Book: Man’s Search for Meaning
Author: Victor Frankl
Find Online:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27s_Search_for_Meaning
Date Read: August 2018

Why did I choose to read this book?

I think I saw someone recommend this strenuously on Reddit and decided to check it out. I'm really gad I did.

Excerpts

To weave these slender threads of a broken life into a firm pattern of mean­ ing and responsibility is the object and challenge of logotherapy, which is Dr. Frankl's own version of modern exis­tential analysis.

But these moments of comfort do not establish the will to live unless they help the prisoner make larger sense out of his apparently senseless suffering

Frankl is fond of quoting Nietzsche, "He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how. "

In the concentration camp every circumstance conspires to make the prisoner lose his hold. All the familiar goals in life are snatched away. What alone remains is "the last of human freedoms"—the ability to "choose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances. " This ultimate freedom, recognized by the ancient Stoics as well as by modern existentialists, takes on vivid significance in Frankl's story. The prisoners were only average men, but some, at least, by choosing to be "worthy of their suffering" proved man's capacity to rise above his outward fate.

How can one awaken in a patient the feeling that he is responsible to life for something, however grim his circumstances may be?

We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles—whatever one may choose to call them—we know: the best of us did not return.

I think it was Lessing who once said, "There are things which must cause you to lose your reason or you have none to lose. " An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.

Even in his dreams the prisoner did not seem to concern himself with sex, although his frustrated emotions and his finer, higher feelings did find definite expression in them.

…love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief mo­ ment, in the contemplation of his beloved.

But soon my soul found its way back from the prisoner's existence to another world, and I resumed talk with my loved one: I asked her questions, and she an­ swered; she questioned me in return, and I answered.

I did not know whether my wife was alive, and I had no means of finding out (during all my prison life there was no outgoing or incoming mail); but at that moment it ceased to matter. There was no need for me to know; noth­ ing could touch the strength of my love, my thoughts, and the image of my beloved. Had I known then that my wife was dead, I think that I would still have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of her image, and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying."Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death.

To draw an analogy: a man's suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the "size" of human suffering is absolutely relative.

The conscious­ ness of one's inner value is anchored in higher, more spir­ itual things, and cannot be shaken by camp life. But how many free men, let alone prisoners, possess it?

Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.

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 the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, de­ cide what shall become of him—mentally and spiritually.

An active life serves the purpose of giving man the op­ portunity to realize values in creative work, while a passive life of enjoyment affords him the opportunity to obtain fulfillment in experiencing beauty, art, or nature. But there is also purpose in that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one pos­ sibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man's attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces. A creative life and a life of enjoyment are banned to him. But not only creativeness and enjoyment are meaningful. If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.

Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.

It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future— sub specie aeternitatis. And this is his salvation in the most difficult moments of his existence, although he sometimes has to force his mind to the task.

We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.

When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude.

Not only our experiences, but all we have done, whatever great thoughts we may have had, and all we have suffered, all this is not lost, though it is past; we have brought it into being. Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.

Life in a concentration camp tore open the human soul and exposed its depths. Is it surprising that in those depths we again found only human qualities which in their very nature were a mixture of good and evil? The rift dividing good from evil, which goes through all human beings, reaches into the lowest depths and becomes apparent even on the bottom of the abyss which is laid open by the con­centration camp.

…logotherapy, in comparison with psychoanalysis, is a method less retrospective and less introspective. Logotherapy focuses rather on the future, that is to say, on the meanings to be fulfilled by the patient in his future.(Logotherapy, indeed, is a meaningcentered psychotherapy. ) At the same time, logotherapy defocuses all the vicious-circle formations and feedback mechanisms which play such a great role in the development of neuroses.Thus, the typical self-centeredness of the neurotic is broken up instead of being continually fostered and reinforced

There are some authors who contend that meanings and values are "nothing but defense mechanisms, reaction formations and sublimations. " But as for myself, I would not be willing to live merely for the sake of my "defense mechanisms," nor would I be ready to die merely for the sake of my "reaction formations. " Man, however, is able to live and even to die for the sake of his ideals and values!

as soon as one is confronted with what is problems authentic and genuine in man, e.g. , man's desire for a life that is as meaningful as possible. If it does not stop then, the only thing that the "unmasking psychologist" really unmasks is his own "hidden motive"— namely, his unconscious

Unmasking, however, should stop conflicts between drives and instincts but rather from existential as soon as one is confronted with what is problems authentic and genuine in man, e.g. , man's desire for a life that is as meaningful as possible. If it does

that the "unmasking psychologist" really unmasks is his own "hidden motive"— namely, his unconscious need to debase and depreciate what is genuine

If it does not stop then, the only thing that the "unmasking psychologist" really unmasks is his own "hidden motive"— namely, his unconscious need to debase and depreciate what is genuine, what is genuinely human, in man.

