Viktor E. Frankl (1946). Man’s Search for Meaning. (New York: Pocket Books). 221 Pages
(Living meaningfully) A Review Ozodi Thomas Osuji Ph.D.
In college I read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning; indeed, I took courses that surveyed the various psychotherapies and his Logotherapy was one of those reviewed. Somehow, however, I put the book and the therapeutic method based on it out of my mind!
Last week, I went to the local library and browsed through several bookshelves and one of the books that caught my attention was Dr Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. I recalled that I had read it ages ago but could not quite remember what it said. I decided to reread it and thus checked it out (along with other books). I read the other books first and kept trying to remember what Dr Frankl said for if I did I would not waste my time rereading his book. Unable to remember what the book said I read it. I read it in one evening; I did not put it down until I had read all of it.
As I reflected on what Dr Frankl said I could not help but wondering why I had not incorporated his philosophy into my approach to life since it made eminent sense to me. Or, maybe I have but did not know where I got my ideas?
Let me summarize what Dr Frankl said in his seminal book. The book is divided into three sections. Section one talked about his concentration camp experiences, the second section talked about logotherapy and the third section talked about what he called tragic optimism. Section two and three elucidated his philosophy, a philosophy predicated on his concentration experience. We shall focus on those two sections. In so far that section one is relevant to this discussion it is its attempt to describe the psychology of incarcerated persons, the psychology of their incarcerators, the prisons guards, the SS and the Capos and the psychology of the prisoners upon liberation from the camp. These various psychologies were really not well developed; the reader who seeks detailed information on those subjects can obtain them from better sources. Stanly Milligrams’ Stanford University study whereby some students were required to act as prison guards and administered electric shocks on other students who took on the role of prisoners did a better job informing us on how guards are easily socialized to become sadists who enjoy seeing prisoners suffer.
On the psychology of the prisoners Dr Frankl talked about the sense of shock the prisoners feel upon coming to the camp and their later acceptance of their fate (in contemporary psychology this is called the grieving process, the experience people go through when they experience major losses in their lives…shock, disbelief, denial, anger, why me feeling, powerlessness and depression and acceptance and maturity). When they realize that this nightmare is real and that there is no escape they tend to deaden their sensibilities and tolerate what in normal society they would not. These folks no longer respond as normal persons generally respond, such as experience outrage when injustice is done around them. As it were, their souls are numbed and they are able to tolerate the most inhumane treatment of their fellow human beings. Their primary preoccupation is to survive from minute to minute and not to worry about such abstract concepts as justice or lack of it.
Interestingly, the inmates expected to be rescued at any moment and developed what Dr Frankl called delusion of retrieve, the misinterpretation of cues to mean that someone is about to rescue them, retrieve them from their nightmare (this is pretty much like hungry persons’ tendency to see food everywhere).
Upon liberation from the concentration camps the prisoners undergo another set of experiences, including disillusionment, the realization that the beatific outside world that they had dreamed of is not so. They return to the real world where people are more or less like the people in the concentration camps only somewhat less evil but evil nevertheless.
Generally, those who had been incarcerated for a long time have a difficult time readjusting to liberty; they tend to look with nostalgia their prison life where others were responsible for their lives and behaviors. People can get used to everything including living without freedom.
Americans who have been in jails for extended periods of time when released so miss their jail home that they unconsciously choose to commit petty crimes so that they are returned to jail. For one thing their comrades are in jail and they are used to jail routine, to their song and dance with jail wardens. Moreover, in prisons they are given beds, roof over their heads and some sort of food whereas outsized jails they have to hustle to make a living, a skill they may have lost. This is not to talk about the death and general absence of the loved ones that the prisoners had thought were waiting to welcome them upon their release. Recidivism is probably contributed to by ex-convicts desire to return to their jails, to the only world that they know.
Release from a cage often makes life in the cage preferred to life outside it. There is such a thing as socialization to life in a cage so that when habituated birds are released, they return to captivity.
As noted, however, these ideas are not well developed nor are they the main focus of the book. The main thrust of the book is man’s search for meaning, and to that task we presently return.
