Viktor Frankl for the soul : The will to meaning
By: Raluca Preda
Tags: Mans Search For Meaning, Books, Viktor Frankl, Meaning, Willpower

Viktor Emil Frankl (1905–1997) had a most remarkable life: a Holocaust survivor, a professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Vienna Medical School, the father of Logotherapy (literally “Healing through meaning”). He taught at Harvard, Stanford, Dallas and Pittsburgh and received a total of 29 honorary degrees worldwide as well as countless awards. A man of tremendous inner strength and insight, his books have been greatly influential around the world.

In 1945, shortly after being released from a concentration camp, Viktor Frankl sat down and in just nine days he wrote his well-known book, “A Man’s Search for Meaning”. In it, he tried to analyze the will to survive, and the strength behind one’s resilience. He has managed to endure one of humanity’s worst episodes in recorded history, and used his capacity for self-reflection to turn it into one big learning experience. If you have not yet read any of his writings, I highly suggest you pick up this book as an essential pandemic reading.

Finding meaning in suffering

“ He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

Viktor Frankl believed that if there is a meaning in life, then there must be a meaning in suffering too.

While imprisoned in Auschwitz, Frankl lost most of his family: his parents, his brother and wife, all but his sister. He himself was very close to dying in the gas chamber. In one instance, the prisoners were gathered up and split into two rows, on the right side and on the left side. He defied orders and sneaked unseen to the right line, a small act that saved his life. All the prisoners on the left row were executed. I can only imagine the horrors he endured in the concentration camps: the hunger, cold, disease, brutality. Yet he had the strength to find significance in these dire circumstances. Around him, some of the prisoners gave up all hope and abandoned themselves to despair, while others started seeing it all as a challenge and would bear it bravely.

What Frankl observed was that the people that had a purpose in their lives, that were still holding onto hope, had a much higher survival rate. He concluded that his own ability to find purpose helped him to survive.

Everything was taken away from Viktor, his whole life, even his own name. Instead of falling in despair, he started thinking about his suffering as an experience to be learnt from. One must endure the suffering of life, and accept it as a part of it, having the duty to overcome the obstacles laid in the path. He tells the story of how he would steal bits of paper and write his ideas down on them, or imagine he’s holding lectures about his experiences in the concentration camps. By doing this, he was able to objectify his suffering, and detach from it. He also reported humor and heroism as great powers used to self-detach. Laughing in the face of one’s misery is a way of standing up to life, showing that you can deal with the challenges faced. You can take it, and not only that, but you also have the power to laugh at it. Viktor even went as far as to consider humor as a divine attribute.

“There are situations in which one is cut off from the opportunity to do one’s work or enjoy one’s life; but what can never be ruled out is the unavoidability of suffering. In accepting this challenge to suffer bravely, life has a meaning up to the last moment, and it retains this meaning literally to the end.” — Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

So, how can one take a negative experience and turn it into a human achievement? Frankl believed that this can be done by having the right attitude in front of misfortune.

In his book, he gives the example of one of his patients, a man that recently lost his wife. He was suffering and grieving, and so Viktor asked him, if it would have been the other way around, that he would die and the wife would not, wouldn’t she be the one suffering greatly right now? Would he not prefer sparing her the suffering of loosing her husband, by taking this suffering upon himself? Thinking this way, the burden of the patient was not lessened, but by shifting the perspective he had on his wife’s death, Frankl gave a purpose to the man’s suffering, that allowed him to carry the weight of his loss in a different way.

This concept lays at the heart of Logotherapy. Viktor Frankl infused philosophy into his psychiatric work, asserting that life has meaning in any circumstances, even in the face of horrors.

“In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.” — Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

A will to meaning

Viktor Frankl calls “the will to meaning” the idea that humans are motivated by a desire to find meaning.

While helping suicidal patients during logotherapy sessions, Frankl would start by asking them a question: “Why do you not commit suicide?”. Based on the patients reply, he would find their reasons to live and help elaborate on them.

In one instance, while in a concentration camp, Viktor was approached by a prisoner that was suicidal. “Why do you want to commit suicide?”, Viktor asked him. The man admitted to wanting to end his life, because there was nothing for him in the future. He could not expect anything anymore from life. “Well, have you considered that perhaps life is expecting something from you?”. Frankls thus improvised a reply that managed to offer the man hope.

Viktor Frankl coined the term of “Existential Vacuum”. He noticed that an increasing number of patients are dealing with feelings of alienation, emptiness and meaningless. The most obvious sign of existential vacuum in a society is a manifestation of a state of boredom. To quote him: “Unlike an animal, man is not told by instincts what he must do. And unlike man in former times, he is no longer told by traditions what he should do. Often he does not even know what he basically wishes to do”. Nowadays, the existential vacuum is not only common, but it is also spreading fast globally.

The term “vacuum” is used here, because as it is the case, other things will rush to fill the hole left behind by a lack of meaning. People experiencing the existential vacuum will search for ways to numb themselves: seeking pleasures, sex, drugs, or seeking power, money, busy-ness, or even becoming angry and trying to destroy everything perceived as a cause for the existential vacuum. People will fall into these neurotic vicious circles, instead of paying attention to the reason why the emptiness was created in the first place.

Frankl rejected the idea that the ultimate goal in life was pleasure, as Sigmund Freud stated, or that the goal in life is power, as Alfred Adler believed. He was certain that only finding purpose can fill and close the existential vacuum. I agree with him on this point. Looking around society today, it’s plain to see that power and pleasure will not only never fill the existential vacuum, but it actually makes the hole bigger, deeper and hungrier.

Frankl believed that happiness, just as success, should not be actively pursued, but ensued, by living a life true to oneself, and focusing on a purpose deemed higher than oneself. By letting your conscience guide you, and following your purpose to the best of your abilities, happiness and success will follow naturally as a by-product of your efforts.

“Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run — in the long-run, I say! — success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it” — Viktor E. Frankl, The Will to Meaning: Foundations and Applications of Logotherapy

There is no universal meaning to life, Frankl affirms. This meaning differs, from person to person, or even in the same person during time. The meaning of life is obviously flexible, yet he did identify three main roots of meaning:

Through work, by doing a deed or job, especially creative work

Through love, by encountering or seeing someone or something we care deeply for

Through the attitude we take towards unavoidable suffering (key word here is unavoidable)

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” — Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Viktor points out that in any given situation, between stimulus and response, there is a small space where a person can choose their reaction. There will always be unavoidable external forces working on a person, like the weather, traffic, or sudden illness. But the attitude towards these forces is what defines a person.

He believed that there are two categories of people, the decent and the indecent. As examples, he offered the story of the Nazi camp guard, that gave him a piece of bread even if it came as a risk for himself. Viktor is telling how his eyes swelled up with tears, not only in gratitude for the bread, but for the kindness of the gesture. At the opposite end, he recalled the prisoners that would insist on inflicting on their fellow prisoners the same pain as it was inflicted on themselves, most notable the kapo (a prisoner in a Nazi camp, assigned by the SS guards to supervise forced labor or carry out administrative tasks). These prisoners were motivated by survival, hoping to gain favors with the guards by carrying out their tasks in the most brutal way, in a system designed to turn victim against victim. Yet amongst the people captive in the camps, there were also the ones that would not bend, and would choose to give their last piece of bread away to a fellow in need.

In a world in which you experience everyday “the banality of evil”, as Hannah Arendt named it, you are just as likely to find beacons of humanity and kindness. What Viktor Frankl tells us is that one must choose and decide one’s own way, not thinking of a reward, but because this is the right thing to do