Viktor E. Frankl‘s Man‘s Search for Meaning is one of those rare books of inestimable value which one can and should read many times throughout one‘s life. The reason for it must be that every word therein rose from painful personal experiences – from a life of a kind that none of us has ever had to endure: experiences in a concentration camp, as the title of the first part of the book tells us.
“This book does not claim to be an account of facts and events but of personal experiences, experiences which millions of prisoners have suffered time and again. It is the inside story of a concentration camp, told by one of its survivors.“
Viktor E. Frankl, Man‘s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press Boston, p. 3
Viktor E. Frankl was born in Vienna, Austria, in the year 1905, where he also died in 1997. He survived Auschwitz and he is considered as the founding father of the “third Viennese school of psychotherapy“ – the third school after the psychoanalytical approaches of Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler. Harold S. Kushner in his foreword to Man‘s Search for Meaning gives us a couple of hints on Frankl‘s disagreement with Freud and Adler and on his own unique perspective and contribution to the field of psychotherapy:
“Terrible as it was, his experience in Auschwitz reinforced what was already one of his key ideas: Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it. (…) Finally, Frankl‘s most enduring insight, one that I have called on often in my own life and in countless counseling situations: Forces beyond our control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.“
Harold S. Kushner, Foreword in: Viktor E. Frankl, Man‘s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press Boston, p. X
Apathy
Frankl clearly states that it was not due to some sort of special strength on his part or better survival and resilience tactics that he survived the camps while others did not. It was nothing but lots of lucky moments sparing him the fate of entering the gas chambers or of dying due to weakness and sickness in one of the camps – it was nothing but grace. And that the best men he knew did not return from the camps. Yet, from his own experiences and from his observations about the experiences of his comrades he was able to deduce certain factors of resilience, as we could call them, – his fate forced him to study human nature in one of the most vile settings ever created by men and under the most extreme and abnormal of conditions, and he thereby was able to understand more deeply what is essential to the integrity of our human souls.
To get a gruesomely real picture of what Frankl is trying to tell us, one should read his entire account as he describes two major stages in the psychological reaction of the inmates of Auschwitz: first shock, then apathy.
“I think it was Lessing who once said, ‘There are things which must cause you to lose your reason or you have none to lose.‘ An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior. Even we psychiatrists expect the reactions of a man to an abnormal situation, such as being committed to an asylum, to be abnormal in proportion to the degree of his normality. The reaction of a man to his admission to a concentration camp also represents an abnormal state of mind, but judged objectively it is a normal and, as will be shown later, typical reaction to the given circumstances. These reactions, as I have described them, began to change in a few days. The prisoner passed from the first to the second phase; the phase of relative apathy, in which he achieved a kind of emotional death.“
Viktor E. Frankl, Man‘s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press Boston, p. 20
“Apathy, the main symptom of the second phase, was a necessary mechanism of self-defense. Reality dimmed, and all efforts and all emotions were centered on one task: preserving one‘s own life and that of the other fellow. It was typical to hear the prisoners, while they were being herded back to camp from their work sites in the evening, sigh with relief and say, ‘Well, another day is over.‘ It can be readily understood that such a state of strain, coupled with the constant necessity of concentrating on the task of staying alive, forced the prisoner‘s inner life down to a primitive level. Several of my colleagues in camp who were trained in psychoanalysis often spoke of a ‘regression‘ in the camp inmate – a retreat to a more primitive form of mental life.“
Viktor E. Frankl, Man‘s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press Boston, p. 28
“With the majority of the prisoners, the primitive life and the effort of having to concentrate on just saving one‘s skin led to a total disregard of anything not serving that purpose, and explained the prisoners‘ complete lack of sentiment.“
Viktor E. Frankl, Man‘s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press Boston, p. 33
“I mentioned earlier how everything that was not connected with the immediate task of keeping oneself and one‘s closest friends alive lost its value. Everything was sacrificed to this end. A man‘s character became involved to the point that he was caught in a mental turmoil which threatened all the values he held and threw them into doubt. Under the influence of a world which no longer recognized the value of human life and human dignity, which had robbed man of his will and had made him an object to be exterminated (having planned, however, to make full use of him first – to the last ounce of his physical resources) – under this influence the personal ego finally suffered a loss of values. If the man in the concentration camp did not struggle against this in a last effort to save his self-respect, he lost the feeling of being an individual, a being with a mind, with inner freedom and personal value. He thought of himself then as only a part of an enormous mass of people; his existence descended to the level of animal life. The men were herded – sometimes to one place then to another; sometimes driven together, then apart – like a flock of sheep without a thought or a will of their own. A small but dangerous pack watched them from all sides, well versed in methods of torture and sadism. They drove the herd incessantly, backwards and forwards, with shouts, kicks and blows. And we, the sheep, thought of two things only – how to evade the bad dogs and how to get a little food.“
Viktor E. Frankl, Man‘s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press Boston, p. 49-50
“The camp inmate was frightened of making decisions and of taking any sort of initiative whatsoever. This was the result of a strong feeling that fate was one‘s master, and that one must not try to influence it in any way, but instead let it take its own course.“
