Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

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.