Dr Frankl was a young Jewish psychiatrist in Vienna, Austria when the Nazis took over Austria in 1938. He had worked at a large psychiatric hospital before Hitler took over Vienna. Based on his observations of his patients he had written a manuscript that he intended to publish. But before he could publish his book the Nazis rounded him and other Jewish persons up and bundled them to concentration camps. He spent several years in those camps, including Auschwitz.
He hid his manuscript in his coat hoping to protect it and should he be saved from the camp eventually publish it. At some point the Nazis took his coat. He was given a rag tagged coat from a prisoner who had been gassed to death in the gas chambers. In the pocket of the coat was a quote in Yiddish from Hebrew scripture to the effect that one should do what one knows is true instead of just writing about it or talking about it. That prayer stuck with him and he decided to live the thesis of his manuscript instead of merely lamenting its loss. The man decided to live the truth he knew and to rewrite his book should he ever get out of the camp alive.
The desire to live and eventually write his book, again, apparently kept him going. Moreover, living what he believed to be the truth gave him faith to tolerate the incredible abuses the SS and their capos (fellow prisoners used by the SS guards to monitor other prisoners behaviors…those were sometimes more vicious than the SS guards) visited on the Jewish inmates of the concentration camp.
In the part of his book that described his experience at the camp, Dr Frankl narrated the starvation, the physical and verbal abuses, the humiliation, the use of their labor for free by Nazis and when like work animals they were no longer able to perform the work required of them they were herded into gas chambers and gassed to death. Eventually the Nazis killed over six million Jews.
However, it is not Nazi depraved behavior that preoccupied Dr Frankl; what interested him is how his fellow inmates responded to their abuse and degradation. The majority of the inmates literally became swine, and like pigs sniffed for food; many stole food from the mouths of children. It was a kind of Darwinian struggle for survival of the fittest and the weakest died. Those who could hustle for food survived and those who could not die out! But amiss this Hobbesian war of all against all a handful of the inmates lived like saints. Not only did they not struggle for their survival at the expense of other persons but did whatever little they could to help other folks survive. These folks would share whatever food they had with other inmates, especially those who were sick. These people transcended their individual existence.
So, how is it that in the midst of suffering that some human beings are able to transcend their egos desire for survival at the expense of other egos and did what served social interests? What is it that motivated the saints in the concentration camp? What kept them going so that a few of them eventually lived to see the day Russian soldiers liberated the concentration camp from the Nazi psychopaths?
Dr Frankl said that those who did not degenerate to pig (may be one is doing pigs injustice by calling sociopathic human beings pigs?) level had certain characteristics; that they had hope for the future; they believed that despite their bleak surroundings that life has some meaning; indeed, that they found meaning from their unavoidable suffering (if suffering is avoidable of course folk should try to avoid it or else they would be masochists; unavoidable suffering can be reinterpreted so that it is made the most of; how do they say it: if life gives you lemon make lemonade out of it; this is basic stoic philosophy Epictetus wrote about it; one can change ones attitude towards unavoidable bad conditions so that one manages to live cheerfully despite the suffering one is in).
In effect, if one has belief that life has meaning and one lives in accordance with that belief one is likely to live like the saints in the concentration camp called our world despite the vicissitudes of life.
Of course, it goes without saying that what gives one individual meaning may not necessarily give another individual meaning. Dr Frankl found meaning in his desire to publish his book and live in accordance with its thesis. Others probably found meaning and hope from thinking about their loved ones (wives, children etc.) and hope in their mental children (the ideas that they hope to give birth to from their concentration camp experience).
From his prisoner experience Dr Frankl came to the conclusion that human beings are those creatures that seek meaning in their lives. As he sees it, each of us searches for meaning to his life. Why am I living, he says each of us asks himself that question. Different persons come up with different answers to their existential question.
As Dr Frankl sees it, to the extent that the individual has found a meaning for living he tends to live peaceful and happy existence.
If for some reason the individual is unable to come up with a meaning for his existence, Dr Frankl says that he may develop what he called existential neurosis. He defines this type of neurosis differently from the manner regular Freudian psychoanalysts define neurosis (Freud sees neurosis as emanating from the conflicts arising from the interplay of id, Ego and Superego…from unsatisfied pleasure principle, frustrated sexuality). Dr Frankl’s existential neurosis emanates from failure to find meaning in one’s life.