Viktor E. Frankl, Man‘s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press Boston, p. 56
“Apart from its role as a defensive mechanism, the prisoners‘ apathy was also the result of other factors. Hunger and lack of sleep contributed to it (as they do in normal life, also) and to the general irritability which was another characteristic of the prisoners‘ mental state. (…)
Viktor E. Frankl, Man‘s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press Boston, p. 62-63
Besides these physical causes, there were mental ones, in the form of certain complexes. The majority of prisoners suffered from a kind of inferiority complex. We all had once been or had fancied ourselves to be ‘somebody.‘ Now we were treated like complete nonentities. (The consciousness of one‘s inner value is anchored in higher, more spiritual things, and cannot be shaken by camp life. But how many free men, let alone prisoners, possess it?) Without consciously thinking about it, the average prisoner felt himself utterly degraded.“
Yes, you definitely need to read not only these little excerpts from Frankl’s account presented to you here, but all the experiences, moments and stories Frankl relates to us to be able to begin to understand – but can one who has not ever even remotely gone through something like this ever really understand? – what life in a concentration camp was like and how the shock and the apathy phase showed themselves in the lives of the prisoners. But what Frankl tries to convey to us at least as much as the conditions of life in a concentration camp and the apathetic and wretched state of the prisoner is the truth of human freedom and of man‘s free will at all times:
“(…) I may give the impression that the human being is completely and unavoidably influenced by his surroundings. (In this case the surroundings being the unique structure of camp life, which forced the prisoner to conform his conduct to a certain set pattern.) But what about human liberty? Is there no spiritual freedom in regard to behavior and reaction to any given surroundings? Is that theory true which would have us believe that man is no more than a product of many conditional and environmental factors – be they of a biological, psychological or sociological nature? Is man but an accidental product of these? Most important, do the prisoners‘ reactions to the singular world of the concentration camp prove that man cannot escape the influences of his surroundings? Does man have a choice of action in the face of such circumstances?
Viktor E. Frankl, Man‘s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press Boston, p. 65-66
We can answer these questions from experience as well as on principle. The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action. There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed. Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that 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 own way.
And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate.
(…) Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him – mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp. Dostoevski said once, ‘There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.‘ These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost.“
Resilience
There are many passages where Frankl gets into what we could call the resilience factors that would rouse a man from the apathy forced upon him and would help him retain both his humaneness and his hope – that would give him some “inner freedom“.
“In spite of all the enforced physical and mental primitiveness of the life in a concentration camp, it was possible for spiritual life to deepen. Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain (they were often of a delicate constitution), but the damage to their inner selves was less. They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom. Only in this way can one explain the apparent paradox that some prisoners of a less hardy make-up often seemed to survive camp life better than did those of a robust nature.“
Viktor E. Frankl, Man‘s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press Boston, p. 36
“This intensification of inner life helped the prisoner find a refuge from the emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty of his existence, by letting him escape into the past. When given free rein, his imagination played with past events, often not important ones, but minor happenings and trifling things. His nostalgic memory glorified them and they assumed a strange character. Their world and their existence seemed very distant and the spirit reached out for them longingly: In my mind I took bus rides, unlocked the front door of my apartment, answered my telephone, switched on the electric lights. Our thoughts often centered on such details, and these memories could move one to tears.“
Viktor E. Frankl, Man‘s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press Boston, p. 39
From these words we may conclude several things: that, contrary to what one might expect, more sensitive people can quite often be the more resilient people compared to seemingly tougher ones in extreme situations and crises, and that both spirituality and imagination, and in fact anything able to transcend the momentary present situation of utmost slavery and of being denied of being oneself, were able to give relief and to – mentally, spiritually – unlock the prison of now. Frankl shares this recollection with us to make one of his most poignant points in his account:
“We stumbled on in the darkness, over big stones and through large puddles, along the one road leading from the camp. The accompanying guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles. Anyone with very sore feet supported himself on his neighbor‘s arm. Hardly a word was spoken; the icy wind did not encourage talk. Hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly: ‘If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don‘t know what is happening to us.‘
Viktor E. Frankl, Man‘s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press Boston, p. 36-39
That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. 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 was then 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 front of me a man stumbled and those following him fell on top of him. The guard rushed over and used his whip on them all. Thus my thoughts were interrupted for a few minutes. But soon my soul found its way back from the prisoner‘s existence to another world, and I resumed talk with my loved one: I asked her questions, and she answered; she questioned me in return, and I answered.