It is obvious that in noogenic cases the appropriate and adequate therapy is not psychotherapy in general but rather logotherapy; a therapy, that is, which dares to enter the specifically human dimension

A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease. It may well be that interpreting the first in terms of the latter motivates a doctor to bury his patient's existential despair under a heap of tranquilizing drugs. It is his task, rather, to pilot the patient through his existential crises of growth and development.

Thus it can be seen that mental health meaning orientation, I turn to the is based on a certain degree of tension, the detrimental influence of that feeling of tension between what one has already which so many patients complain today, achieved and what one still ought to namely, the feeling of the total and accomplish, or the gap between what one is ultimate meaninglessness of their lives and what one should become.

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him. What man needs is not homeostasis but what I call "noddynamics," i.e. , the existential dynamics in a polar field of tension where one pole is represented by a meaning that is to be fulfilled and the other pole by the man who has to fulfill it.

At the beginning of human history, man lost some of the basic animal instincts in which an animal's behavior is imbedded and by which it is secured. Such security, like Paradise, is closed to man forever; man has to make choices.

no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do.Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism).

Thus, logotherapy sees in responsibleness the very essence of human existence

Logotherapy is neither teaching nor preaching. It is as far removed from logical reasoning as it is from moral exhortation. To put it figuratively, the role played by a logotherapist is that of an eye specialist rather than that of a painter. A painter tries to convey to us a picture of the world as he sees it; an ophthalmologist tries to enable us to see the world as it is.

The logotherapist's role consists of widening and broadening the visual field of the patient so that the whole spectrum of potential meaning becomes con­ scious and visible to him.

When we are no longer able to change a situation— just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer —we are challenged to change ourselves.

It is one of the basic tenets of logotherapy that man's main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life. That is why man is even ready to suffer, on the condition, to be sure, that his suffering has a meaning.

Is it not conceivable that there is still another dimension, a world beyond man's world; a world in which the question of an ultimate meaning of human suffering would find an answer?

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 meaningful-ness in rational terms.

For, in the past, nothing is irretrievably lost but everything irrevocably stored.Thus, the transitoriness of our existence in no way makes it meaningless.

Man constantly makes his choice concerning the mass of present potentialities; which of these will be condemned to nonbeing and which will be actualized? Which choice will be made an actuality once and forever, an immortal "footprint in the sands of time"? At any moment, man must decide, for better or for worse, what will be the monument of his existence.

In this context, one might amend the saying "The wish is father to the thought" to "The fear is mother of the event. "

Pleasure is, and must remain, a sideeffect or by-product, and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it is made a goal in itself

This anticipatory anxiety resulted both in excessive intention to confirm her feminin­ ity and excessive attention centered upon herself rather than upon her partner. This was enough to incapacitate the patient for the peak experience of sexual pleasure, since the orgasm was made an object of intention, and an object of attention as well, instead of remaining an unintended effect of unreflected dedication and surrender to the partner.

In this approach the phobic patient is invited to intend, even if only for a moment, precisely that which he fears.

inasmuch as his fear is replaced by a paradoxical wish. By this treatment, the wind is taken out of the sails of the anxiety.

Such a procedure (paradoxical intention), however, must make use of the specifically human capacity for self-detachment inherent in a sense of humor. This basic capacity to detach one from oneself is actualized whenever the logotherapeutic technique called paradoxical intention is applied. At the same time, the patient is enabled to put himself at a distance from his own neurosis

Paradoxical intention = inversion theory

Moreover, it is a short-term therapeutic device.However, one should not conclude that such a short-term therapy necessarily results in only temporary therapeutic effects. One of "the more common illusions of Freudian orthodoxy," to quote the late Emil A.Gutheil, "is that the durability of results corresponds to the length of ther­ apy. " 13 In my files there is, for instance, the case report of a patient to whom paradoxical intention was administered more than twenty years ago; the therapeutic effect proved to be, nevertheless, a permanent one.

One of the most remarkable facts is that paradoxical intention is effective regardless of the etiological basis of the case concerned. This confirms a statement once made by Edith Weisskopf-Joelson: "Although traditional psychotherapy has insisted that therapeutic practices have to be based on findings on etiology, it is possible that certain factors might cause neuroses during early childhood and that entirely different factors might relieve neuroses during adulthood.

the cue to cure is self-transcendence

more erroneous and dangerous assumption, namely, that which I call "pandeterminism. " By that I mean the view of man which disregards his capacity to take a stand toward any conditions whatsoever. 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 selfdetermining. Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment

How can we dare to predict the behavior of man? We may predict the movements of a machine, of an automaton; more than this, we may even try to predict the mechanisms or "dynamisms" of the human psyche as well. But man is more than psyche.

