Man's Search for Meaning

The book in two parts

Viktor Frankl was a Viennese psychiatrist and neurologist. Before the war, he already worked on a theory that people need meaning more than they need pleasure or power. In 1942 the Nazis deported him, his wife, and his parents. He spent nearly three years in four camps, including Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and subcamps of Dachau. His wife, his mother, his father, and his brother all died.

He wrote the first part of the book in about nine days after liberation. It is not a history of the camps. It answers one question: how did camp life affect the mind of an average prisoner? The second part, "Logotherapy in a Nutshell," explains the therapy that Frankl built from his prewar ideas and his camp experience. Later editions add a postscript, "The Case for a Tragic Optimism."

Frankl writes as an ordinary prisoner, not as a hero. He was number 119104. He worked mostly as a laborer, digging and laying railway tracks, and only near the end as a doctor in a typhus ward.

Phase one: shock on arrival

Frankl divides the prisoner's mental reaction into three phases. The first is shock at admission.

At Auschwitz, an SS officer sorted the new arrivals with a small movement of a finger: left or right. Most people sent one way went to the gas chambers. The survivors lost everything. They gave up their clothes, their hair, and their possessions. Frankl had sewn the manuscript of his first book into the lining of his coat. He lost it here.

Many prisoners at first felt a "delusion of reprieve." Like a man condemned to death who expects a pardon at the last minute, they hoped things would not be so bad. A grim curiosity and even humor followed. Frankl notes how much the body could endure: prisoners slept nine to a bunk, worked in the cold with wet shoes, and did not catch the colds they would have caught at home. Many thought of suicide, often by "running into the wire" (the electrified fence). Frankl resolved not to.

Phase two: apathy and the inner life

The second phase is apathy, a kind of emotional death. After a few weeks, prisoners stopped feeling disgust, horror, or pity. They watched beatings and deaths without reacting. Frankl describes this as a necessary shell. It protected the mind by narrowing all attention to one goal: survive today.

Hunger dominated thought. Prisoners talked about food constantly. Interest in politics, sex, and culture faded. Only religion and a deep inner life stayed strong in some people.

This inner life is the center of the book. On a freezing march to a work site, Frankl thought of his wife. He saw her face and heard her answer. He did not know if she was alive. He found that it did not matter. Love, he realized, reaches beyond the physical person. He writes that the salvation of man is through love and in love.

Other inner resources also helped:

• Beauty. Prisoners looked at a sunset over the Bavarian woods and forgot their condition for a moment.
• Humor. Frankl and a friend promised to invent one funny story every day about life after liberation.
• A future goal. When Frankl felt near collapse, he imagined himself after the war, in a warm lecture hall, giving a talk on the psychology of the camp. This turned his suffering into an object of study.

From these observations, Frankl draws his central claim. The camp could take everything from a person except one thing: the freedom to choose an attitude toward the conditions. He saw men who walked through the huts comforting others and giving away their last piece of bread. They were few. But they proved that a person can keep some inner freedom even when everything outside is controlled.

So the kind of person a prisoner became was not fully determined by the camp. It was also the result of an inner decision. Frankl says there are only two races of people: the decent and the indecent. Both exist in every group. He names a camp commander who secretly bought medicine for prisoners with his own money, and he describes prisoners who acted as cruel Capos (inmates who supervised other inmates).

Frankl links survival to having a reason to live. He often cites Nietzsche: a person who has a "why" to live for can bear almost any "how." When a prisoner lost faith in the future, he gave up. He stayed in his bunk, smoked his last cigarettes, and soon died. Frankl tells of a fellow prisoner who dreamed that the war would end on March 30. When the day came with no liberation, he fell ill and died. Frankl also notes that the death rate rose sharply in the week between Christmas 1944 and New Year 1945, when many people's hope of being home for Christmas collapsed.

