Viktor Frankl Profound Journey to Find Meaning in Life’s Darkest Moments

Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” is a life-changing exploration of human resilience. This powerful memoir delves into Frankl’s harrowing experiences in Nazi concentration camps, revealing how he discovered purpose amidst unimaginable suffering.

Dive into this transformative book to unlock the secrets of finding meaning in your own life, no matter the circumstances.

Genres

World History, Popular Psychology Psychoanalysis, Popular Psychology Psychotherapy, Jewish Holocaust History, Health, Fitness and Dieting, Psychology Education and Training, TA and NLP Psychotherapy, Existential Psychology, Philosophy, Self Help, Memoir, Biography, Classics, Spirituality, Holocaust

Summary

“Man’s Search for Meaning” is divided into two parts. The first recounts Frankl’s experiences in concentration camps during World War II. He vividly describes the brutal conditions and psychological torment prisoners endured. Frankl observed that those who maintained a sense of purpose were more likely to survive.

The second part introduces logotherapy, Frankl’s psychotherapeutic method. This approach focuses on finding meaning in life as the primary motivational force. Frankl argues that while we can’t always control our circumstances, we can choose our attitude towards them.

Frankl identifies three main sources of meaning: purposeful work, love, and courage in the face of difficulty. He emphasizes the importance of responsibility and the human capacity to find meaning even in extreme suffering.

Throughout the book, Frankl weaves personal anecdotes with philosophical insights. He challenges readers to reflect on their own lives and find purpose, even in seemingly hopeless situations.

Review

“Man’s Search for Meaning” is a profound and deeply moving work that resonates across cultures and generations. Frankl’s writing is clear and accessible, making complex philosophical ideas digestible for a wide audience.

The book’s strength lies in its unique perspective. Frankl doesn’t just theorize about meaning; he lived through extreme circumstances and emerged with powerful insights. His firsthand account of life in concentration camps is both heart-wrenching and inspiring.

Frankl’s logotherapy offers a refreshing alternative to other psychological approaches. By focusing on meaning rather than pleasure or power, he provides a framework for personal growth that feels both intuitive and revolutionary.

Some readers might find the descriptions of camp life disturbing. However, these passages are crucial for understanding the context of Frankl’s insights.

The book’s message of hope and resilience is timeless. It challenges readers to take responsibility for finding meaning in their own lives, regardless of external circumstances.

While the ideas presented are profound, the writing style is sometimes repetitive. Some concepts could have been explored in greater depth.

Despite these minor drawbacks, “Man’s Search for Meaning” remains a must-read for anyone grappling with life’s big questions. It offers both practical wisdom and philosophical depth, making it a valuable resource for personal growth and understanding the human condition.

From 1942 to 1945, Viktor Frankl survived four Nazi Concentration Camps by finding meaning in each moment. By discovering a steady source of meaning, Frankl transcended suffering and sustained his will to live. After WWII, Frankl returned to his psychiatric practice and helped individuals fill their ‘inner emptiness’ with meaning to eliminate despair and activate a sustainable source of productive energy.

“Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure or a quest for power, but a quest for meaning…The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life.” – Viktor Frankl

It is simply impossible for anyone other than survivors to know what life was like for a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp. We can only imagine how people got through each day, and how they managed to stay sane when surrounded by atrocities.

Viktor Frankl, himself a survivor of the camps, helps explain how prisoners of the Nazi regime struggled through. These experiences also provided Frankl with evidence for his psychological theory, logotherapy, which explains how, in order to thrive – and, in more dire circumstances, survive – we need to discover our personal meaning of life.

This book summary explains both Frankl’s findings from the camps and his development of logotherapy.

In this summary of Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl,n i this book summary you’ll discover

• how to find meaning in your life;
• how the concentration camps sucked the hope out of prisoners; and
• how some people can find humor in even the worst situations.

