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.

Baking Cakes in Kigali by Gaile Parkin

Baking Cakes in Kigali by Gaile Parkin, 2009

This book has already been discussed and reviewed very extensively. It is a good read, convincingly written so that you can, or imagine you can, hear the Tanzanians and Rwandans speaking. It invites comparisons with Alexander McCall Smith’s Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency books, but is in a way much more serious, being set in post-genocide Kigali, with the multiple problems of “truth and justice”, Aids, malaria, orphaned street-children, and more.

A very telling aspect is how the various characters work together to rebuild Rwanda, at a very local and personal level.

Angel, the central figure, makes cakes to order. Each chapter is broadly built around a different cake, and the Cake Order Form, is one of the devices that unite the narrative into a whole. Angel also has a habit of polishing her glasses when she needs time to think; and making hot steaming mugs of sweet, spicy tea.

Parkin clearly draws very extensively on her own experience as an HIV-Aids counsellor in Kigali. What is conspicuous by its absence is any coherent notion of marriage or of the value of morality, continence, chastity or faithfulness. In the many incidents and discussions in the book which touch on weddings, marriage, and couples, there is no understanding of marriage and love as self-giving.

Certainly, Angel and Pius are faithfully married, and Angel refers with deep disapproval to the way a young woman called Linda dresses: “she had never seen a man look at Linda’s face; there were always other parts of her body that were asking more urgently to be observed.” Angel has good values, but does not reflect on them. She and Pius are Catholics, but they know that some Catholics, even nuns and priests, took part in the killing in 1994. “In Rwanda we’re simply Christians. I’m nervous of attending just one church here, of listening to just one priest. Because how can we know what is truly in that priest’s heart after so many showed that love and peace were only words in their mouths? So we attend a different church every second week; in between, we still attend our local Catholic church” (p.85).

At the very start of the book, Angel explains that when she and her husband got married (they are now grandparents), they were “pioneers” of contraception, and were careful to have only two children “so that we could afford to educate them well.” In the event, their children, having had children of their own, both lost their respective spouses and died before the start of the book, and Angel and her husband Pius are now starting all over again, bringing up their five grandchildren as their own children. The book does not point the moral, but it is actually a clear instance of how wrong-headed it is to contracept in order to have fewer children and hence more money.

A fairly important figure in the book is Jeanne d’Arc, who, having been orphaned and gang-raped during the genocide at the age of eleven, has been a prostitute for the past seven years in order to support herself, her two sisters, and a small boy they found abandoned. Angel is able to help Jeanne d’Arc in many different ways, finally putting her in touch with someone who can teach her to sew to be able to earn her living in a “safer” way. But, at the same time, she jokes with someone else about Jeanne d’Arc and her “business”. Perhaps she develops more compassion for Jeanne d’Arc in the course of the book.

Angel is able to help people in many ways in the course of her business. One often has the impression that the author had a list of themes she wanted to bring in, and worked through them – FGM, the mayibobo (street children), truthfulness to oneself and to others, Catholicism in Rwanda – chapter by chapter, through the book.

Overall it is a good read, ideal for provoking enjoyable discussions, which need to take each theme a lot deeper, with a lot more informed input, than the book itself is able to do.

Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande

Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End

Atul Gawande

Profile Books, 2014

Atul Gawande is an American doctor whose parents came from India. His book discusses, in detail, the current state of Western medicine with regard to the end of life. We read it because of its extreme relevance; each of us has lived through, or is currently living through, the death of a family member or close friend from different kinds of terminal illnesses.

These days, doctors and nurses are (highly) trained to do things. They identify what is wrong and see what can be done to fix it. They are not trained to cope with death, or to discuss the subject of death, still less to relate to patients on a personal level.

According to Gawande (p. 166), more than 40% of oncologists admit to offering treatments that they believe unlikely to work. And the doctor-patient relationship is increasingly miscast in retail terms: “The Customer is always right”. Sick people want to be “better”, to regain the life they had before; doctors are hesitant to trample on patients’ expectations and are not trained to explain to them just how little hope there is of recovery, for example, or just how little time they may have.

Gawande shows that this often results in terminal patients being subjected to drastic operations, chemotherapy, etc., but not being shown realistically what their situation is or what is the best that can be hoped for.

He also looks at all sorts of initiatives that are being set up to implement a different approach to terminal illness and end-of-life care. This includes a very good description of what a Hospice does, pp. 161 & 165. It raised the question of “Ars bene moriendi” – the art of making a good death, a mediaeval theme encouraging a consideration of what would constitute a good death. In the 20th and early 21st century, overwhelmingly, people who are asked “How would you want to die?” say they would like death to be so sudden that they knew nothing about it.