Contrary to those psychoanalysts who contend that “meanings and values are defense mechanisms, reaction formations and sublimations,” Dr Frankl sees the search for meaning as critical in our existence and says that “he would not be willing to live merely for his defense mechanisms, nor would he be willing to die just for his reaction formations. Man is…able to live and die for the sake of his ideals and values!”
Subsequent to his liberation from the concentration camp, Dr Frankl developed what he called Logo therapy (Logo is from Greek for meaning; therapy is any effort to change people for the better, to heal them). Logo therapy is that form of psychotherapy that believes that people need meaning in their lives and thus helps them search for their individual meanings and when found live them. Logotherapy is appropriate for what Dr Frankl called noogenic neurosis (noos is Greek for mind).
No person can tell other persons what is meaningful for them; the therapist cannot tell his clients what gives them meaning, all he can do is enable them find out what their existence considers meaningful and go live it. The critical point here is that the individual must find out what his existence considers meaningful and then live it; he must not just talk about it but live it and do what it asks of him.
As Dr Frankl sees it, each of us has a will to meaning and when that will to meaning is frustrated, say when we do work that is not in accord with it we feel that our lives are meaningless and we feel existential neurosis (depression, anxiety etc.). As it were, life assigns each of us a task that we must perform to find meaning in our lives and if we deviate from them we feel existential frustration.
As Dr Frankl sees it, the “striving to find a meaning in ones life is the primary motivational force in man. That is to say that I speak of the will to meaning in contrast to the pleasure principle on which Freudian psychoanalysis is centered, as well as in contrast to the will to power on which Adlerian psychology, using the term striving for superiority, is focused.” (In post Second World War Vienna, Logotherapy was considered the third mode to psychotherapy, third to Freudian and Adlerian therapies.)
It is in living what makes him feel that his life is meaningful that the individual actualizes his self. It is in living in accordance with ones meaning that one finds happiness and peace. Happiness is not something one should aim at; it is a byproduct of how one lives ones life. Live in accordance with your meaning and peace and happiness will be your reward; but seek pleasure as an end and you reap pain.
Dr Frankl’s Logotherapy is a form of existential therapy because it aims at “assisting the patient to find meaning in his life.” However, it differs from French existentialism that sees life as meaningless exercise, which sees life as nothing to be endured by devoting ones life to doing what one likes to do. To Dr Frankl such existentialist philosophy is nihilistic and is a product of the age of meaninglessness we live. The age has its collective neurosis, the belief that life has no meaning and existentialist philosophers merely give articulation to that nihilistic neurosis.
As Dr Frankl sees it, we may not know what the ultimate meaning to life is but deep down each of us has something that gives him a sense of meaning to his life. One may or may not believe in God (Dr Frankl does not knock religion although he understands why it is almost impossible to reconcile the existence of a loving God with a world where Nazi madmen could kill whomever they deemed not worthy of life) but in as much as such belief gives some people a feeling that their lives have meaning so be it. God may be an illusion, as Freud said (in his book, the Future of an Illusion), but look at Freud’s life; it is marked by addiction to cocaine and obsessive compulsive neurosis that despite his psychoanalysis he could not overcome. Is that a better way to live?
If an illusion makes people live moral lives who are we to knock it if our supposed intellectual enlightenment leads to mass murder, as in Nazi Germany. By the way, how do we know that God does not exist? Is it from pure reason, or from science? Are those two not partial understanding of phenomena? Atheism is as much a religion as is religion for both are predicated on faith on the unknown, not complete knowledge of existence.
When the individual fails to find meaning in his existence he develops existential neurosis and may become depressed or act out aggressively or seek refuge in addiction (to sex, over eating, alcohol, smoking, drugs etc.). As Dr Frankl sees them, addictions are largely contributed to by the existential vacuum people in our time live in. Our existential vacuum may be masked. “Sometimes the frustrated will to meaning is vicariously compensated for by the will to power, including the most primitive form of the will to power, the will to money. In other cases the place of the frustrated will to meaning is taken by the will to pleasure. That is why existential frustration eventuates in sexual compensation.”
