Dr. Victor Frankl ” Man’s search for meaning”

On my way back to Atlanta from one of my trips, a young man rushed into the flight, almost at the close of boarding gates, to occupy the seat next to me in the business cabin. His face looked flushed indicating he had hurried his way to the flight. In one hand, he was holding a thin hardcover book, and in the other balancing a carry-on bag and a jacket. He quickly dropped his bag and jacket underneath the seat, sat down gasping for breath, turned towards me for a quick nod, opened the book in a hurry ( almost as if boarding the flight was a distraction he could have done without) to read. He didn’t give himself even a few minutes to settle down, wipe his face, adjust the air vent or drink some water, as is normal for a seasoned traveler to do. A few minutes passed before I looked at him again. He was still engrossed in the book. It was clear that the book was irresistibly holding his attention. Soon, I was able to glance at the title of the book, and the moment the name registered in my mind, I knew exactly what was going on with this man and why this particular book was holding him enthralled. There are not many books in literature that have the capacity to change the course of one’s life, in one reading. And such books usually are not to be actively sought; they mysteriously find you at the right time. They can hide in the corner of your library for a long time without anyone noticing, and one fine day, one of them can attract your attention in response to a nagging question, an emotional conundrum, or an existential enigma. Why that happens when it happens, no one can answer. It was one such book the man beside me was reading. It was Viktor Frankl’s “ Man’s search for meaning”.

Victor Frankl was one of the dominant psychologists of the twentieth century. This essay will become incredibly long if I attempt to elaborate on Dr. Frankl’s overall contribution to the field. However, this little book, “Man’s search for meaning” that Dr. Frankl wrote in 1946, just after the war, is widely known and acknowledged as a sensitive exploration on finding peace and meaning even under the most abject circumstances. The book described Dr. Frankl’s experiences in the Nazi concentration camps for six winters between 1941 and 1946. To date, along with Anne Frank’s diaries, this book remains one of the most moving accounts of survival, faith, hope, meaning and restitution during that tragic period in human history. The original title of the book published in German was “Say ‘Yes’ to Life: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp”. In its English translation, the title was changed to “Man’s search for meaning”. The concentration camps during the Nazi regime were not just prisons, they were temporary holding places for mass murder. Millions held in those camps were physically tortured and stripped of all humanity. What happened within those enclosed spaces amounted to the complete annihilation of the spirit, dignity, respect, and identity of a Jew. When the existence and the tragic operations of the concentration camps came to light after the war, it busted forever the myth of human progress and proved beyond doubt that beneath the veneer of rationality, there ran strong, virulent currents of bestiality and perversion waiting to raise its head. The Holocaust was a tragic revelation and a turning point. We have not yet completely recovered from the shock of what happened within those gas chambers. That is the reason whenever we observe symptoms of a totalitarian regime beginning to take shape, we become nervous and paranoid. Memories of the Holocaust come back, and we begin to fear the worst.

Dr. Frankl was a famous doctor even before the Nazis decided to purge the Jews. He was a jew in Austria, and by the end of 1930, had established a third school of psychology alongside Freud’s and Jung’s. He called it Logotherapy – or the ability to find meaning in human lives, not as an abstract idea, but something concrete and personal to the individual concerned. When the threat of an imminent Nazi purge was becoming a reality in 1941, thousands fled Germany by any means available. The American consulate formally offered Dr. Frankl a visa to the US, assuring immunity and professional freedom. But Dr. Frankl refused. He refused the offer because he couldn’t leave his aged parents behind and selfishly seek liberty for himself. In 1991, in a new preface to the book, Dr. Frankl described how, during those initial days of the Nazi regime, he grappled with the idea of leaving Austria or not and “a hint from heaven”, as he calls it, in the shape of a piece of marble on the dining table of his ancestral home helped him make up his mind. That marble piece was from a synagogue that the Nazis had just torn down. His father had managed to recover it from the debris because a portion of one of the ten commandments “ Honor thy Father and Mother that thy days be long upon the land”, was embossed on it. When Victor saw the marble piece and read that fragment, he became resolute in his decision to stay, and not leave. He remained in Austria, knowing fully well what was in store for him.

