by Viktor E. Frankl, written in 9 days in 1945, first published 1946
Danette recommended this book, along with The Tattooist of Auschwitz. I’ve wanted to read it for a long time. The copy I read includes 6 parts: a Foreword by Harold S. Kushner; the Preface to the 1992 Edition; Part I, the story itself, Experiences in a Concentration Camp; Part II, Logotherapy in a Nutshell; the Postscript 1984; and an Afterword by William J. Winslade. Almost every single page of these 6 parts has a sticky note on it for a nugget of wisdom for life. The copy I read includes the 6 parts mentioned and was published by Beacon Press in 2006 or thereabouts.
The main point of the book is this: Human beings must have something or someone to live for; we must have meaning. Without meaning to our lives, we become hopeless, depressed, despairing. And, even in the worst of places, environments, situations, you can choose your attitude and find something to live for.
Foreword by Harold S. Kushner, a Jewish Rabbi, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People:
“He describes poignantly those prisoners who gave up on life, who had lost all hope for a future and were inevitably the first to die. They died less from lack of food or medicine than from lack of hope, lack of something to live for. By contrast, Frankl kept himself alive and kept hope alive by summoning up thoughts of his wife and the prospect of seeing her again, and by dreaming at one point of lecturing after the war about the psychological lessons to be learned from the Auschwitz experience.”
“Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times.”
“Finally, Frankl’s most enduring insight, one that I have called on often in my own life and in countless counseling situations: Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.”
In the Preface to the 1992 Edition, Frankl tells the story of why he didn’t leave Vienna, Austria, when he had the chance to do so. He was very concerned about his elderly parents. They were overjoyed that he was about to leave. He was going to be able to write his book about Logotherapy and avoid the fate of so many. But he couldn’t decide if he should leave his parents or not. He needed “a hint from heaven.” “It was then that I noticed a piece of marble lying on a table at home. When I asked my father about it, he explained that he had found it on the site where the National Socialists had burned down the largest Viennese synagogue. He had taken the piece home because it was a part of the tablets on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed. One gilded Hebrew letter was engraved on the piece; my father explained that this letter stood for one of the Commandments. Eagerly I asked, “Which one is it?” He answered, “Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land.” At that moment I decided to stay with my father and my mother upon the land, and to let the American visa lapse.”
In Part 1 of Man’s Search for Meaning, Experiences in a Concentration Camp:
The prisoners would use cigarettes to exchange for soup, unless the prisoner had lost the will to live, and then they would smoke their cigarettes. “Thus, when we saw a comrade smoking his own cigarettes, we knew he had given up faith in his strength to carry on, and, once lost, the will to live seldom returned.”
There is a condition known as “delusion of reprieve.” At the beginning, as soon as they were being loaded onto trains, nearly everyone believed that they would be reprieved somehow.
Page 8:
“When one examines the vast amount of material which has been amassed as the result of many prisoners’ observations and experiences, three phases of the inmate’s mental reactions to camp life become apparent: The period following his admission; the period when he is well entrenched in camp routine; and the period following his release and liberation.
“The symptom that characterizes the first phase is shock.”
Page 18: “The thought of suicide was entertained by nearly everyone, if only for a brief time. … From personal convictions which will be mentioned later, I made myself a firm promise, on my first evening in camp, that I would not “run into the wire.” This was a phrase used in camp to describe the most popular method of suicide–touching the electrically charged barbed-wire fence.”
Page 20: “These reactions, as I have described them, began to change in a few days. The prisoner passed from the first to the second phase; the phase of relative apathy, in which he achieved a kind of emotional death.”
Page 23-24: “Apathy, the blunting of the emotions and the feeling that one could not care any more, were the symptoms arising during the second stage of the prisoner’s psychological reactions, and which eventually made him insensitive to daily and hourly beatings. By means of this insensibility the prisoner soon surrounded himself with a very necessary protective shell.”
He talks about the cruelty of the guards. He was not standing directly in front of the prisoner behind him and a guard hit him on the head sharply twice. “At such a moment it is not the physical pain which hurts the most (and this applies to adults as much as to punished children); it is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all.”
“Strangely enough, a blow which does not even find its mark can, under certain circumstances, hurt more than one that finds its mark. Once I was standing on a railway track in a snowstorm. In spite of the weather our party had to keep on working. I worked quite hard at mending the track with gravel, since that was the only way to keep warm. For only one moment I paused to get my breath and to lean on my shovel. Unfortunately the guard turned around just then and thought I was loafing. The pain he caused me was not from any insults or any blows. That guard did not think it worth his while to say anything, not even a swear word, to the ragged, emaciated figure standing before him, which probably reminded him only vaguely of a human form. Instead, he playfully picked up a stone and threw it at me. That, to me, seemed the way to attract the attention of a beast, to call a domestic animal back to its job, a creature with which you have so little in common that you do not even punish it.