‘Stop!‘ We had arrived at our work site. Everybody rushed into the dark hut in the hope of getting a fairly decent tool. Each prisoner got a spade or a pickaxe.
‘Can‘t you hurry up, you pigs?‘ Soon we had resumed the previous day‘s positions in the ditch. The frozen ground cracked under the point of the pickaxes, and sparks flew. The men were silent, their brains numb.
My mind still clung to the image of my wife. A thought crossed my mind: I didn‘t even know if she were still alive. I knew only one thing – which I have learned well by now: Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.
I did not know whether my wife was alive, and I had no means of finding out (during all my prison life there was no outgoing or incoming mail); but at that moment it ceased to matter. There was no need for me to know; nothing could touch the strength of my love, my thoughts, and the image of my beloved. Had I known then that my wife was dead, I think that I would still have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of her image, and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying. ‘Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death.‘“
Besides the contemplation of the beloved, rare moments of beholding beauty – in nature, in art – are sources of this transcendence that liberates one from brutal unopened immanence.
“As the inner life of the prisoner tended to become more intense, he also experienced the beauty of art and nature as never before. Under their influence he sometimes even forgot his own frightful circumstances. If someone had seen our faces on the journey from Auschwitz to a Bavarian camp as we beheld the mountains of Salzburg with their summits glowing in the sunset, through the little barred windows of the prison carriage, he would never have believed that those were the faces of men who had given up all hope of life and liberty. Despite that factor – or maybe because of it – we were carried away by nature‘s beauty, which we had missed for so long.“
Viktor E. Frankl, Man‘s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press Boston, p. 39-40
The spiritual, the religious dimension of Frankl‘s experiences shines through time and time again. The moments of transcendence are also the moments of a silent confirmation of the ultimate meaningfulness of creation and of human life despite it all.
“Another time we were at work in a trench. The dawn was grey around us; grey was the sky above; grey the snow in the pale light of dawn; grey the rags in which my fellow prisoners were clad, and grey their faces. I was again conversing silently with my wife, or perhaps I was struggling to find the reason for my sufferings, my slow dying. In a lost violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious ‘Yes‘ in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose. At that moment a light was lit in a distant farmhouse, which stood on the horizon as if painted there, in the midst of the miserable grey of a dawning morning in Bavaria. ‘Et lux in tenebris lucet‘ – and the light shineth in the darkness. For hours I stood hacking at the icy ground. The guard passed by, insulting me, and once again I communed with my beloved. More and more I felt that she was present, that she was with me; I had the feeling that I was able to touch her, able to stretch out my hand and grasp hers. The feeling was very strong: she was there. Then, at that very moment, a bird flew down silently and perched just in front of me, on the heap of soil which I had dug up from the ditch, and looked steadily at me.“
Viktor E. Frankl, Man‘s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press Boston, p. 40-41
The critical point in each and every resilience factor seems to be that something is present that creates a certain distance to the pressing and horrable situation a man finds himself in, thereby crossing its totality.
“Humor was another of the soul‘s weapons in the fight for self-preservation. It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds. I practically trained a friend of mine who worked next to me on the building site to develop a sense of humor. I suggested to him that we would promise each other to invent at least one amusing story daily, about some incident that could happen one day after our liberation.“
Viktor E. Frankl, Man‘s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press Boston, p. 43
But beyond a couple of jokes that might have given one some relief for a short moment, it ultimately all came down to the question of the meaning of human life – and to the meaning of suffering and death. And whether or not, the inmate could still envision a future to hope for.