Recommendation

Viktor E. Frankl’s extraordinary, moving memoir of three years in Nazi death and labor camps is a literary classic and an inspiration to millions. This 2006 edition features a 57-page added section offering Frankl’s explication of “logotherapy,” the psychoanalytic method he developed after the war. Frankl wrote this memoir in nine days in 1946, after returning to his former home in Vienna, Austria, to learn that the Nazis had murdered his pregnant wife, his parents, his brother and his community of friends. His unsentimental account sets out to help readers avoid what he regarded as a misleading, conceptual trap: thinking of the camps with “sentiment and pity.” As of 2006, Frankl’s book had sold more than 12 million copies in 22 languages. A 1991 Library of Congress survey placed it among the “10 most influential books in America.” In non-English editions, its title is Say Yes In Spite Of Everything; that exuberance captures Frankl’s belief that what happens to you – including suffering – is secondary to your response to it. His book teaches that everyone must find his or her unique meaning and purpose in life, and fulfill it. After the intense horror of his camp saga, Viktor E. Frankl’s report on his psychoanalytic approach is less gripping, but quite meaningful. We recommend his brilliant, stirring, unforgettable memoir to students of history, all therapists and, really, to everyone.

Take-Aways

• Viktor E. Frankl, a Viennese doctor and psychiatrist, survived four Nazi death and labor camps during World War II and developed a deep sense of the meaning of life.
• In the camps, human life had no worth. Many prisoners lost all scruples as they fought to endure.
• Without knowing how or why, people can grow accustomed to and cope with anything.
• Even the worst living conditions reveal the “potential” for meaning.
• After years of imprisonment, Frankl stopped making choices; he “let fate take its course.”
• Postwar, he created a “third school” of Viennese psychology, “logotherapy,” to help people find the purpose and meaning in their lives.
• Seeking meaning in life is humankind’s primary drive.
• Your attitude toward life determines the meaning of your life.
• You must take responsibility for finding the answers to the problems your life presents and doing the tasks life sets for you.
• “The salvation of man is through love and in love.”

During Frankl’s time in concentration camps and time as a psychiatrist, he discovered three rich sources of meaning; three ‘wells of meaning’ you can turn to when you lose hope and require motivation to get through a difficult period in your life.

The Three Wells of Meaning

Pursue a Life Task

When Frankl entered the Auschwitz concentration camp, Nazi guards stripped Frankl of his possessions and confiscated a manuscript he’d been working on his entire adult life. After a period of shock and disbelief, Frankl vowed to survive his time at Auschwitz to rewrite and publish the manuscript.

While suffering from typhus and on the brink of death, Frankl wrote notes for his manuscript on scrap paper he’d collected around camp. Frankl felt the manuscript was a valuable piece of work only he could do because he had the unique collection of experience, knowledge, and skills to do it. If he died, the world would miss his contribution.

“Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.” – Viktor Frankl

“In the Nazi concentration camps, one could have witnessed that those who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfill were most apt to survive.” – Viktor Frankl

What task awaits you? If you don’t know, seek out new experiences, acquire new knowledge, and develop a rare combination of valuable skills. Then look for opportunities to leverage your unique collection of experience, knowledge, and skill. When you feel like your life is one long apprenticeship preparing you for a task you believe you were born to do, life feels meaningful.

Love

To Frankl, “love” is the act of seeing potential in others and helping them actualize that potential. Love is creating opportunities for your child; love is mentoring a junior member of your team; love is introducing your friend to someone who can get them a more rewarding job; love is comforting a sick parent, so they can find the strength to live another day. When you lack meaning, find someone you can elevate; aim to make someone else’s life a little bit better. Get so busy helping others you forget yourself in the process.

“The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself.” – Viktor Frankl

Suffer Bravely

Frankl endured unimaginable amounts of suffering inside Nazi concentration camps, but he found a way to transcend his suffering by imagining himself standing in front of a group of students in a well‐lit, warm lecture room.