“The most painful part of the beatings is the insult which they imply.”
Page 28: “What did the prisoner dream about most frequently? Of bread, cake, cigarettes, and nice warm baths.” Page 29: One night, one of his fellow prisoners was having a horrible nightmare. “Suddenly I drew back the hand which was ready to shake him, frightened at the thing I was about to do. At that moment I became intensely conscious of the fact that no dream, no matter how horrible, could be as bad as the reality of the camp which surrounded us, and to which I was about to recall him.”
Page 36: “In spite of all the enforced physical and mental primitiveness of the life in a concentration camp, it was possible for spiritual life to deepen. Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain (they were often of a delicate constitution), but the damage to their inner selves was less. They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom. Only in this way can one explain the apparent paradox that some prisoners of a less hardy make-up often seemed to survive camp life better than did those of a robust nature.”
Page 37-38: In a brutal march, guards butting them with rifles, stumbling in the dark through stones, ice, in the wind and cold, he and his friend began to think of their wives, “If our wives could see us now!” He started thinking of his wife. “Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.
“A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth–the 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 moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way–an honorable way–in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, “The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.””
He feels that even if he had know his wife was dead, he would still have been able to transcend his surroundings by his thoughts and memories and mental conversations he had with her.
Page 39: “As the inner life of the prisoner tended to become more intense, he also experienced the beauty of art and nature as never before.”
Page 40 and 41, he describes how one evening, they were done for the day, in their huts eating their bowl of soup on the floor, when a fellow prisoner runs in to tell them about a beautiful sunset. They all went out to see it and stared for minutes on end. “How beautiful the world could be!”
Another time, they were working in a trench and everything was grey – it was not yet dawn – grey sky, grey snow, grey rags, grey faces. He was miserable and hopeless and heard from somewhere “a victorious “Yes” in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose. At that moment a light was lit in a distant farmhouse, which stood on the horizon as if painted there, in the midst of the miserable grey of a dawning morning in Bavaria. “Et lux in tenebris lucent” –and the light shineth in the darkness. For hours I stood hacking at the icy ground. The guard passed by, insulting me, and once again I communed with my beloved. More and more I felt that she was present, that she was with me: I had the feeling that I was able to touch her, able to stretch out my hand and grasp hers. The feeling was very strong: she was there. Then, at that very moment, a bird flew down silently and perched just in front of me, on the heap of soil which I had dug up from the ditch, and looked steadily at me.”
Page 43: “Humor was another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation.”
Page 65-66 (the famous quote): “There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed: 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.”
“And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate.”
Page 67: “The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity–even under the most difficult circumstances–to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. 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.”
Page 69, he describes talking with a young woman in the concentration camp on her deathbed. She was going to die in the next few days, but she was cheerful. “”I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,” she told me. “In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.” Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, “This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness.” Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. “I often talk to this tree,” she said to me. I was startled and didn’t quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. “Yes.” What did it say to her? She answered, “It said to me, ‘I am here–I am here–I am life, eternal life.'””
Page 69-70: “Former prisoners, when writing or relating their experiences, agree that the most depressing influence of all was that a prisoner could not know how long his term of imprisonment would be.”
Page 72-73: “Any attempt at fighting the camp’s psychopathological influence on the prisoner by psychotherapeutic or psychohygienic methods had to aim at giving him inner strength by pointing out to him a future goal to which he could look forward. Instinctively some of the prisoners attempted to find one on their own. 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.”
Page 76: “As we said before, any attempt to restore a man’s inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal. Nietzsche’s words, “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,”…”Whenever there was an opportunity for it, one had to give them a why–an aim–for their lives, in order to strengthen them to bear the terrible how of their existence.”
Page 80: “A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life.”
Page 84: “We now come to third stage of a prisoner’s mental reactions: the psychology of the prisoner after his liberation.” On pages 84 to 86, he discusses the different types of guards – how could they be so cruel. Some were truly sadists and these were the guards selected when they wanted severeness. But the feelings of the guards were hardened after so many years of witnessing the brutalities of camp. But there were some guards who took pity on the prisoners and even helped them when able.
Regarding the prisoners who made it to freedom, at first they didn’t know what to think about it. They didn’t experience the euphoria they thought they would. But physically they began to eat and eat and eat.