In olden days folks simply accepted their people’s religions and those seemed to give many of them reason for living but today science has made most college educated persons, especially those educated in the physical sciences not to believe in God and more importantly not to derive meaning from the consolation of religion.
Philosophy used to give folks some sort of consolation but astronomy tells us that we are nothing but matter. Fourteen billion years ago, something emerged out of nowhere; that something was the size of the nucleus of an atom; it became incredibly hot and exploded in a Big Bang. Its heat produced light. Light produced photons. Photons transformed themselves into mass (first as quarks and electrons and quarks became neutrons, protons etc.; energy transformed itself to matter). We are made from matter and when we die our bodies return to matter.
The universe is expanding and in trillions of years to come all the galaxies, stars, planets etc. would die. All matter would break up into atoms and atoms into particles and those eventually return to the nothingness from which they came. The universe would-become one cold empty space. Life, in effect, is nothing; life, existentialist thinkers tell us, is a joke and there is no meaning to it.
But Dr Frankl sees it, that there is a meaning to life albeit we do not quite grasp it. “Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus every ones life is unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.”
Our minds tell us, without proof, that there is meaning to our existence. Physics, on the other hand, tells us that there is no meaning to our existence. Charles Darwin teaches us that human beings are just a bunch of animals that evolved brains and their brains produce thinking. Thinking is nothing but the dance of electrons (which are photons with mass). The neurons in our brains communicate with each other via electricity and neurochemicals and somehow produce thinking. When we die our brains die and that is the end of us. In the here and now if something interferes with the balance of the chemistry in our brains we become insane.
Contemporary psychiatry tells us that mental illness is a function of chemical imbalances in our brains. Are you schizophrenic? Then your brain has unbalanced dopamine. Are you manic? Then your brain has unbalanced neuropiniphrine. Are you depressed? Then your brain has unbalanced serotonin. Are you anxious? Then your brain has unbalanced GABA or endorphin. Even personality disorders are these days seen as products of neurotransmitter imbalances in the brain.
Having reduced human beings to biochemical factories where there are disorders psychiatrists give their clients’ medications to rebalance their chemically disordered brains. Alas, all their medications do not heal any one of his mental disorder. Sixty years of medicinal psychiatry (the first so-called therapeutic medication, Thorazine was introduced in 1952) the mentally ill are still not healed!
We are exactly where we were when Freud and his disciples talked to their neurotic clients for thirty years and did not heal any one of them and Pavlov, Watson and Skinner and their fellow behaviorists talked glibly about classical and operant conditioning and behavior modification and did not modify any ones neurosis and or psychosis.
So what is the problem? Dr Frankl says that man is more than his body. We are more than machines. Perhaps we should not so quickly dismiss the idea of spirit? Ah, God, where is the proof that he exists? We have no such proof. Yet, if one lives what gives one meaning, which tends to entail being “responsible to society and or to ones conscience” one tends to find joy in one’s life.
Dr Frank insists that we can discover meaning in our lives by “creating work or doing a deed, by experiencing something or encountering someone or by the attitude we take towards unavoidable suffering.” “What is demanded of man is not as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms. Logos is deeper than logic.”
Nihilism or the belief that life has no meaning is a copout. “There is a danger inherent in the teaching of man’s nothingness, the theory that man is nothing but the result of biological, psychological and sociological conditions, or the product of heredity and environment. Such a teaching makes the neurotic belief what he is prone to believe anyway, namely, that he is the pawn and victim of outer influences or inner circumstances. This neurotic fatalism is fostered and strengthened by psychotherapy which denies that man is free. To be sure, a human being is a finite thing, and his freedom is restricted. It is not freedom from conditions, but freedom to take a stand toward the conditions….I bear witness to the unexpected extent to which man is capable of defying and braving even the worst conditions conceivable.”
To sum Dr Frankl’s philosophical stance I repeat his intoxicating words, words that are music to my ears: “man is not fully conditioned and determined but rather determines himself whether he gives in to conditions or stands up to them. In other words, man is ultimately self-determining. Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment. Every human being has the freedom to change at any instant. Therefore we cannot predict his future. Man is capable of changing the world for the better and of changing himself for the better.”