An incurably psychotic individual may lose his usefulness but yet retain the dignity of a human being. This is my psychiatric credo. Without it I should not think it worthwhile to be a psychiatrist. For whose sake? Just for the sake of a damaged brain machine which cannot be repaired? If the patient were not definitely more, euthanasia would be justified.

A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes—within the limits of endowment and environment—he has made out of himself.

Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.

Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who in­ vented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.

Meaning orientation had subsided, and consequently the seeking of immediate plea­ sure had taken over.

…one's life as a whole, although I do not deny that such a long-range meaning does exist. To invoke an analogy, consider a movie: it con­sists of thousands upon thousands of individual pictures, and each of them makes sense and carries

Therefore, I will not be elaborating here on the meaning of one's life as a whole, although I do not deny that such a long-range meaning does exist. To invoke an analogy, consider a movie: it con­ sists of thousands upon thousands of individual pictures, and each of them makes sense and carries a meaning, yet the meaning of the whole film cannot be seen before its last sequence is shown.However, we cannot understand the whole film without having first understood each of its com­ ponents, each of the individual pictures. Isn't it the same with life? Doesn't the final meaning of life, too, reveal itself, if at all, only at its end, on the verge of death? And doesn't this final meaning, too, depend on whether or not the po­ tential meaning of each single situation has been actualized to the best of the respective individual's knowledge and belief?

Sweepingly, I would locate the cognition of meaning —of the personal meaning of a concrete situation—midway between an "aha" experience along the lines of Karl Biihler's concept and a Gestalt perception, say, along the lines of Max Wertheimer's theory. The perception of mean­ ing differs from the classical concept of Gestalt perception insofar as the latter implies the sudden awareness of a "figure" on a "ground," whereas the perception of mean­ ing, as I see it, more specifically boils down to becoming aware of a possibility against the background of reality or, to express it in plain words, to becoming aware of what can be done about a given situation

if a pre-reflective axiological self-understanding exists, we may as­sume that it is ultimately anchored in our biological heritage

Most important, however, is the third avenue to meaning in life: even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by so doing change himself. He may turn a personal tragedy into a triumph.

But the most powerful arguments in favor of "a tragic optimism" are those which in Latin are called argumenta ad hominem

Is this to say that suffering is indispensable to the dis­covery of meaning? In no way. I only insist that meaning is available in spite of—nay, even through—suffering, pro­vided, as noted in Part Two of this book, that the suffering is unavoidable. If it is avoidable, the meaningful thing to do is to remove its cause, for unnecessary suffering is maso­chistic rather than heroic.If, on the other hand, one cannot change a situation that causes his suffering, he can still choose his attitude.

I refer to what is called mysterium iniquitatis, meaning, as I see it, that a crime in the final analysis remains inexplicable inasmuch as it cannot be fully traced back to biological, psychological and/or sociological factors. Totally explain­ ing one's crime would be tantamount to explaining away his or her guilt and to seeing in him or her not a free and responsible human being but a machine to be repaired.

…when I addressed the prisoners in San Quentin, I told them that "you are human beings like me, and as such you were free to commit a crime, to become guilty. Now, however, you are responsi­ ble for overcoming guilt by rising above it.

…which life consists is dying…

In fact, the opportunities to act properly, the potentiali­ties to fulfill a meaning, are affected by the irreversibility of our lives. But also the potentialities alone are so affected. For as soon as we have used an opportunity and have actu­alized a potential meaning, we have done so once and for all. We have rescued it into the past wherein it has been safely delivered and deposited. In the past, nothing is ir­retrievably lost, but rather, on the contrary, everything is irrevocably stored and treasured.

In view of the possibility of finding meaning in suffering, life's meaning is an unconditional one, at least potentially. That unconditional meaning, however, is paralleled by the unconditional value of each and every person. It is that which warrants the indelible quality of the dignity of man. Just as life remains potentially meaningful under any con­ ditions, even those which are most miserable, so too does the value of each and every person stay with him or her, and it does so because it is based on the values that he or she…

But today's society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of useful­ness.

My interest does not lie in raising parrots that just rehash "their master's voice," but rather in passing the torch to "independent and inventive, innovative and creative spirits.

You may be prone to blame me for invoking examples that are the exceptions to the rule."Sed omnia praeclara tarn di icilia quam rara sunt" (but everything great is just as difficult to realize as it is rare to find) reads the last sentence of the Ethics of Spinoza.