A few months later, Dr. Frankl was taken a prisoner and dispatched from one concentration camp to another. Stripped of his profession, status, and identity, he found his ideas and beliefs tested, challenged, and forged in new ways. The principal question Dr. Frankl seriously asked himself was this: what happens to a man when he has stripped away of everything he possessed — education, dignity, family, wealth, self-respect, and importantly, no hope at all for the future? What does a man do in such a case? Is there anything at all that can give his life meaning and a will to survive? Dr. Frankl introspected deeply on these questions in the midst of the humiliating lives he and the fellow Jews were leading. Death was imminent. Anytime, Dr. Frankl could be gassed. Life was precarious, fragile, and held together by the thinnest of threads. The only unassailable part of their lives was the inner sense of worth and meaning each one possessed and could value. The Nazis had stripped away everything from the inmates, and what was left is just their own inner essence, if at all it mattered. Under such conditions, Frankl noticed a curious phenomenon: Many inmates died not from ill-health or starvation or unhygienic conditions of living, they died because they simply lost the will and the meaning to continue living. Often the victims would refuse to get up from their soiled beds, or eat, talk or co-operate. They gave up on life. When an inmate reached this state, they would invariably die within a week, withering away like an unwatered plant.

On the other hand, Dr. Frankl observed that many who survived the camps successfully did so mostly by finding something to live for. In other words, each survivor found a meaning that was extremely personal and applicable only to him or her. For few, it was their family, for others it was a skill they cherished, to a few others, it was the hope of a brighter future. In short, there was something each one could find within themselves that made life worth holding onto. Dr. Frankl himself found meaning in his desire to continue his work as a psychologist and to use his insights discovered in the camp. Whenever he found some breathing space in the crowded camps, he jotted down his thoughts on scraps of soiled paper, which he would later use in his book “Man’s search for meaning”. He also remembered his wife often. Thoughts of reuniting with her, and resuming the intimacy they shared kept him buoyant. Dr. Frankl also realized that Imagination can be a great tool if used positively. This attitude of re-directing and harnessing the complete hopelessness of a situation into an inner force filled with personal meaning and energy often summons the necessary energy to keep the body and self-functioning in an integrated manner. In the book, Dr, Frankl often quotes Frederick Nietzsche’s insightful comment “He who has a why to live for, can bear almost any how”. The important thing is to figure out the “why”-the meaning in one’s existence – and the means to achieve the “why” will unfailingly appear. No meaning is trivial as long as we have and believe in one.

Some detractors did critique Dr. Frankl’s work that he passively accepted the suffering the Germans so inhumanely inflicted, and that he advocated a philosophy of fatalism. That may be a wrong reading of the book, and far from what Dr. Frankl meant. In the book, Dr. Frankl strongly points that every effort must be taken to stop atrocities and suffering of any kind; but when that becomes impossible, and people are thrown into a choiceness predicament such as the Jews found themselves in, then the only way to keep hope alive is to find an inner meaning. Otherwise, everything is lost.

Midway during my flight, my neighbor put the book down and pressed his eyes. It was a little moist and tired. I asked him” Do you like the book you are reading?”He looked at me for a moment, as if I had asked the wrong question, and then answered: “This book has opened my eyes. I bought this yesterday after work, and since then I haven’t been able to keep myself away from it. I almost missed the boarding announcement. For a long time, I have wondered how anyone could have survived the Holocaust, and if they did – How? Dr. Frankl’s little memoir has given me the answers, and a possible opening to change my own way of life. From now on, this book will be the gift I will share with people close to me..”I understood his answer. I felt the same way when I read it for the first time nearly a decade ago.

God bless…

yours in mortality,

Bala