However, in practice a death like that is often devastating for those who are left behind, who have had no chance to say goodbye, let alone resolve unfinished issues, forgive or seek forgiveness, and so on. Endings matter (p. 239). A traditional Roman Catholic prayer was “From a sudden and unprovided death, O Lord, deliver us.”

Gawande focuses on the importance of having time to talk (p. 177) and even recommends paying doctors to take time to talk, not just perform (p. 187).

He has arrived at a set of questions that can help terminal patients arrive, sooner or later, at a real understanding of their situation, and that can enable them to make the best decisions on their treatment options (p. 183).

“What is most important to you?”

“What goals are most important for you now?”

“What trade-offs are you willing to make?”

“What sacrifices are you willing to make now for the possibility of more time later?”

“What are your worries?’

“What are your biggest fears and concerns?’

He also says to patients, “I am worried” (This means both “this is serious”, and “I’m on your side”).

What is needed is to help people to negotiate the overwhelming anxiety, about death, anxiety about suffering, anxiety about their loved ones, finances and process (p.182). People die only once, so they have no experience to draw upon (p. 188).

The book covers a very wide set of issues, impossible to cover adequately in a blog post like this. One point he makes is that in the case of elderly people, it is normally their children who make the choices for them, and they choose safety over quality of life every time, sometimes leading to dire results for the elderly person's happiness and well-being.

We stop the healthy from committing suicide because we recognize that their psychic suffering is often temporary (p. 244).

For the terminally ill who face sufferings that we know will increase, only the stonehearted can be unsympathetic (p.244). But assisted living is far harder than assisted death (p. 245). If you only read about this book and don’t read the book itself, you could assume that, with his emphasis on making the last stages of life as good as they can be, Gawande would naturally support the “assisted suicide” or “assisted dying” proposals. He does not. One of his 2014 Reith lectures was quoted in a letter urging “assisted dying” from a large group of VIPs, published in The Daily Telegraph on Monday December 29, 2014: “we are heartless if we don’t recognise unbearable suffering and seek to alleviate it”. They used this quotation in support of their urge to legalise “assisted dying”, a.k.a. euthanasia for terminally ill people.

But they were misquoting him by taking one sentence out of context. In fact, on pp. 244-245 of Being Mortal, Gawande looks at the Netherlands, where euthanasia has been legal for some years, and sees that palliative medicine in the Netherlands lags far behind palliative medicine in other countries such as the UK and America.  While he talks about medication to end unendurable pain, it is clear that what he has in mind is precisely what the Catholic Church has always taught: it is not wrong to provide pain-killing medication for the purpose of reducing or ending suffering in a patient with a terminal illness, even when it is foreseen that the medication will have the effect of shortening their life. What is wrong is to end one’s own or someone else’s life in order to escape suffering which can be relieved by medication.

20 October 2009 - The Picture of Dorian Gray

Woodlands Book Club has been going for a year now. October's meeting was about Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. Before settling down to discuss it, we debated the book for next month and decided on C. S. Lewis, 'Till We Have Faces": it is out of print, but available on Amazon and abebooks.com second-hand.
Dorian Gray is short but enormously interesting. One member had been to see the recent film when it came out, and did not recommend it at all - too dark and vicious; the message of the book was distorted.
Wilde's preface to the book - ending on the statement that "all art is quite useless" - is deliberately provocative, an inverted way of expressing "Art for art's sake". The opposite view is expressed in the "Letter to Artists" written in 1999 by John Paul II: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/letters/documents/hf_jp-ii_let_23041999_artists_en.html
John Paul II sees art as being at the service of mankind, a way of expressing the goodness and especially the beauty of creation at all levels, and communicating it to others.
By contrast, Wilde's philosophy and way of life was essentially self-centred and self-seeking. He was the leader of the 'aesthetic' movement at the end of the 19th century (which started in decadence and was parodied in Gilbert & Sullivan's operetta 'Patience').
In the book, the ideal that is presented is to seek beauty and experience pleasure - not happiness, as Gray says towards the end. His 'search' for beauty is described in great detail in Chapter 11, which is key to the whole book. Surprisingly, many bookclubbers had skipped Chapter 11 because it didn't have any action!
A question that comes up repeatedly is one person's influence on another: Lord Henry Wotton is delighted at the way he is able to mould the young Dorian Gray. Gray himself is shown to have a progressively more destructive influence on the people who follow him. He ends up by refusing to admit his influence - read responsibility - on anyone.
We discussed which of the three main characters of the book was actually Oscar Wilde - Dorian Gray, Basil Hallward and Henry Wotton. Different bookclubbers had identified one or other of the three as Wilde when we were reading, and this coloured our interpretation of it. Presumably all three were Wilde.