The beauty of it all is that “the innermost core of the patient’s personality is not even touched by a psychosis. A human being is not like other things that are determined by things; he is self-determining (within limits of course for his environment does affect him). Man can make of himself, within limits set by his environment what he becomes.”
Dr Frankl has evidence for his position because despite the attempt by the criminals called Nazis at the concentration camp he did not succumb to becoming an animal who stole food from the mouth of children. He was in a living laboratory where he saw some people become swine and others chose sainthood. “Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.”
Need I add more? Human beings are those creatures driven by desire to find meaning in their lives; those who live meaningful lives live like saints whereas those that don’t live like swine. Of course, only a few find meaning in their lives. Whoever said that what is good (beauty) is easy to attain? Dr Frankl’s philosophy, aka Logotherapy seems a useful path to living the good life. I highly recommend reading his book: Man’s search for Meaning.
CRITICISM
My intention in doing this book review is to write a straight forward summary of Dr Frankl’s book; I love the book and therefore have no intention of taking issue with him. That been said a disturbing thought keeps intruding into my mind. The thought is this: why didn’t the Jewish inmates of the concentration camps rebel, fight and if needs be die fighting? In Mein Kampf Adolf Hitler (his political blueprint) made it crystal clear that he considered Jews to be subhuman vermin and that he wanted them shipped out of Europe or exterminated. When he came to power in 1933 Jews were arrested and shipped to the various concentration camps; the operating idea was to get as much work out of them and when they are broken up throw their dead bodies into ditches. They were condemned to death from the very moment they were rounded up from their homes and brought to the camps. In the camps, old or sickly or broken ones were immediately sent to the gas chambers and gassed to death. The salient point is that Hitler and his Nazi gang wanted the Jews dead and the Jews in the concentration camps were condemned men, and knew it!
My question is this: knowing that they would be exterminated how come the Jews did not choose to die like men by fighting their captors. If they had attacked their captors clearly they would have been shot dead and in my opinion would have died decent death, manly death, and heroic death. Why did they sheepishly allow themselves to be worked to near death status and then walked into gas chambers to be gassed to death? Why did they choose to walk into gas chambers to be gassed to death, why not fight and get shot to death? Where is it written that the orders of mad men should be obeyed? If God himself gave such order it ought to be disobeyed. Fuck God if he is the lord of death not life. Only a loving God, the lord of life, not death is worthy of our obedience.
It seemed to me that Jews had a choice to make, the choice to fight or not to fight, to live like men or like animals. In as much as they did not choose to fight it seemed to me that they were partners in their humiliation and eventual death. It seems to me that the Jews who walked into gas chambers and were gassed to death were capital cowards hence as contemptible as the Nazis who gassed them to death.
When I was in elementary school my friends would call any child who gave in to bullies a Jew. I did not understand what that meant. I am guessing that it means that Jews are those people who did not fight back and allowed themselves to be slaughtered by Nazi criminals. I am glad to see that the nation of Israel has corrected that mistake and now fight for their national survival. No human being should tolerate others oppression under any religious or philosophical guise.
These types of thinking lead me to wondering about human beings in general. As we all know human beings easily embrace slavery. Africans allowed white Americans and Arabs to enslave them; they could have fought and died fighting, in which case they would not have become slaves.
The slave master obviously is a sadist and a terrorist; he used terror to instill fear into the minds of his slaves; he intimidated them and out of fear of being killed they did as he asked them to do; as a sadist he derived pleasure from torturing his slaves.
Now, suppose the potential slaves did not mind been killed by the sadistic slave master and refused to obey him the most the sadist would have done was to kill them. If they were killed, preferably while fighting, they would have died valiant death. Instead, their desire to live at all costs disposed them to tolerate the incredible abuse they received in the hands of slave masters.
In effect, what encourages human beings to practice slavery and the bestiality that Nazis practiced was human beings fear of death, their willingness to tolerate abuse and oppression rather than fight for liberty or die. Why this tendency to tolerate oppression?
