Man's Search for Meaning

In his book “Take Off Your Shoes” (1972), Mark Link revisited Viktor Frankl’s experience in the Nazi concentration camps, and outlined the basic structure by which Viktor Frankl articulated his logotheraphy in his famous book, “Man’s Search for Meaning” (1956). 

Sex is considered as one of the most primitive of our human intincts which even over-rides our instinct for survival. Yet Viktor Frankl observed that the religious dimension of our human existence is more fundamental than our sexual drive. In the inhuman situation, like the Nazi concentration camps, sex drive was almost null. However, according to Viktor Frankl, our being religious became more vibrant in the cruel, atrocious, and inhuman condition where human life became absurd, meaningless, and valueless. In the concentration camp where life is reduced to the whims of those who have control over the system, the religious men and women started breaking their own bread and shared it to other prisoners who suffered the most. Our survival instinct follows its natural tendency to safeguard first ourselves and to feed our hungry stomachs, but the human spirit can rise above our condition. We transcend the forces of the environment that shaped our thinking and acting. We refuse to be determined by our environment. We shape our environment. This article of Mark Link is a good read. Kudos.

Viktor Frankl observed

that most prisoners passes through

three mental stages in concentration camps.

Their initial reaction was shock.

Formed in single line, they filed by a camp officer,

who pointed to the left for one person (crematorium) and

to the right for another (work camp).

Thousands of human lives hinged upon the flick of his finger.

The second stage was apathy or “emotional” death.

Forced to do hard labor,

prisoners were often fed only bread and thin soup.

They became walking skeletons.

They saw fellow prisoners cruelly beaten,

but didn’t respond – even with sympathy.

Dr. Frankl observed that the sex urge was generally absent;

but religious interest was “the most sincere imaginable.”

Prisoners conducted their own services,

and the depth of their faith was surprising.

Despite deep personal suffering,

some comforted others and gave away their ration of bread.

In this brutal climate, some prisoners became animals; others became saints.

Rising above suffering, they turned life into an “inner triumph”.

Dr. Frankl often cites Nietzsche’s phrase:

“He who has they why to live for, can bear almost any how.”

The third stage came following liberation from the camps.

The experience was like a dream.

Some reacted bitterly, others gratefully.

Frankl’s reaction was gratitude.

Shortly after his release,

he was strolling through a field of wild flowers with birds circling overhead.

Instinctively, he knelt and prayed.

“I called to the Lord, from my narrow prison,

and He answered me in the freedom of space.”

He doesn’t recall how long he knelt there, repeating those words.

Out of these prison experiences,

Frankl drew the insights for a new approach to psychotherapy,

which he calls “logotherapy”.

It holds that the underlying motivation of human behavior is

the will to meaning--  every man’s search to find meaning in his life.

According to Frankl, we detected meaning

and we are free to accept it or reject it.

Man is “never driven to moral behavior… he decides to act morally.”

Frankl holds that we can experience meaning in one of the three ways:

(1)  By performing an action (e.g. helping others)

(2)  By experiencing a value (e.g. love), or

(3)  By undergoing suffering.

What counts in suffering is not the suffering,

but one’s attitude toward it.

Dr. Frankl denies that man is a mere product of heredity and environment.

Man is able to surmount these.

For Frankl, the goal of human existence is

not “self-actualization,” but “self-transcendence.”—

overcoming and surpassing one’s self.