Man's Search for Meaning

Summary

Man's Search for Meaning has two parts. The first, Experiences in a Concentration Camp, is not a chronicle of atrocities but a psychiatrist's account of how ordinary prisoners lived, suffered and either kept or lost their inner hold on life. Frankl, writing of himself mostly as an anonymous prisoner, divides the camp experience into three psychological phases. The first is shock on admission to Auschwitz: the selection on the platform, the stripping and shaving, the loss of the manuscript he had sewn into his coat, and a strange delusion of reprieve, followed by grim humour and cold curiosity. The second is apathy, the emotional numbing that let prisoners endure the daily routine of beatings, cold, hunger and death in the work camps of Kaufering and Türkheim. Here Frankl describes what still moved within: the inner life that made some sensitive prisoners outlast tougher ones, his loving contemplation of his wife on a freezing march at dawn, flashes of beauty and humour, the provisional existence of men who cannot see an end, the dying young woman who spoke of a chestnut tree outside her window, and a fellow prisoner whose loss of hope after a prophetic dream was followed by death from typhus. On a day when the camp was punished with fasting, he spoke to his fellow prisoners in the dark hut about the meaning that still lay in their suffering, their love, and the people who were waiting for them. The third phase, after liberation, brings depersonalization, bitterness and disillusionment, before a slow return to life. Part Two, first printed in the English edition of 1959 as Basic Concepts of Logotherapy and later titled Logotherapy in a Nutshell, sets out the school of therapy he built on these experiences. Against Freud's will to pleasure and Adler's will to power it places a primary will to meaning. Frustration of that will produces an existential vacuum and sometimes noögenic neurosis. Meaning is discovered, not invented, in three ways: by creating a work or doing a deed, by experiencing something or encountering someone in love, and by the attitude one takes toward unavoidable suffering. Frankl illustrates the techniques of paradoxical intention and dereflection with clinical cases and stresses responsibility as the essence of human existence. The 1984 postscript, The Case for a Tragic Optimism, applies these ideas to the tragic triad of pain, guilt and death. The book first appeared in Vienna in 1946 as Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager. Ilse Lasch's translation of the camp account, with a preface by Gordon W. Allport, was published by Beacon Press in 1959 as From Death-Camp to Existentialism; the revised and enlarged edition of 1962 took the present title.

Top Lessons

• The last freedom

  Frankl argues that circumstances can strip a person of possessions, rank, health and even name, but not of the freedom to choose an attitude toward them. The camp did not make that choice easy, and he does not blame those who broke, but he saw prisoners who kept their dignity and gave away their bread.

• Meaning is found, not made

  Logotherapy holds that meaning is not something we invent for ourselves but something that calls to us from outside, in a task, a person, or a situation that must be faced. Frankl turns the question around: life is asking us what we will make of it, and we answer by responsible action.

• Love as a source of meaning

  On a dark march to a work site, Frankl talks inwardly with the image of his wife, not knowing whether she is alive, and discovers that love reaches beyond the physical presence of the beloved. Love is one of the three main ways he says meaning is found.

• Suffering that is not wasted

  Frankl does not praise suffering and says avoidable suffering should be removed. But where it cannot be avoided, the way one bears it can become an achievement. His case of the elderly physician grieving his wife, who finds meaning in having spared her the pain of surviving him, shows the idea in a clinical setting.

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Medical Lens

This is a primary document in the history of psychotherapy. Logotherapy, Frankl's Third Viennese School after Freud's psychoanalysis and Adler's individual psychology, treats the will to meaning as a basic human motive and locates some neuroses (which Frankl calls noögenic) in existential frustration rather than in instinctual conflict. Part Two introduces its two signature techniques: paradoxical intention, in which a phobic or obsessive patient is invited to wish for, with humour, the very thing feared (an approach later compared with exposure-based and symptom-prescription methods in behavioural and family therapy), and dereflection, which turns a patient's hyper-reflection away from the symptom, as in some sexual dysfunctions and insomnia. Part One is also a first-hand clinical record of camp medicine: hunger and edema, frostbitten and suppurating feet, the typhus epidemic in which Frankl served as a prisoner-doctor and fell ill himself, and his observations on apathy, irritability, and the collapse of resistance that followed loss of hope, which he connects (as a clinician's impression, not a controlled finding) with the death rate around Christmas 1944 and New Year 1945. His prewar suicide-prevention work reappears in the camp, where he and a colleague dissuade two despairing men by pointing each to a person or task awaiting him. The three phases of the prisoner's psychology, especially the depersonalization and bitterness after liberation, are often read alongside later trauma literature, though Frankl wrote before modern diagnostic categories and his descriptions should not be translated too quickly into them. Logotherapy influenced later meaning-centred psychotherapy, including work in palliative and cancer care.

• Part One, first phase

  Admission to Auschwitz: the selection, shaving and disinfection, the delusion of reprieve, and the first emotional reactions, including grim humour and curiosity.

• Part One, second phase

  Apathy as emotional protection; hunger, edema and cold; prisoners' fantasies about food; the provisional existence with no foreseeable end.

• Part One, second phase

  Frankl works as a doctor in a typhus camp, falls ill with fever, and keeps himself awake at night reconstructing his lost manuscript.

• Part One, second phase

  A fellow prisoner's dream foretells liberation on 30 March; when the date approaches without rescue he falls ill and dies, which Frankl links to the loss of hope.

• Part One, second phase

  Frankl's talk to his hut on the fasting day, and his work with two men who had spoken of suicide, each reminded of a child or a scientific work waiting for him.

• Part One, third phase

  Depersonalization, the inability to feel pleasure after liberation, and bitterness and disillusionment on finding loved ones dead.

• Part Two

  Clinical cases of paradoxical intention and dereflection, and the elderly physician whose grief for his wife is reframed as a sacrifice that spared her.