In the contemporary world oppressors are still abusing folks because folks are willing to tolerate it. In Africa Africans are so afraid of dying that they tolerate their oppressive leaders, thugs and thieves, really that rule them. If only they rose up and fought and demanded freedom or death they would have decent governments. In North America black folk are still largely relegated to second class citizenship and they tolerate it hence encourage white folks to remain the beasts they still are.
Why are we human beings so tolerant of abuse when it is in our hands to take up weapons and fight for our liberty?
I cannot answer this question for all persons. I can only answer it for me. Given what I know about me and as testified by my history, I think that if other persons tried to subject me to the type of abuse that Nazis subjected Jews to I would rather die fighting them than tolerate such a fate. Life has never meant that much for me, anyway. As an existentialist (in the mode of Camus, Sartre, Heidegger, Jasper etc.), I have always seen life as meaningless and purposeless and tolerate it on the basis of doing what I like doing. If I were to live without doing what makes sense to me I would prefer to die, preferably fighting whoever took my liberties away.
I understand that not many people are existentialist and certainly not many persons have my indomitable mind, a mind that even at age eight would defiantly tell adults to go jump into the river and drown themselves if they tried telling me to do something without first consulting and getting my permission. Beating me, as folks tried doing to me, did not help; raising your hands to strike me and or your voice at me made me more stubborn, willful and oppositional. Go ahead and shoot me and put me out of my misery was my attitude to oppressors, but tolerate oppression, no. I do not love living in flesh so much to justify tolerating other persons abuse just so I am given the privilege to live in body, to suffer.
Why do people like to live in flesh, anyway? Don’t they realize that to live in ego and body, as Buddha said twenty five hundred years ago, is to suffer? What is so beautiful about living in body that people are afraid of leaving their bodies, dying? I do not understand it. I am ready to die at any moment, especially if my liberty is threatened. For me it is give me liberty or give me death. Life in slavery? No, thank you.
I do not understand why some persons are not afraid of harm and death while the many are intimidated by fear of harm and death, and I will leave it at that; I will not take issue with Dr Frankl and ask him why he did not fight and die and instead tolerated Nazi abuse of him and his people. My warrior spirit sees him as a coward but I may be wrong?
LOVE IS ALL THAT MATTERS IN OUR EXISTENCE
A man has to know some things for certain. I do know that to me love is the best antidote to our absurd lives. I look at me, I see a body that will, give or take a hundred years, die, rot and smell to high heaven. I have no illusion about my body, it is food for worms. My body is nothing. So is your body. If our bodies are nothing, I reason that the egos, sense of selves our brains produce, are also nothing. In other words we are nothing. I have no illusion that I have worth or that human beings have worth.
My only illusion is that despite our physical worthlessness that we have the capacity to love ourselves as we are. Thus, I strive to love me and love all people.
What is love? We can engage in unending philosophical discussion on the nature of love. For me love means working for our mutual good, in Adler’s psychological terms, love is working for our social interest.
Love means providing all children with education up to university level at public expense; love means providing all people with health insurance. Love means seeing certain things in life as human rights that we are obligated to provide to each other. Having met those necessities the individual is left alone to go do his own thing.
To me, democracy and attenuated free enterprise economy (mixed economy) is the way to go.
I must say that love does not mean tolerating others abuse under some misguided notion that we should forgive our enemies. Our enemies are misguided and we need to correct their anti-social behaviors but not tolerate them. We should fight Nazis, Taliban’s and other enemies of human freedom and dignity and not overlook their madness under some misguided Christian concept of forgiveness. Correction of our mistakes and living lovingly is my idea of the good life.
As Dr Frankl requires us to do, I have searched my mind (noos) and found that loving all people and helping all people to love themselves is what gives my life meaning. When I stop loving me and all people I have stopped doing that which gives my life meaning and purpose, and as the man said I will die. As long as I have the hope, be it an illusion or delusion that it is possible to get most human beings to love all people I find reason to live (or in cynical existentialist category, excuse to live, excuse for tolerating the inherent suffering that is our existence in body, space and time).
PS: Why write a review of a book written in 1946? It is because I find the contents still germane to the demands of existence in 2011. Read this book and try to figure out what makes your life meaningful, and don’t just talk about it, live it and you live a peaceful, happy and abundant life.
Ozodi Thomas Osuji
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