“Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions and psychic 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 be 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 own way.” —Viktor Frankl
Man’s Search for Meaning, Dr. Viktor Frankl’s psychological narrative of life in a concentration camp and the lessons he learned, is both horrifying and inspiring. In the 1930’s, as Hitler and the Nazi’s came to power in Germany, Frankl was working as a psychiatrist in Vienna, Austria. But while Frankl’s personal and professional career was progressing, so too was anti-semitism and the Nazi’s. In 1942, while Frankl was chief of neurology at a hospital in Vienna, Austria, he, along with his pregnant wife, mother, and father were interned in a Nazi concentration camp. Dr. Frankl was the only member of his family to survive.
From his personal experience and observations of others while interned, Frankl developed a psychological perspective he termed logotherapy. Logos is a Greek word that Frankl likened to “meaning.” According to logotherapy, “find[ing] meaning to one’s life is the primary motivational force in man.” Even in the bleakest of circumstances, living in a concentration camp, Frankl found that if a person had a why to live he could bear cruelty, uncertainty, and injustice because even suffering bravely could provide meaning. By accepting unavoidable suffering as a personal challenge, “even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by doing so change himself.”
While reading, Man’s Search for Meaning, I was challenged to consider whether I could find meaning in suffering. While I may not be interned by Nazi’s, could I suffer bravely if I had a terminal illness or had tragedy befall my family? In asking this question, I was reminded of Dr. Paul Kalanithi’s memoir, When Breath Becomes Air. Dr. Kalanithi was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer at age 36 just as he was finishing his residency as a neurosurgeon. As the future he, “had imagined, the culmination of decades of striving, evaporated” Dr. Kalanithi faced his impeding death with poise and integrity. With the perspective of someone who had spent years confronting human mortality he writes, “…death always wins. Even if you are perfect, the world isn’t. The secret is to know that the deck is stacked, that you will lose, that your hands or judgement will slip, and yet still struggle to win for your patients. You can never reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote towards which you are ceaselessly striving.” Although he writes from the perspective of a doctor, Dr. Kalanithi’s words sound true to me. Although we do not often think about it until we are confronted with it, the basic contract with life is that it will end in death. And in the face of death we must strive to improve and to struggle for a cause beyond ourselves.
Dr. Kalanithi’s words echo those of Dr. Frankl. So, knowing that the deck is stacked, how might Dr. Frankl counsel to live a meaningful life?
- First, the purpose of life is not to satisfy our human drives and instincts, adapt to society, or appropriately mediate between our different desires (id, ego, superego) but to find meaning. “According to logotherapy, we can discover meaning in life in three ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take towards unavoidable suffering.”
- Second, in each and every moment of our lives we are responsible for how we respond to life. The meaning of life is not some abstract concept created by an individual’s expectations of the way life should be; rather it is life on a moment to moment basis that is questioning each individual. Meaning is found, “not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answers to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.”
- Third, by shifting the focus away from the self and towards someone or something (a cause, a creation) a person is able to transcend the self. It is only as a by-product of self-transcendence that an individual is able to experience self-actualization or meaningful pleasure. The more one makes self-actualization or pleasure the meaning of life, the more one will miss it.
Ultimately, the message Frankl’s conveys in Man’s Search for Meaning is hopeful. That despite our natural abilities and circumstances, each of us have agency to determine, “At any moment…for better or worse, what will be the monument of his [or her] existence.”