Man's Search for Meaning, Revised and Updated.

Viktor E. Frankl

ISBN: 0-671-66736-X, 1985

Read: 2-7 May, 1998

Reviewed: 18 May 1998

The book Your Money or Your Life, in Chapter 4, which deals with evaluating expenditures in terms of their alignment with satisfaction, meaning, and what one would do if one didn't have to work, spends a great deal of time discussing the problem of meaning and purpose in life. One must have the yardstick in order to make the evaluation. Part of that discussion recommends this book, maybe even a full reading of it, as one way to search for meaning. I asked the LCF library to obtain a copy from the L.A. County system and here it is.

Frankl was a young psychiatrist in his mid 20s when he was taken to a German concentration camp for three years. Of course, he did not know it would be three years; that was part of the despair of it all. All of his family, including his beloved wife, were taken to different camps and he never saw any of them again.

The first section of this book recounts his experiences there in the camp cluster around Auschwitz, of being stripped of everything human and still having freedom to choose attitude. Of knowing pretty precisely what his odds of making it were. Of thinking of suicide or of giving up, the same thing under the circumstances, and of deciding against it. He gives anecdotes that are so foreign to my life that they read more like information in an engineering text rather than something I can step into and identify with. Or perhaps I am just afraid. He tells of indignity, of callousness, of ultra conservation of energy and health, of bureaucracy gone to it's cruelest extreme and of utilizing the truly mean people to its ends. Frankl is embarrassed by all this, indeed, he intended to publish anonymously, but in the end could not, realizing that he had to own up to what had happened and claim authorship for the book to have its intended effect.

He details the three phases of prisoner life: the cold shock of beginning, the monotone steady state of survival at any cost, and the readjustment afterwards, how some would feel fully justified in being beyond or above societal conventions (like laws or respect or decency) because of the worst they had been through at its hands. It is a hard read.

In Part II, he details his particular branch of existentialism, logotherapy so that we will be able to understand his conclusions from his unique experience. As the term 'existentialism' is used frequently, I looked up the definition in the dictionary and tried to memorize the salient points. Man is inexplicable and each is unique and has a unique path. Responsibility and accountability for choices is key. There was more to the definition that I have already forgotten.

Logotherapy, he claims, is the third school of Viennese psychiatry. Freud believed that all motivations stemmed from sexuality. Logotherapy does not deny that sex is a motivator but does not think that it is prime or sole. A second school holds that supremacy is the prime motivator. While this would explain Hitler and many other lesser men to some lesser degree, logotherapy again does not deny that ascendancy is a motivator but does not think it is sole or prime. The prime motivator to Frankl is meaning.

Treatment of psychic illness is best accomplished through a search for meaning. Dealing with thoughts of suicide, for instance, is done by determining what it is that one has to live for. He did this in the death camps and afterwards in his practice with success. He also has many hints about performance, for instance, someone who cannot sleep because they try too hard should try much harder or (in a healthier case) not at all. Whether it is sweating or orgasms or happiness, the way to achieve the goal is not to aim for it, but to focus on something else, an increase of embarrassment, the giving of pleasure to another, or to live out a deep, sacrificial meaning and, as a surprise by-product, achieve happiness.

His motto is to live each moment as if you had already lived once, remembered this situation and were about to blunder badly in the same way you did the first time. Use intelligence to make good choices instead, begin with the end in mind, as Covey would say. He asks a group what each of them desires or is stuck with. One woman wants an easy, pampered life, another is stuck caring for a disabled son indefinitely. He asks them to consider themselves 80 years old looking back on the lives they have detailed. What is there to be proud of? Which one is satisfied? A strong point is that old people who have done good are most fortunate. All of the good they have done is locked into the past and nothing can take that away from the reality of the proceeding universe. Having the future before you, as young people do, is to have mostly choice and potential, a tough road ahead indeed.

The third and final section (but preceding an enormous bibliography from his organization and other sources) is "The Case for a Tragic Optimism." "[This] means that one is, and remains, optimistic in spite of the tragic triad ... which consists of those aspects of human existence which may be circumscribed by: (1) pain; (2) guilt; and (3) death." In short, one must avoid the avoidable, to do otherwise is masochism but when faced with the unavoidable in the triad, one must find a higher purpose, a meaning to live through it for.

At the end, he admits that decent people are in the minority and closes with the warning:

“Let us be alert--alert in a twofold sense:

Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of.

And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.”

In this brief recounting, I have not done justice to the depth or potential of this book or the way of thinking encapsulated in it. Certainly there is much in these modes of thinking that resonates with my own struggle and belief system. I do now know if these beliefs will help me decide if the particulars of spending my money are appropriate to my meaning and purpose in life. I am optimistic that perhaps indirectly they will. I am also frightened by my own potentials, of all sorts. But it is true that the prime motivator for me is in fact a striving for meaning, to have made a difference. By Kraybill, this is the sin of turning stones into bread, the first temptation that Christ faced down. With all three books, among many more, I am pouring in information and the end of the confusion, a resolution in which I will feel happy and well, is not yet in sight.