“I imagined myself giving a lecture on the psychology 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.” – Viktor Frankl

Whenever an unexpected, uncontrollable setback happens in your life, find a use for it. Look at the suffering objectively and ask yourself, “How might this be valuable?”

Often the primary value of suffering is the chance to strengthen your beliefs and values. Think of your favorite movie character. At some point, that character suffered, and while watching him/her suffer, you discovered who they were and what they stood for. Now, imagine you’re a character in a movie. When you encounter suffering, use it as an opportunity to display and strengthen your beliefs, values, and ideals, and inspire others in the process.

“(By) accepting the challenge to suffer bravely, life has a meaning up to the last moment, and it retains this meaning literally to the end.” – Viktor Frankl

Prisoners’ first reaction to the concentration camps was shock – first in the form of hope, then despair.

Today, everyone has at least some awareness of the horrible, inhumane acts that were carried out in the concentration camps across Germany and Eastern Europe under the Nazi regime.

Likewise, the targets of Nazi violence during the Holocaust had at least some inkling of the terrible fate that awaited them. Because of this, you’d think that the initial reaction upon entering the camps would have been fear. Reactions, however, were split into three distinct phases.

The first phase began upon arrival at the camp – or even as inmates were being transported.

Prisoners were so shocked at what was happening that they desperately tried to convince themselves that, somehow, everything would be alright. Most prisoners had heard horrific stories about what happened at the camps, yet when they themselves were sent there, they told themselves that things would be different for them.

Those who arrived at the death camp Auschwitz, for example, were sent to the left or right as they exited the train – one group for hard labor and one for immediate execution. However, none of them knew what these groups meant.

Due to the shock of arriving at the camp, the prisoners succumbed to the delusion of reprieve, falsely believing that the line they were in would somehow mean an escape from certain doom.

During this first phase, the prisoners who hadn’t yet become accustomed to the horrors of the camp were terribly frightened by everything that went on. Newly arrived prisoners couldn’t manage the intensely emotional experience of watching other prisoners being punished in the most brutal ways for the most trivial offenses.

Confronted with grotesque brutality, they soon lost their hope and began to see death as some kind of relief. Most, in fact, considered suicide as a way out – perhaps by grabbing the electrical fence around the camp.

After a few days in the camp, prisoners fell into a state of apathy, which allowed them to concentrate on survival.

Following their initial shock, prisoners soon became “used to” the horror and death that surrounded them, thus becoming emotionally dull.

Instead, all their thoughts and emotions were focused on survival. Rather than muse about feelings like love or desire, for example, prisoners mostly talked and even dreamed about food or any other kind of vital, life-sustaining satisfactions that we normally take for granted, but which were severely limited in the camps.

While prisoners hid from the horror in the first phase, the dull emotions of the second phase acted as a shield, giving them the constitution to both live through the everyday cruelties of the camps and grab any opportunity to improve their own chance of survival.

For example, after several people died during a typhus outbreak in one of the camps, prisoners in the second phase no longer felt disgust or pity as they gazed at the corpses. Instead, they saw an opportunity to grab leftover food, shoes or other clothing items from the now deceased prisoner.

There was no foreseeable end to their time in the camp other than at the hands of the guards, which left prisoners unable to imagine that life still had any meaning.

Usually, we live for the future: we make big plans and get excited about seeing our life unfold. Prisoners in the camps, however, had a completely different view. For them, there was no excitement for the future. There wasn’t even a future – nobody knew when (or if) their prison term would come to an end.

Most prisoners thought their lives were already over. They merely “existed” in the camp – they gave up “living” as there were no goals to reach.

Life after liberation from the camps was often characterized first by a feeling of disbelief, and then by bitterness.

The prisoners who were lucky enough to survive the concentration camps had to face a new challenge upon their release. Most had spent such a long time in the camps that living a normal life became very difficult.

