Viktor
Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning
A
Book Review
Written
by Dan McDonald
Someone recommended that I read Man’s
Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl (1905-1997). I have to admit I had never heard of the book
even though it was one of the more influential books written in the Twentieth
Century. I had succumbed for a couple of
decades to reading almost exclusively from authors within my own intellectual tribe. That kind of habit is deadly to intellectual
growth. We learn more from those whose
thoughts present considerations outside of our perspective rather than merely
specializing in authors writing in a perspective agreeable to our own. I found in Frankl’s work nothing with which I
disagreed but discovered much that I had not sufficiently contemplated.
Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning
can be seen as two books in one. The
first portion of the book describes his time living in Nazi concentration
camps. He was Jewish and was imprisoned
in various concentration camps during the years of 1942-1945. The latter half of the work is a description
of the psychiatric field known as logotherapy which he helped pioneer. The two halves of the book are related as what
Frankl experienced and observed in the concentration camps helped confirm in
his own mind the contributions to mental health that could be expected from
logotherapy. I cannot from a single
reading of the book do justice to the concepts of logotherapy. But if one word sums up the goal of the
psychiatrist using “logotherapy” with those under his or her care, it is that
hope is a necessary characteristic of a healthy mind. Frankl came to the perspective that without a
meaning upon which to cling, human beings lose hope and flounder. Whereas in certain fields of psychiatry the
emphasis is placed upon discovering the root causes from the past of one’s
mental problems, logotherapy is pursued with a sense that generally it is a
lack of hope rather than the pain of the past which most threatens one’s mental
health. Admittedly this is too much of a
simplification in comparing logotherapy and psychoanalysis but generally logotherapy
aims to heal by encouraging hope rather than by digging up the issues of the
past. I mention these aspects of the
book, but feel unqualified to give a fully accurate portrayal of what Frankl
was seeking to convey about logotherapy.
I suspect that typical readers will
find the first half of the book especially interesting. It is there where Frankl describes what life
was like in the concentration camps. He
describes it as only a person who had suffered in that environment can describe
life in the camps. He surprises us by describing
how he realized that even in the camps men could only lose their freedom of
will by choice. There were individual
decisions constantly being made by persons whether German, Jewish and whether
educated or not. He describes a prison
commandant that won a certain degree of appreciation from prisoners because of
how he treated the confined with a degree of humanity and respect even though
he was a high ranking SS officer, and he likewise describes Jewish men made
trustees who treated prisoners with a sadistic element seldom matched even by
SS guards. His experience in the
concentration camps convinced him that collective guilt was a concept to be opposed
for in each moment of life men and women were called upon by life itself to
answer the questions of life. He had
seen that in the worst of conditions people were confronted by the issues life
demanded them to answer. A young Victor
Frankl, at the age of sixteen had been asked to speak after a manuscript he had
written had been submitted to The
International Journal of Psychoanalysis.
At age 16 Frankl said something he would believe for his entire
life. He said: “It is we ourselves who must answer the
questions that life asks of us, and to these questions we can respond only by
being responsible for our existence.”[i]
Frankl regarded human beings as
constantly being called upon through the issues of life to answer the questions
which life poses to us. Our decisions
influence the persons we shall become.
This is one of the reasons why discovering a reason to hope may change
the trajectory of a life being lived. If
the past cannot be changed, our attitude towards what claim the past may have
upon us can be altered by a change in our understanding of the hope we have for
the future.
In Frankl’s understanding of
meaning, by observation he recognized three general areas in which men and
women usually discovered meaning for their lives that helped them discover
hope. He here describes the avenues by
which human beings generally discover a personal meaning to channel their
lives. “According to logotherapy, we can
discover this meaning in life in three different ways: 1) by creating a work or
doing a deed; 2) by experiencing someone or encountering someone; and 3) by the
attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.”[ii]
Frankl, in describing experiencing
someone or encountering someone is describing how the element of love in
relationships helps give a person a meaning.
One of Frankl’s perspectives which
most spoke to me was how Frankl was convinced that meaning is discovered not
within our psyches or within our inner being but in connection with the reality
with which we must become engaged if we are to live. We live in an era of that has made a near
Deity out of our inner beings or our souls.
