📚 Man's Search for Meaning
Book Title
Man’s Search for Meaning
(non-fiction | autobiography)
Author
Viktor E. Frankl
Review
Through Man’s Search for Meaning, the reader traverses through the life of a man that survived the concentration camps during World War II. Viktor E. Frankl puts emphasis on the responsibilty each individual has for finding their own meaning in life, regardless of their life situation.
Frankl believed that life was primarily a pursuit for meaning, rather than for pleasure or power. These sources of meaning include: finding significance in work, experiencing values (through love for others or finding beauty in art), and choosing to respond a certain way to inevitable suffering. Through his experience at Auschwitz, Frankl was able to reinforce his beliefs as he found the courage to survive through memories of his wife and his desire to teach psychology after the war.
“I forced my thoughts to turn to another subject…I was giving a lecture on the pyschology of the concentration camp! All that oppressed me at that moment became objective, seen and described from the remote viewpoint of science. By this method I succeeded somehow in rising above the situation, above the sufferings of the moment, and I observed them as if they were already of the past.”
Having a dream to work towards and visualizing it definitely helps me stay motivated. However, there is a danger to constantly thinking of the future, as I have often felt myself unsatisfied of my current life circumstance. This is where context is important, as the horrific reality of Auschwitz is extremely different from staying present during times of peace.
“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.”
It is the natural tendency of human nature to live towards a future goal more so than to focus on the present moment - unless the task requires them to do so.
Frankl states that the three mental stages experienced by the prisoners were: shock, apathy in routine, and disillusionment upon liberation. During one of the nights at Auschwitz, Frankl recalls a fellow prisoner having a horrible nightmare. However, he refused to wake him up.
“At that moment I became intensely conscious of the fact that no dream, no matter how horrible, could be as bad as the reality of the camp which surrounded us, and to which I was about to recall him.”
Without blunting one’s emotions, each prisoner will fall victim to delirium in such an abnormal situation. However, Frankl emphasizes that a person can achieve fulfillment through the ‘image he carries of his beloved’.
“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.”
Frankl was able to find hope by reflecting and conjuring up thoughts of his wife.
“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.”
Frankl also mentions the importance of humour, and how it helps change the perspective of any situation.
“…humour, 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.”
Many times, I have pondered on what action I would have taken if I was placed in the shoes of Frankl. Many times, I asked myself if I would have the same capacity of mental strength to overcome the horrors of the concentration camps.
“Under the influence of a world which no longer recognized the value of human life and human dignity … 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 indiviudal, a being with a mind, with inner freedom and personal value.”
Those that let their thoughts and the strength of their mental capacity deteriorate were bound for a tragic fate before others.
“Psychological observations of the prisoners have shown that only the men who allowed their inner hold on their moral and spiritual selves to subside eventually fell victim to the camp’s degenerating influences.”
Though I tell myself that I would not lose my values and stay strong if I was placed in the same environment, I cannot help but question to what extent I would endure the hardships that the Auschwitz prisoners went through.
“No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.”
It is difficult to keep composure when other people show a lack of care in their behaviours and the fact that their behaviour and resulting danger is out of one’s control.
“For one’s own irritability took on enormous proportions in the face of the other’s apathy and especially in the face of the danger which was caused by it.”
Through experience in camp life and knowledge of psychological prinicples, Frankl tells the reader that even in the most dire circumstances, the man can choose how to react - for the better.
“…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.”
“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.”
“Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon was we form a clear and precise picture of it.”
Is this why many spiritual practices tell the reader to observe and name what they are currently feeling?
“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 thoughts can directly influence a person’s mood, as well as their bodily functions.
“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. Thus it is impossible to define the meaning of life in a general way.”
“This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love. When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude.”
The common responsibility we share is our existence and the impact we have on those dear to us - for many, this is their parents, siblings or friends.
One thing that I couldn’t understand was how such atrocities coud be inflicted from one human to another. The answer that Frankl provided was:
“First, among the guards there were some sadists, sadists in the purest clinical sense. Second, these sadists were always selected when a really severe detachment of guards was needed. Third, the feelings of the majority of the guards had been dulled by the number of years in which, in ever-increasing doses, they had witnessed the brutal methods of the camp.”
Frankl goes on to say:
“It is apparent that the mere knowledge that a man was either a camp guard or a prisoner tells us almost nothing. Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn.”
which makes senses, as I believe not all guards followed orders out of sheer will and malicious intent.
Sigmund Freud hypothesized that all humans act the same under a critical situation - as an example, that people will all act primitively when starved - but from Frankl’s experience in the concentration camp, that was not the case.
“…on the contrary, people became more different. people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints.”
Overall, the solution that Frankl provides for suffering is coined ‘logotherapy’.
“Logotherapy focuses…on the meanings to be fulfilled by the patient in his future.”
“…mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become…I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium…what man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling of a worthwhile goal…”
I personally found it difficult to stay present when my ambition for completing a future goal took over. And when I achieved that goal, I was never satisfied with myself - I would immediately strive for more. This makes me think that what Frankl suggests is finding meaning in the future when one faces inevitable suffering, as it is difficult stay present when external circumstances work against your freedom.
“any attempt to restore a man’s inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal. Nietzsche’s words, ‘He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,’ could be the guiding motto for all psychotherapeutic and psychohygienic efforts regarding prisoners.”
On a lighter note, Frankl makes an interesting distinction regarding what is commonly known as the ‘Sunday Scaries’.
“‘Sunday neurosis,’ that kind of depression which afflicts people who become aware of the lack of content in their lives when the rush of the busy week is over and the void within themselves becomes manifest.”
In other words, ‘Sunday scaries’ isn’t anxiety from awareness of the imminent work week ahead but caused instead by the anxiety from the lack of meaning in one’s work - which one is most aware when the day-to-day hustle subsides.
Another psychological trick to stop overthinking is to approach it with irony:
“As soon as the patient stops fighting his obsessions and instead tries to ridicule them by dealing with them in an ironical way - by applying paradoxical intention - the vicious circle is cut, the symptom diminishes and finally atrophies.”
Lastly, the book ends with a solid analogy:
“…consider a movie: it consists of thousands upon thousands of individual pictures, and each of them makes sense and carries a meaning, yet the meaning of the whole film cannot be seen before its last sequence is shown. However, we cannot understand the whole film without having first understood each of its components, each of the individual pictures. Isn’t it the same with life? Doesn’t the final meaning of life, too, reveal itself, if at all, only at its end, on the verge of death?”
This book contains specific examples in support of the point that each individual is responsible for their own attitude, and that the pursuit of meaning is possible regardless of one’s circumstance.
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