Immediately after their release, the prisoners were unable to grasp their freedom. Accustomed to a state of emotional apathy, they couldn’t immediately change their perspective. At first, prisoners couldn’t experience pleasure or joy.

Having dreamed so often of liberation, they found it unreal when it finally came.

After being liberated many prisoners felt as though, after all of the brutality that had been inflicted upon them, it was their turn to inflict harm on others. Having been made to suffer such inhumanity, it made complete sense to them to look for some sort of compensation, for instance, by taking vengeance against the guards in the camps.

What’s more, liberated prisoners didn’t always receive the warm welcome they imagined they would when they returned home. Unfortunately, many prisoners came home only to find that their family had been killed and their towns turned to rubble.

But their bitterness wasn’t just about lost family and friends. They hoped for compassion, expecting that their suffering would be understood. All too often, however, the people they talked to after release – those who had never seen a concentration camp – would only shrug and tell that they too had suffered, for example, from rationing and bombing.

While returning to a normal life certainly wasn’t easy for the liberated prisoners, after a while most of them managed to enjoy their lives once more and be happy that they’d survived the Holocaust.

Prisoners concentrated on their “inner” lives to distract themselves from what was happening in the real world.

So far, we’ve seen how prisoners suffered inside the camp. But how was it possible to protect their sanity and survive the horrors? In essence, it all came down to where they placed their focus.

For some, imagining their loved ones and reminiscing about the past made it possible to mentally escape the terror and brutality of their environment. In fact, those who were able to find at least a bit of happiness in their memories were often better able to survive than others.

In the brutal reality of the camps they had no relief, as they were forced to do hard labor in the cold with little more than rags on their backs. Love, however, could bring them fulfillment. A nice conversation with their loved ones – even if only in their imagination – was something the camp guards couldn’t take away from them.

Even the smallest slivers of memory were able to bring relief – mundane things like switching on the lights in their own bedrooms back home.

A few of the prisoners found solace by immersing themselves in nature and humor. An idyllic sunset or a cute bird could offer the inmates a fragment of happiness, even if it was only fleeting.

Prisoners managed small gatherings during their half-hour lunchbreak, during which they tried to distract themselves from their reality, for example, by songs or other small performances.

There were even rare moments when prisoners found their sense of humor.

This humor often involved imagining the future – after being released – and joking about how their camp routines might affect later situations. For example, sitting at the family dinner table, they might forget where they were and ask for soup from the bottom of the bowl, where the few nutritious peas would be found in the camp cook pots.

Most prisoners accepted their fate, but some tried to make decisions whenever they could.

The freedom to choose, whether it’s picking out our outfits, our lunches or the charities to which we donate, is something we all take for granted. Of course, in the camps, nothing could be taken for granted. The ability to decide for oneself took on a completely new meaning.

Most decisions were a matter of life or death, and many prisoners were afraid to make them.

Sometimes, for example, prisoners were ordered to go to another camp. However, the prisoners were kept in the dark about the true destination and the meaning of the transfer. The guards sometimes referred to these as “rest camps,” but no one could be certain that they weren’t being led to the gas chambers.

So, once prisoners realized that they would be sent elsewhere, some would become desperate to change that decision. This was sometimes possible if they worked harder for their captors, e.g., by volunteering for extra shifts.

Yet there was also the possibility that their new camp would actually bring them relief. There was simply no way for them to know what decision would be best, and thus many prisoners decided that they should not intervene in their fate.

There were other prisoners, however, who were determined to maintain even the tiniest freedoms, and therefore grabbed any opportunity to make decisions.

Despite their miserable conditions, these prisoners tried – as far as was possible – to live in accordance with their own values.

Their spiritual life, for example, was something that couldn’t be taken away from them. Although they might have to abandon their rituals, they could still decide to live up to high moral standards.

For instance, some prisoners would give bread to those who were in greater need, even though they were hungry too.