But Frankl understands meaning being discovered in a relationship to
that which is outside of ourselves so that instead of being led back to our
inner beings we are led outward to appreciate the life in which we are engaged
to the point that we might lose the sense of ourselves in the life being lived
in the meaning we have discovered. He
writes, “I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in
the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed
system.” He adds in the same paragraph, “It
denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something
or someone, other than oneself – be it a meaning to fulfill or another human
being to encounter.”[iii]
That is something that seems to me
worthy to be considered. We imagine that
it is in our own inner beings that purpose and meaning is to be
discovered. But what if in taking that
path we are only distinguishing ourselves from the rest of reality to the point
that we are separating ourselves from reality?
Do we discover truth within ourselves or do we simply separate ourselves
from reality? What if humanity was created
to exist within a creation, to commune with others, to be drawn out of ourselves
into an existence that reflects a majestic creator who has created an entire
universe to be the cathedral of his glory and grandeur? What if we are meant to understand through
all that has been made that there is the mystery of a life to be discovered not
within our inner beings but within our engagement with an entire creation
reflective of the glory and grandeur of its Creator? Would we be so enamored with looking inside
ourselves for ultimate answers if we imagined the possibility that the whole of
creation was given to be a sort of cathedral wherein God, creation, and the
purpose of humankind are to be discovered connected to each other? Perhaps as St. Paul indicated in Acts 17 that we are given life in this creation that
we might seek after, groping towards finding him who has created all things and
ourselves. Frankl, as a physician
acknowledges that his psychiatry is meant to be a way of helping heal a mind,
but that salvation of the soul is not something done within psychiatry. He was a Jewish man married to a Catholic
woman who kept his personal beliefs personal, but it is clear from all he says
that he had a deep respect for the questions of faith within the pursuit of
meaning and purpose for life.
The other point Frankl would teach
our era is that meaning and purpose for life is to be found in the hope that
looks forward not in the past which threatens to engulf and confine us in what has been. This is not to say that we should somehow
treat sufferings in the past as unimportant.
We would recognize that many a person is deeply wounded by their
sufferings when young or even when older.
But in Frankl’s thinking life is continually offering us the freedom and
responsibility to make decisions in the now to influence the course of the
future. I have found certain writers to
speak with great clarity about sufferings but it was as if after suffering
there is nothing more except a painful sadness that because of wrongs done to
us our lives our ruined. But Frankl saw
suffering, even while in a concentration camp differently.
Frankl
described his thought one day as he wondered if he would survive the
concentration camp or not. He
wrote: “[My concern was different from
that of most of my comrades. Their
question was, “Will we survive the camp?
For if not, all this suffering has no meaning.” The question which beset me was, “Has all
this suffering, this dying around us a meaning?
For if not, then ultimately there is no meaning to survival; for a life
whose meaning depends upon such a happenstance – as whether one escapes or not –
ultimately would not be worth living at all.”[iv] Do you grasp Frankl’s logic? If we imagine that life has meaning, but that
suffering has no meaning; then we are saying that life has meaning only as long
as we are lucky enough not to encounter suffering. But surely if there is meaning in life then
our lives prove themselves to have meaning even in our encounters with
suffering. So it is that one who has
found purpose and meaning in life learns to face suffering with a desire to as
much as is possible turn his or her suffering into a sort of accomplishment of
good. He considers Dostoyevsky who
learned to think of suffering wondering if he would prove himself worthy of
suffering.
Frankl was a man who was a member of
his century, the Twentieth Century. But
that does not make him irrelevant for the present century. He summed up what he believed the Twentieth
Century taught humankind. He wrote: “Our generation is realistic, for we have
come to know man as he really is. After
all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he
is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s
Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his
lips.”[v]
Frankl’s work offers us so much more
that I can only admit that as much as I have sought to show his work a worthy
book to read and contemplate, I have hardly begun to appreciate what he
gathered from a life of deeds, of love, and of suffering. I would only hope that if you have found
anything of interest in my words about this book that you will recognize that
the book itself treats these matters with greater clarity than I can express
the truths he discovered and described in his life of deeds, love, and suffering.
[i] Man’s
Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl.
Beacon Press, Boston 2006 edition.
P.156
[ii] Ibid;
p.111
[iii] Ibid;
p. 110
[iv] Ibid;
p. 115
[v] Ibid;
p. 134
No comments:
Post a Comment