finding meaning in life.
On love, Frankl declares:
No one can become fully aware of
the very essence of another human being until he loves him. By his love he is
enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and
even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized.
Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to
actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and what
he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.