According to logotherapy, our motivation to act stems from our life’s meaning.

The author witnessed many terrible scenes in the camps. During that time, he realized again and again that people need meaning in their lives in order to have something to look forward to.

Indeed, the prisoners who could maintain this meaning were stronger and more resilient than those who had lost it.

This observation helped confirm many ideas from his own theory of psychotherapy, logotherapy, which posits that our search for meaning is the greatest motivation in our lives.

There is plenty of research that supports this idea. For example, in a study from Johns Hopkins University, students were asked what they considered to be central in their lives. The vast majority – 78 percent – reported that finding a purpose and meaning in life was most important to them.

When we’re unable to find meaning in our lives, we’re left with what is referred to as an existential vacuum. People who are unable to live according to their values, or feel like their lives have no meaning, will find a kind of emptiness inside themselves.

You don’t have to undergo serious trauma to experience the existential vacuum. Just take the widespread “Sunday neurosis,” for example, which occurs when people start to relax after a structured week of hard work, only to realize that their lives are totally devoid of substance.

Logotherapy aims to help people find meaning, and thus prevent the negative consequences that could result from a persisting existential vacuum.

There is no general meaning of life; everyone’s life has it’s own specific meaning in a given moment.

Knowing how important it is to find a purpose in life, we’re left asking ourselves how we go about finding our own. Indeed, many people believe that, in order to make the right choices in life, they must first discover their life’s purpose.

Logotherapy, however, suggests that the opposite is true: it’s how we act, and it’s the responsibility we feel toward our choices that determines our meaning.

For example, the prisoners in the concentration camps who were able to maintain a purpose in life did so based on the choices that they made. The decision to look for beauty in nature or help others in greater need gave them a purpose, a realization that they were not beaten and could keep going.

One consequence of this is that our meanings don’t have to be the same. In fact, everyone has his own meaning of life.

If you ask a chess grandmaster the best move, she’ll tell you that there is no best move in general. There is, however, a best move depending on the varying situations during the game.

The same applies to life’s meaning: there is no general meaning of life, and life’s meaning depends on each individual’s unique set of circumstances and decisions.

Logotherapy aims to help people understand the possibility that their lives can have meaning and that everybody has to figure out his life’s purpose according to his own decisions.

The meaning of life has no restrictions. For example, you might discover that your new job at a recycling start-up offers you personal meaning (e.g., feeling like you’re part of a positive contribution to the world) or it could go beyond the personal, and involve society and social conscience (e.g., seeing the improvement in other people’s lives).

You can manage your fears by actively pursuing them.

Although the ultimate goal of logotherapy is to help patients find the meaning of life, that isn’t its sole application. Logotherapy has also developed a number techniques that are helpful for people who’ve developed mental disorders, e.g., after experiencing an existential vacuum.

Logotherapy is able to accomplish this by focusing on the internal rather than external factors that affect patients.

In normal psychotherapy, the patient is analyzed and his neurotic fears explained by his environment and other external events and circumstances. In contrast, logotherapy assumes that people are able to make decisions and define their life’s purpose independently of their environment.

This basic understanding is necessary to help people realize that they are actually in control of their fears and anxieties in order to achieve long-term results. But how?

Logotherapy makes use of this strange phenomenon: when we fear something will happen, it often does, yet when we try and force something to happen, it never happens!

Imagine you have a nervous friend who is deathly afraid of blushing in front of other people. Since he’s always thinking about it, he immediately starts blushing whenever he’s in a crowd.

In this situation, logotherapy uses something called paradoxical intention, in which the patient is asked to do exactly the thing that she is afraid of.

Your nervous friend, for example, could start trying to blush as much as possible whenever he is around other people. Soon he’ll notice that when he tries to force it, nothing happens, and he’ll thus lose his fear of blushing.

