"Man's Search for Meaning": Saying yes to life despite everything

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

-Nietzche

Viktor Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist who survived four Nazi death camps during the Holocaust. During his time in the camps, he dreamed of writing about his experiences from a psychological perspective. That dream kept him alive. The epigraph above is repeated throughout the book as a central theme to Frankl’s philosophy on life. He created a revolutionary approach to psychotherapy known as logotherapy, which focuses on helping people find and pursue their meaning.

Part One

This section describes the horrors the prisoners encountered in the camps. Frankl toys with the idea of fate throughout the section. He states that, “...fate was one’s master and that one must not try to influence it in any way, but instead let it take its course.” He writes how a prisoner was always one injury, illness or number away from death.

Frankl writes about the prisoners’ desensitization. He calls this phase two apathy. “If someone had asked us the truth of Dostoevski’s statement that flatly defines man as a being who can get used to anything we would reply ‘Yes…but do not ask us how.’” 

He also brings up the idea of retreating to the inner self. “Dostoevski said once, ‘There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my suffering.’ These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death bore witness to the fact that last inner freedom cannot be lost.”  Frankl argues that as long as a prisoner refuses to let his mind be controlled by his circumstances, he has meaning and can survive.

Part Two

In this section of the book, Frankl makes his theory of logotherapy and meaning clearer. He sees meaning as an individual calling that must be discovered, but people embrace responsibility for their lives in order to succeed. He argues that freedom can turn into arbitrariness unless it is paired with responsibility and half-jokingly writes, “This is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.”

At the end of the book, the reader is left with the challenge to take responsibility for their life. “For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best. So, let us be alert–alert in a twofold sense: Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. Since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.”

By Sierra Lastine