From this he draws a practical rule. To help a person in despair, you must point them toward a future goal. One man had a child waiting abroad. Another had a series of books to finish. Each person's meaning is unique. Frankl puts it this way: we must stop asking what we expect from life and start asking what life expects from us.

Phase three: after liberation

The third phase begins after release. Frankl describes depersonalization. When the prisoners walked out into the meadows, they could not feel joy. They had to learn it again.

Two dangers followed. Some former prisoners felt that their suffering entitled them to harm others. Others met bitterness and disillusionment when they returned home. Their families were dead, or people at home shrugged and said they had suffered too. Frankl calls this the hardest experience of all for many survivors.

Logotherapy: the will to meaning

The second part explains logotherapy, from the Greek "logos," meaning "meaning." Frankl calls it the third Viennese school of psychotherapy. Freud built on a will to pleasure. Adler built on a will to power. Frankl argues that the primary human drive is the will to meaning.

When this will is blocked, a person feels existential frustration. This can produce a noogenic neurosis, a neurosis that comes from a spiritual or moral conflict, not from a psychological complex. Frankl also describes the existential vacuum: a widespread feeling of emptiness and boredom in modern life. People no longer have instincts that tell them what to do, or traditions that tell them what they should do. So they either do what others do (conformism) or what others tell them (totalitarianism). He names a "Sunday neurosis," the depression that hits some people when the busy week ends and they face their inner emptiness.

Frankl says meaning is found, not invented. It is specific to each person and each moment. He lists three main ways to find it:

1. By creating a work or doing a deed.
2. By experiencing something or encountering someone, above all through love.
3. By the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.

The third way is the most distinctive. Frankl tells of an elderly doctor who could not get over his wife's death. Frankl asked: what if you had died first? The man answered that his wife would have suffered terribly. Frankl replied that he had spared her this suffering, and now he paid for it by surviving and mourning her. The man shook Frankl's hand and left. His loss did not change, but it now had a meaning.

Frankl is clear that suffering is not necessary for meaning. If suffering can be avoided, the meaningful act is to remove its cause. Only unavoidable suffering calls for this attitude.

He also stresses responsibility. Logotherapy asks patients to live as if they were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as they are about to act now. He suggests that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast of the United States should have a partner: a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.

Frankl also describes two clinical techniques.

Paradoxical intention targets anticipatory anxiety. Fear brings about the thing that a person fears. So the therapist asks the patient to wish for it, with humor. A young doctor who feared sweating in front of others was told to show people how much he could sweat. The fear stopped, and so did the sweating. A person with insomnia is told to try to stay awake.

Dereflection targets hyper-intention (trying too hard for a result) and hyper-reflection (watching yourself too closely). Frankl applies it to sexual problems and other conditions in which self-observation blocks a natural process. The patient shifts attention away from the self and onto a task or another person.

Behind both is one idea. Happiness and success cannot be pursued directly. They ensue as side effects of dedication to a cause greater than oneself or to another person.

The case for a tragic optimism

In the postscript, Frankl asks how a person can stay optimistic in the face of the tragic triad: pain, guilt, and death. His answer is that life keeps its meaning under all conditions. Pain can become an achievement. Guilt can become a chance to change for the better. The fact that life is temporary is a reason to act responsibly now.

He adds that the past is not lost. What we have done, loved, and suffered is stored in the past, where nothing can remove it. A full past matters more than a long future.

Frankl ends with a balanced view of human nature. People are capable of building the gas chambers of Auschwitz. They are also capable of walking into those chambers upright, praying.

What the critics say

Some historians point out that Frankl spent only a few days in Auschwitz itself and most of his time in Dachau subcamps, and they read parts of the account as shaped by his later theory. Others note that survival in the camps depended largely on chance. Frankl himself acknowledges this: he writes that the best of the prisoners did not return.

Who should read it

Read it if you face loss, illness, or a long period of hardship, or if you work with people who do. It is also a short, direct introduction to meaning-centered therapy for anyone who feels busy but empty.