Summary

Viktor E. Frankl

As a teen, Viktor E. Frankl studied philosophy and psychiatry. He initiated a correspondence with Sigmund Freud, who submitted an article of Frankl’s to a leading journal, which published it when Frankl was only 16. By age 34, in 1939, he was head of neurology at Rothschild Hospital, Vienna’s only Jewish hospital. When the Nazis closed it, Frankl feared for his and his family’s lives. In 1942, the US consulate offered him a visa. This rare invitation, a stroke of luck, was a tribute to his reputation. Few Jews got out of Austria that late; fewer still got to America.

“It is a question of the attitude one takes toward life’s challenges and opportunities, both large and small.”

Frankl wanted to flee; he knew he could finish his pending book in America. But he saw a fragment of marble his father had saved after the Nazis destroyed Vienna’s largest synagogue. It came from an engraving of the Ten Commandments and bore only a Hebrew letter. When Frankl asked about it, his father said the letter stood for “Honor thy father and mother.” Unable to abandon his family, Frankl let his US visa lapse. The Nazis deported him and his family in September 1942. From then until March 1945, the Nazis shuttled Frankl among four death and labor camps: “Theresienstadt, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Kaufering and Türkheim,” part of Dachau.

Scruples

Frankl worked in small, less-well-known camps where “the real extermination took place” and uncounted people perished in horror and obscurity. The Nazis pushed their captives off cattle cars at the entry to Auschwitz, confiscating their documents and few remaining belongings. They tattooed numbers on the arms of those they did not send straight to the gas chamber. This – with being stripped naked, completely shaved and given the clothes of dead prisoners – destroyed prisoners’ identities. With the loss of identity came the loss of principles. Few inmates could care about morality or ethics. To live amid great suffering, each person grew a “very necessary protective shell.” Some of those who shed their compunctions survived. Camp life killed many others, and wiped out those who clung to a higher purpose. “The best of us did not return.”

Cigarettes

Frankl worked as a doctor in a typhus ward during his last few weeks of captivity only. He spent most of three years doing crushing manual labor, laying train tracks in cold, wet weather, wearing rags and rotting shoes. Jews were slave workers for German industrial concerns. At times, they earned “bonus” coupons for cigarettes, the camp’s currency. Only the Capos – Jewish prisoners chosen as guards – actually smoked their cigarettes. Everyone else traded them for food or tidbits, like a scrap of wire to use as a shoelace. If a prisoner smoked his own cigarettes, everyone knew he’d lost the will to live and would die shortly. The SS soldiers who ran the camps gave liquor to prisoners working in the gas chambers and crematoria. These workers knew they soon would end up in the ovens like most prisoners. The Nazis kept them drunk to keep them working.

Reality

Frankl quickly recognized the reality of the camps. He divorced himself from his previous life and vowed to live within this new reality. All he had was “his existence.” He learned he did not need any of the things he once thought he couldn’t live without. He had to sleep on rough boards in unheated huts, sharing two ragged blankets with eight other men, and yet he still slept. He ate almost nothing, but lived. He accepted Dostoevsky’s truth: “A man can get used to anything.” Prisoners seeking suicide would hurl themselves onto the electrified barbed-wire fence. Frankl vowed never to “run into the wire.” He would die soon anyway; he wanted each day he could get.

Apathy

Prisoners hardened to their circumstances did not look away from humiliating punishments that fellow inmates endured. They raced to strip new corpses of clothes, shoes or hidden food. Many lost all empathy as they starved, though Frankl clung to some caring for his friends as a path to his own survival. The men grew almost used to constant beatings, finding that “the most painful part of the beatings is the insult they imply.” To the Capos and the SS, no prisoner had humanity. They were nothing. All that mattered was survival. Fed only “watery soup” and a tiny bread ration daily, the prisoners watched their bodies “devour themselves.” They forgot anything that wouldn’t help keep them alive. Few had the energy to help others. As the guards and Capos ruled life and death, the prisoners became mere toys of fate, further reducing their sense of humanity.

