What is the meaning of life? This question has haunted humankind since the dawn of man. Viktor Frankl, an Austrian Jewish neurologist, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, took the quest further and pioneered logotherapy (from the Greek word logos, which denotes “meaning”), a meaning-centred approach towards psychotherapy. His book Man’s Search for Meaning is widely cited as one of the most inspirational books of the 20th century. It recounts Frankl’s experiences and observations in Nazi concentration camps that he ultimately draws on in order to develop logotherapy.
Frankl was the director of the neurological department at the Rothschild Hospital in Vienna when he was arrested and deported to a Nazi concentration camp with his family in 1942. Over the course of three years, Frankl was shuffled between four concentration camps, including the notorious Auschwitz. He survived. His parents, wife and brother did not.
In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl writes about the feelings of shock and denial upon entering the concentration camp. After Frankl arrived at Auschwitz with 1,500 other Jews, he found himself thrust into one of two groups. His group was ordered to throw everything they carried with them onto the ground. It was here that Frankl lost the manuscript of his first book on logotherapy, a loss that made him feel as though his whole former life had been taken from him. Here, he was no longer the prominent psychiatrist and neurologist; he was merely prisoner 119104. Later the same evening, he asked where his friend, who was in the other group, had been sent. A senior inmate pointed to clouds of smoke billowing out of a chimney, and said, “That’s where your friend is, floating up to Heaven.”
Frankl observes that after a few days when their illusions of reprieve had been shattered, the prisoners developed an emotional shell of apathy against the brutality of life inside the camp. Having witnessed so many beatings, so much suffering and death, they became numb and despondent. Frankl remembers how he gave up waking up a fellow inmate who was having a nightmare because “no dream, no matter how horrible, could be as bad as the reality of the camp”.
Under the degrading influence of the concentration camp, one had to cling on to something, the faintest trace of humour or the tiniest glimpse of beauty in nature, in order to retain “the feeling of being an individual, a being with a mind, with inner freedom and personal value”. But even with these small mercies, how could anyone who was made to subsist on a meagre diet of thin soup and bread while doing hard manual labour 12 hours a day under the threat of being beaten or death manage to survive in the pits of despair? In contemplating the answer to this question, Frankl began to understand that those who had a goal to look forward to seemed to have a much greater chance of survival than those who gave themselves up to their truly miserable existence. In Frankl’s own case, the desire to see his wife again and rewrite the confiscated manuscript of his book gave him a “why” rich enough that it pulled him through nearly three years of captivity.
Frankl’s experience of the Nazi death camps reinforced his view that the search for purpose and meaning was the key to psychological well-being. He argues that one can discover the meaning of life through work, through love or through one’s attitude to unavoidable suffering. The notion that love and work give meaning to life is not something new, but it is Frankl’s observation of the positive consequence of the search for meaning while in the depths of suffering that distinguishes his work from that of any other psychologist. Frankl believes that our actions are not so much a consequence of outside influence, but rather the result of an inner decision. In the midst of all the torture and atrocities, he saw fellow prisoners choose to unleash cruelty on their own; but he also saw individuals rising beyond themselves:
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s way.
Frankl contends that even in the most horrendous conditions, we still have the freedom to choose how we respond to the situation and create meaning out of it. For those few campmates who chose to remain “brave, dignified and unselfish”, Frankl writes, “it can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom—which cannot be taken away—that makes life meaningful and purposeful.”
Frankl opines that “man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life”. This brings us back to the ultimate question: what is the meaning of life? In his opinion, the meaning of life is not something vague that can be defined in a general way. Rather, it is about exploring and taking on the tasks and responsibilities that are unique to each individual. “It did not really matter what we expected from life,” he says, “but rather what life expected from us.”
