Victor Frankl: The Value of Meaning

Victor Frankl was a physician and neurologist until in 1942 he and his wife and parents entered Auschwitz, one of the most notorious death camps of the Nazis. He was the only one who survived.

He worked a laborer's jobs, but they also put him in the hospital. He did clandestine work to prevent despondency and suicide among his fellow inmates He never lost the purpose and meaning of his life.

From this, he developed a philosophy of the meaning of life and its accompanying logotherapy.

While Frankl's philosophy and psychology demand a personal responsibility from all of us, it also gives hope to everyone, no matter what the condition might be.

After the camps were liberated by the allies, Frankl wrote his book, Man's Search for Meaning, which is one of the most important and uplifting philosophies that I have discovered.

Victor Frankl "I had wanted simply to convey to the reader by way of concrete example that life holds a potential meaning under any conditions, even the most miserable ones. And I thought that if the point were demonstrated in a situation as extreme as that in a concentration camp, my book might gain a hearing. I therefore felt responsible for writing down what I had gone through, for I thought it might be helpful to people who are prone to despair."

Freud believed in the will to pleasure.

Adler believed in the will to power.

Frankl believed in the will to meaning. He had suffered more than any of the other two men, but from this he came to believe that not only is meaning essential to human life, but that it is essential that each human is responsible to create his or her own meaning.

Logotherapy is based on these premises.

1. Life has meaning under all circumstances, even the most miserable ones.

2. Our main motivation for living is our will to find meaning in life.

3. We have freedom to find meaning in what we do, and what we experience, or at least in the stand we take when faced with a situation of unchangeable suffering.

He not only believed in meaning, but believed in personal responsibility for that meaning.

Frankl, in logotherapy cautions against making too much or too little of outward goals. His view of neurosis is that there are two kinds.

The first is hyperintention, a pathological forced intention to some end that make that end unobtainable.

That second is hyper-reflection, an excessive attention to oneself and one's obstacles.

The goal should be balance of intention with a firm and strong sense of one's meaning.

"We stumbled on in the darkness, over big stones and through large puddles, along the one road leading from the camp. The accompanying guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles. Anyone with very sore feet supported himself on his neighbor's arm. Hardly a word was spoken; the icy wind did not encourage talk. Hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly: "If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don't know what is happening to us."

That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. 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 - that 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."

On Choosing One's Attitude

"Everything can be taken from a man but ...the last of the human freedoms - to choose

one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." p.104

I had a professor in graduate school who had an old European accent. One day I told her about my frustrations with a field work assignment. I was doing a group with women graduating from an Ivy League college. They were suffering angst about their futures. Since they had come from privileged backgrounds and I was struggling to be in school, I had very little patience with their very little problems.

She smiled patiently at me and said, "Ah, I remember how hard it is to graduate, such worries."

Then she told me that she graduated from the University of Warsaw, just before the opening of the Warsaw Ghetto where she was imprisoned. She went from there to Auschwitz where she stayed and literally slaved for the rest of the war.

My mouth dropped open and I couldn't speak for a while, I just listened to her humanity and purpose in life.

I was ashamed. I realized that while the problems of the future Yuppies may look small to me, the biggest hardship I ever had was nothing compared to what she suffered.

I realized then that if she could give honor to these young women and their angst, I could certainly try. This is one of the most important lessons I learned in my career.

My professor's meaning in life was to empathize with and aid other people. Frankl's philosophy and her example has given meaning to my career, or as Frankl would have it, I made it a meaning.

I have heard that deaths, like other things, come in threes. I remember people commenting that Princess Diana, who worked on many social issues died 5 days before Mother Theresa.

No one commented that Victor Frankl died 4 days after Diana.

Deaths of humanitarians came in threes that year.

Princess Diana: 8/31/97

Victor Frankl: 9/4/97

Mother Theresa: 9/5/97

This book is the cornerstone of Frankl's work. He went into the concentration camp a neurologist, but developed his philosophy for psychology while there.

He suffered horribly as did millions of others. Through his experiences he came to believe that those who survived the camps were those who developed a meaning for their own lives and lived by that meaning, even in the most dire circumstances.

Of course, this did not include those who were put in gas chambers or shot, but among the millions who were worked to death, it was those with the will to meaning that mattered.

While Frankl does describe the conditions and life in Auschwitz, he does this only to prove that what he says is true. That people can decide who and what they will be under any conditions.

Have as many books as you want, without cutting down trees or crowding up your house.

What is your meaning? Who decides what it is for you?