Spirituality

Prisoners retreated into interior lives. Many Jews became more religious. The more sensitive and artistic tended to survive as their hardier, less-aware compatriots died. The most sensitive were physically weak, but their richer, deeper interior lives fueled survival. By embracing their inner lives, the men became more, not less, appreciative of natural beauty, sunsets, or brief respites, like an hour by a hot stove. Frankl learned that the tiniest moments could evoke profound joy. Longing for his wife, speaking to her in his mind, the full power of love transfixed him. Amid squalor and death, he saw in his soul that “the salvation of man is through love and in love.”

Fate

Over time, prisoners became more passive. Any active decision might further death, so they avoided making choices. As liberation neared, Frankl turned down an SS offer to join other prisoners on a truck to Switzerland. He let “fate take its course.” He didn’t try to alter his destiny. Like many, he felt fate controlled him and that trying to shift it meant disaster. The Nazis crammed the men from the truck into a hut, set it on fire and watched the Jews in it burn alive.

Choice

Camp life showed Frankl that men have options for how they act. He maintained and saw others maintain “spiritual freedom” and individuality no matter what the Nazis forced them to endure. He found that attitude provides meaning. How you cope with your fate adds or subtracts meaning from your existence. Amid privation, you can keep your “inner liberty.” Men who could hold onto even a small sense of a future found that it helped them survive. Those who ceased to believe in tomorrow did not. In February 1945, a friend of Frankl’s dreamed that the camp would be liberated on March 30. On March 29, amid reports that Allied advances had slowed and would not reach the camp when he had dreamed, the man fell into a deep fever. He died the next day. Typhus appeared to be the cause, but Frankl knew his friend’s loss of belief in his future killed him. Life becomes meaningless when people have nothing to strive for, lose their sense of direction and stop searching for meaning. That is why you must seek answers to the questions your unique life raises. The singularity of your existence gives it meaning. Yet a meaningful life includes death and suffering. Frankl found that life at the bottom of existence revealed good and evil clearly.

“Depersonalization”

When the Allies liberated the camps and freed Frankl, he and his fellow inmates felt no joy. They had lost “the ability to feel pleased.” They had to relearn it. Their experiences depersonalized them. Their new life seemed to be a dream. They could not connect to it. Frankl learned his body could recover as he ate every bit of food that came his way and grew stronger, but his mind and emotions would not heal quickly. He leaned on his faith and slowly found his humanity. Many inmates felt that after what they had suffered, they could behave any way they liked and that their suffering justified evil conduct. Many could not cope with people who hadn’t been in the camps. As the men regained a measure of humanity, they lost their understanding of how they’d survived. The camps came to seem like a bad dream, disconnected from their new lives. The best feeling for those who were able to feel again at all was the exquisite absence of fear.

“Logotherapy”

After the war, Frankl created a new therapeutic approach he called logotherapy, which leads a patient to understand – even if the understanding might hurt – the purpose and meaning of his or her life. He told a colleague that in psychoanalysis a patient lies on a couch and says things that are “disagreeable” to say. Using logotherapy, a patient sits in a chair and “hears things…disagreeable to hear.” Where Freud wrote of a “will to pleasure” and Alfred Adler of “a will to power,” logotherapy concerns “the will to meaning.” Finding life’s meaning is a human’s primary drive. Each person’s meaning is exclusive, particular to his or her life. For a gratifying life, each person must discover and fulfill his or her own meaning. If you cannot find or fulfill your life’s meaning, you will suffer “existential frustration.” Logotherapy helps patients find their lives’ meaning. Unlike psychoanalysis, it doesn’t limit its inquiry to forces in the unconscious. Logotherapy includes the impact of “existential realities” – how patients live, work and love, their health, and the like. Logotherapy tries to help patients identify what their souls need most and fulfill it to give their lives meaning.