Page 89: “One day, a few days after the liberation, I walked through the country past flowering meadows, for miles and miles, toward the market town near the camp. Larks rose to the sky and I could hear their joyous song. There was no one to be seen for miles around; there was nothing but the wide earth and sky and the larks’ jubilation and the freedom of space. I stopped, looked around, and up to the sky–and then I went down on my knees. At that moment there was very little I knew of myself or of the world–I had but one sentence in mind–always the same: “I called to the Lord from my narrow prison and He answered me in the freedom of space.”
“How long I knelt there and repeated this sentence memory can no longer recall. But I know that on that day, in that hour, my new life started. Step for step I progressed, until I again became a human being.”
Page 90 and 91, some of the prisoners who survived and tasted freedom again, understandably, became angry and bitter and disillusioned and wanted revenge. “Only slowly could these men be guided back to the commonplace truth that no one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them.”
Page 93, last sentence of the book: “The crowning experience of all, for the homecoming man, is the wonderful feeling that, after all he has suffered, there is nothing he need fear any more–except his God.”
Part II of the book is all about “Logotherapy.” “According to logotherapy, this striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man.”
“Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become.”
He has a section on The Existential Vacuum. We have lost our purpose and are bored in our modern, comfortable lives. “Sometimes the frustrated will to meaning is vicariously compensated for by a will to power, including the most primitive form of the will to power, the will to money. In other cases, the place of frustrated will to meaning is taken by the will to pleasure.”
Each person has to find their meaning in life and not an abstract meaning to life. “Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced nor can his life be repeated.”
“By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system.”…”It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself–be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself–by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love–the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself.”
In The Meaning of Suffering, “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.”
“But let me make it perfectly clear that in no way is suffering necessary to find meaning. I only insist that meaning is possible even in spite of suffering–provided, certainly, that the suffering is unavoidable. If it were avoidable, however, the meaningful thing to do would be to remove its cause, be it psychological, biological or political. To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.”
When he arrived at Auschwitz, he hid his manuscript in his coat. Of course, it was taken from him, along with all of his clothing. His whole life was in that manuscript – it was his child, so to speak, and it was gone. He was given the worn-out rags of another prisoner who had been sent to the gas chamber. In the pocket of that coat was a “single page torn out of a Hebrew prayer book, containing the most important Jewish prayer, Shema Yisrael. …”
He talks about logotherapy’s use of “paradoxical intention.” That is when you take what a person is deeply afraid of and use that very fear to cure them of the fear. For example, a physician was afraid of his excessive sweating. So instead of being afraid of sweating, they urged him to see how much he could sweat whenever his phobia kicked in. He was cured in just a few weeks. “Paradoxical intention is no panacea. Yet it lends itself as a useful tool in treating obsessive-compulsive and phobic conditions, especially in cases with underlying anticipatory anxiety.”
Page 134 – last 2 paragraphs of Part II, Logotherapy in a Nutshell:
“…In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. 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 invented 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.”
In the section, Postscript 1984, The Case for a Tragic Optimism:
Page137: “How, to pose the question differently, can life retain its potential meaning in spite of its tragic aspects? After all, “saying yes to life in spite of everything,” to use the phrase in which the title of a German book of mine is couched, presupposes that life is potentially meaningful under any conditions, even those which are most miserable. And this in turn presupposes the human capacity to make the best of any given situation.”
Page 138: “It must be kept in mind, however, that optimism is not anything to be commanded or ordered.”…
“To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to “be happy.” But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue.”…
“This need for a reason is similar in another specifically human phenomenon–laughter. If you want anyone to laugh you have to provide him with a reason, e.g., you have to tell him a joke.”
Page 139:
“Once an individual’s search for a meaning is successful, it not only renders him happy but also gives him the capability to cope with suffering. And what happens if one’s groping for a meaning has been in vain? This may well result in a fatal condition. Let us recall, for instance, what sometimes happened in extreme situations such as prisoner-of-war camps or concentration camps. In the first, as I was told by American soldiers, a behavior pattern crystallized to which they referred as “give-up-itis.” In the concentration camps, this behavior was paralleled by those who one morning, at five, refused to get up and go to work and instead stayed in the hut, on the straw wet with urine and feces. Nothing–neither warnings nor threats–could induce them to change their minds. And then something typical occurred: they took out a cigarette from deep down in a pocket where they had hidden it and started smoking. At that moment we knew that for the next forty-eight hours or so we would watch them dying. Meaning orientation had subsided, and consequently the seeking of immediate pleasure had taken over.
“Is this not reminiscent of another parallel, a parallel that confronts us day by day? I think of those youngsters who, on a worldwide scale, refer to themselves as the “no future” generation. To be sure, it is not just a cigarette to which they resort; it is drugs.”