“If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.
Viktor E. Frankl, Man‘s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press Boston, p. 67-68
The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the sufferings it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity – even under the most difficult circumstances – to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may retain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. (…) And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.
(…) Everywhere man is confronted with fate, with the chance of achieving something through his own suffering.“
“Former prisoners, when writing or relating their experiences, agree that the most depressing influence of all was that a prisoner could not know how long his term of imprisonment would be. He had been given no date for his release. (…) A well-known research psychologist has pointed out that life in a concentration camp could be called a ‘provisional existence.‘ (…) A man who could not see the end of his ‘provisional existence‘ was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life. He ceased living for the future, in contrast to a man in normal life. Therefore the whole structure of his inner life changed; signs of decay set in which we know from other areas of life. The unemployed worker, for example, is in a similar position. His existence has become provisional and in a certain sense he cannot live for the future or aim at a goal. (…)
Viktor E. Frankl, Man‘s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press Boston, p. 69-72
A man who let himself decline because he could not see any future goal found himself occupied with retrospective thoughts. In a different connection, we have already spoken of the tendency there was to look into the past, to help make the present, with all its horrors, less real. But in robbing the present of its reality there lay a certain danger. It became easy to overlook the opportunities to make something positive of camp life, opportunities which really did exist. Regarding our ‘provisional existence‘ as unreal was in itself an important factor in causing the prisoners to lose their hold on life; everything in a way became pointless. Such people forgot that often it is just such an exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself. Instead of taking the camp‘s difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised it as something of no consequence. They preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past. Life for such people became meaningless. (…) Varying this, we could say that most men in a concentration camp believed that the real opportunities of life had passed. Yet, in reality, there was an opportunity and a challenge. One could make a victory of those experiences, turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did a majority of the prisoners.“
“It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future – sub specie aeternitatis. And this is his salvation in the most difficult moments of his existence, although he sometimes has to force his mind to the task. (…)
Viktor E. Frankl, Man‘s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press Boston, p. 73-75
The prisoner who had lost faith in the future – his future – was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay. (…)
Those who know how close the connection is between the state of mind of a man – his courage and hope, or lack of them – and the state of immunity of his body will understand that the sudden loss of hope and courage can have a deadly effect. The ultimate cause of my friend‘s death was that the expected liberation did not come and he was severely disappointed. This suddenly lowered his body‘s resistance against the latent typhus infection. His faith in the future and his will to live had become paralyzed and his body fell victim to illness (…).“
“Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost. (…) What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life – daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual. These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment. (…) ‘Life‘ does not mean something vague, but something very real and concrete, just as life‘s tasks are also very real and concrete. (…) Sometimes man may be required simply to accept fate, to bear his cross. Every situation is distinguished by its uniqueness, and there is always only one right answer to the problem posed by the situation at hand.
Viktor E. Frankl, Man‘s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press Boston, p. 76-78
When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. (…)
For us, the meaning of life embraced the wider cycles of life and death, of suffering and of dying.“
“A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the ‘why‘ for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any ‘how‘.“
Viktor E. Frankl, Man‘s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press Boston, p. 80
“Not only our experiences, but all we have done, whatever great thoughts we may have had, and all we have suffered, all this is not lost, thought it is past; we have brought it into being. Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.“
Viktor E. Frankl, Man‘s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press Boston, p. 82
“I said that someone looks down on each of us in difficult hours – a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or a God – and he would not expect us to disappoint him. He would hope to find us suffering proudly – not miserably – knowing how to die. And finally I spoke of our sacrifice, which had meaning in every case. It was in the nature of this sacrifice that it should appear to be pointless in the normal world, the world of material success. But in reality our sacrifice did have a meaning. Those of us who had any religious faith, I said frankly, could understand without difficulty. I told them of a comrade who on his arrival in camp had tried to make a pact with Heaven that his suffering and death should save the human being he loved from a painful end. For this man, suffering and death were meaningful; his was a sacrifice of the deepest significance.“
Viktor E. Frankl, Man‘s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press Boston, p. 83