“Tension”

A healthy psyche exists in a state of tension between what you’ve accomplished and what you have yet to do. Mental health stems not from an absence of tension – or an excess of leisure – but from trying to reach a goal with profound meaning. This is a goal you choose, not one that life thrusts upon you – like, for example, the goal of staying alive in a death camp. The two poles of existence are, first, a meaning you must explore and, second, the person who must explore it – you. When an arch needs repair, those fixing it put a larger load on top of the arch. The load pushes the pieces of the arch together and strengthens it. Your quest for meaning is like the increased load atop an arch.

“The Existential Vacuum”

A sense of emptiness, the existential vacuum is a malaise from the late 20th century and beyond, manifesting as boredom. It springs from a disconnection between you and your goals. It occurs when you cannot find or connect to your necessary purpose. People without a goal fall prey to “conformism,” doing what everybody else does, or “totalitarianism,” doing what other people say. The vacuum might become apparent during times of enforced leisure, like a quiet Sunday.

Meaning

Life’s meaning changes with each person, each day and each hour. Don’t seek a grand, overall meaning to your life. What matters is your life’s unique meaning in the present moment. This is not an abstraction: It’s a concrete task or series of tasks you must identify and perform. To find this meaning, determine what your life asks of you. Only you can answer the demands of your existence. No matter how life shifts, its meaning endures. You can take three paths to finding the meaning in your life: producing work that is yours alone, connecting with another person – that path is love – or transcending hardship or tragedy. If you cannot change your fate, “rise above it.”

Love

Only love enables you to understand the essence of another person. Love reveals your beloved’s foundational characteristics. Love lets you see your loved one’s true potential. Your love inspires and enables your beloved to achieve his or her true potential as his or her love does the same for you. Love may be manifest in sex and, ideally, sex expresses love. But love exists in a place beyond sex or rationality.

Suffering

Suffering, like love, can reveal your life’s meaning. Suffering can stop feeling like suffering when you understand its deeper meaning. But, contrary to what most people think, you do not have to suffer to find meaning in your life. Your heart can “change at any instant.” What seems oppressive today can be revelatory tomorrow. Despite your suffering, strive to embrace “tragic optimism.” Welcome life no matter what course it takes; believe in a future even amid a bereft present. When you find what you must do, and do it, you will gain strength to deal with suffering.

Conclusion

The key message in this book:

Our success, and sometimes our very survival, is dependent upon our ability to find our life’s meaning. This doesn’t have to be something grand or existential – your own personal meaning depending on your immediate circumstances will do just fine.

About the author

World-renowned writer and psychotherapist Viktor E. Frankl wrote more than 30 books on theoretical and clinical psychology.

Viktor E. Frankl was professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Vienna Medical School until his death in 1997. His twenty-nine books have been translated into twenty-one languages. During World War II, he spent three years in Auschwitz, Dachau, and other concentration camps.

Viktor E. Frankl developed the revolutionary approach to psychotherapy known as logotherapy, founded on the belief that humanity’s primary motivational force is the search for meaning. One of the great psychotherapists of this century, he was head of the neurological department of the Vienna Polyclinic Hospital for twenty-five years and is the author of thirty-one works on philosophy, psychotherapy, and neurology, including the classic Man’s Search For Meaning, which has sold over nine million copies around the world.

Harold S. Kushner is rabbi emeritus at Temple Israel in Natick, Massachusetts, and the author of bestselling books including When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Living a Life That Matters, and When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough.

William J. Winslade is a philosopher, lawyer, and psychoanalyst who teaches psychiatry, medical ethics, and medical jurisprudence at the University of Texas Medical School in Galveston.

Table of Contents

Foreword / Harold S. Kushner
Preface / Gordon W. Allport
Preface to the 1992 edition / by Viktor E. Frankl
Experiences in a Concentration Camp
Logotherapy in a Nutshell
Postscript 1984: The Case for a Tragic Optimism.
Afterword / William J. Winslade.