Page 141: “Just consider the mass neurotic syndrome so pervasive in the young generation: there is ample empirical evidence that the three facets of this syndrome–depression, aggression, addiction–are due to what is called in logotherapy “the existential vacuum,” a feeling of emptiness and meaninglessness.”
Page 145: “As logotherapy teaches, there are three main avenues on which one arrives at meaning in life. The first is by creating a work or by doing a deed. The second is by experiencing something or encountering someone; in other words, meaning can be found not only in work but also in love.”
Page 146: “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.” ….
“…bore witness to my patients’ capacity to turn their predicaments into human achievements. …. “…one may find meaning in suffering.”
Page 147, the story of Jerry Long from the Texarkana Gazette. He was paralyzed from the neck down in a diving accident at the age of 17. Rather than becoming a hopeless invalid, he attended classes at a community college via a special phone and is now learning about psychology. He says, “I view my life as being abundant with meaning and purpose…I broke my neck, it didn’t break me….I believe that my handicap will only enhance my ability to help others.”
Again he stresses that if suffering can be avoided, it is to be avoided – “for unnecessary suffering is masochistic rather than heroic.”
Page 151: “Just as life remains potentially meaningful under any conditions, 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 has realized in the past, and is not contingent on the usefulness that he or she may or may not retain in the present….”
Page 151-152: “If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual’s value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler’s program, that is to say, “mercy” killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer.”
Page 154, the last few lines of this section:
“…You may of course ask whether we really need to refer to “saints.” Wouldn’t it suffice just to refer to decent people? It is true that they form a minority. More than that, they always will remain a minority. And yet I see therein the very challenge to join the minority. 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.
“And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.”
In the Afterword, which is excellent, written by William J. Winslade, on page 158:
“Frankl drew constantly upon uniquely human capacities such as inborn optimism, humor, psychological detachment, brief moments of solitude, inner freedom, and a steely resolve not to give up or commit suicide. He realized that he must try to live for the future, and he drew strength from loving thoughts of his wife and his deep desire to finish his book on logotherapy. He also found meaning in glimpses of beauty in nature and art. Most important, he realized that, no matter what happened, he retained the freedom to choose how to respond to his suffering.”
Page 159, “To achieve personal meaning, he says, one must transcend subjective pleasures by doing something that “points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself…by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love.”
Page 160: “Why, then, do some people find themselves feeling so empty? Frankl’s wisdom here is worth emphasizing: it is a question of the attitude one takes toward life’s challenges and opportunities, both large and small. A positive attitude enables a person to endure suffering and disappointment as well as enhance enjoyment and satisfaction. A negative attitude intensifies pain and deepens disappointments; it undermines and diminishes pleasure, happiness, and satisfaction; it may even lead to depression or physical illness.”
Page 161-162: “After his liberation in 1945 from the Turkheim camp, where he had nearly died of typhus, Frankl discovered that he was utterly alone. On the first day of his return to Vienna in August 1945, Frankl learned that his pregnant wife, Tilly, had died of sickness or starvation in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Sadly, his parents and brother had all died in the camps. Overcoming his losses and inevitable depression, he remained in Vienna to resume his career as a psychiatrist–an unusual choice when so many others, especially Jewish psychoanalysts and psychiatrists, had emigrated to other countries. Several factors may have contributed to this decision: Frankl felt an intense connection to Vienna, especially to psychiatric parents who needed his help in the postwar period. He also believed strongly in reconciliation rather than revenge: he once remarked,”I do not forget any good deed done to me, and I do not carry a grudge for a bad one.” Notably, he renounced the idea of collective guilt. Frankl was able to accept that his Viennese colleagues and neighbors may have known about or even participated in his persecution, and he did not condemn them for failing to join the resistance or die heroic deaths. Instead, he was deeply committed to the idea that even a vile Nazi criminal or a seemingly hopeless madman has the potential to transcend evil or insanity by making responsible choices.”
His first wife, Tilly, was Jewish. His second wife, Eleanore Schwindt, was Catholic.
Page 163: “He was fond of saying that the aim of psychiatry was the healing of the soul, leaving to religion the salvation of the soul.”
Page 164: “He stimulated many therapists to look beyond patients’ past or present problems to help them choose productive futures by making personal choices and taking responsibility for them.”
“His approach to psychotherapy stressed the importance of helping people to reach new heights of personal meaning through self-transcendence: the application of positive effort, technique, acceptance of limitations, and wise decisions.”
The last two paragraphs of this section:
“Frankl was once asked to express in one sentence the meaning of his own life. He wrote the response on paper and asked his students to guess what he had written. after some moments of quiet reflection, a student surprised Frankl by saying, “The meaning of your life is to help others find the meaning of theirs.”
“That was it, exactly,” Frankl said. “Those are the very words I had written.”