The Book Made for the Meaning Crisis — Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
What can we learn about purpose in life from a psychologist who suffered the concentration camps?
I keep finding myself in conversations about this book: “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl. When I listened to it last year, after finding it for free on Audible, it had a huge impact on me. And it’s not just me. This book has sold more than 12 million copies and has been translated into 20+ languages.
Frankl was a Jewish psychotherapist, a contemporary of Freud and Jung, who experienced the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp and lived to tell the tale.
In contrast to the other psychotherapists, Frankl believed that our primary drive as human beings is not to fulfill pleasures and needs, or to reconcile conflicting desires but to find meaning in our existence. Even if it’s just a reason to endure our suffering.
Frankl’s experience put this theory to the ultimate test and proved it to the fullest extent.
He goes further, saying that it is dangerous to assume that what we need for mental well-being is equilibrium. What we need is actually not a tension-less state, but the striving and struggling for a meaningful goal that is freely chosen by ourselves.
This rings true, doesn’t it?
I think the best way to engage with the book is to read it yourself. Which you can do for free on Audible. And you can also find a great book summary here on ShortForm, and a video summary here on YouTube. But I’ve tried the next best thing—to walk you through central ideas in the book through a selection of the most powerful quotes. So, here is a collection of the points that jumped out to me, along with some further thoughts about the implications of it’s ideas for our times.
01
— We can find purpose even in the worst imaginable circumstances
“In the final analysis, the sort of person that the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision and not the result of camp influences alone. Fundamentally therefore any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp. Dostoevsky said once ‘there is only one thing that I dread; not to be worthy of my sufferings.’ These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behaviour in camp, whose suffering and death bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings. The way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom which cannot be taken away that makes life meaningful and purposeful.”
“Only a few kept their full inner liberty. Even one such example is sufficient proof that man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate. Such men are not only in concentration camps. Everywhere man is confronted with fate—with the chance of achieving something through his own suffering.”
“As a professor in two fields, neurology and psychiatry, I am fully aware of the extent to which man is subject to biological, psychological and sociological conditions. But in addition to being a professor in two fields I am a survivor of four camps - concentration camps, that is - and as such I also bear witness to the unexpected extent to which man is capable of defying and braving even the worst conditions conceivable.”
02
— Bearing our limitations nobly is enough purpose to satisfy the soul
“An active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity to realise values in creative work, while a passive life of enjoyment affords him the opportunity to obtain fulfilment in experiencing beauty, art or nature. But there is also purpose in that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment, and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behaviour: namely in man’s attitude to his existence. An existence restricted by external forces. A creative life and a life of enjoyment abound to him.”
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
03
— Pursuing happiness makes us unhappy.
“Again and again one is commanded and ordered to be happy. But happiness cannot be pursued, it must ensue. One must have a reason to be happy. Once the reason is found however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least through actualising the inherent meaning dormant in a given situation.”
“Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it”
“[the self-transcendence of human existence] 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. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.”
I’ve not found any other writer who has articulated this reality, one which I imagine that we all know by experience, with such brevity and clarity.
THE MEANING CRISIS
After reading this book, naturally I wanted to find out more about the impact Frankl’s ideas have had on society, in particular, how his purpose-centred psychotherapeutic approach of Logotherapy is being used. But, I was surprised.
I could be wrong, but outside of the popularity of this book, it doesn’t look like Logotherapy has been widely adopted. I wonder why?
For me, Frankl’s ideas make sense of a problem we’re seeing in modern life—what John Vervaeke calls The Meaning Crisis. Despite improving material standards of almost all kinds, we’re seeing epidemics of loneliness, suicide and addiction. How can this be?
Frankl says it is because:
“People have enough to live by, but nothing to live for. They have the means but not the meaning.”
“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.”
Mental health requires tension:
“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. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being. We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. It is only thus that we evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency. I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology "homeostasis", i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.”
Instead, by embracing this tension, we can act as midwives to meaning:
“…It may well be that interpreting the first in terms of the latter motivates a doctor to bury his patients existential despair under a heap of tranquillising drugs. It is his task rather to pilot the patient through his existential crisis of growth and development. Logotherapy regards it’s assignment as that of assisting the patient to finding meaning in his life. In as much as Logotherapy makes him aware of the hidden logos of his existence it is an analytical process.”
I find that all of this seems to disrupt the nice and neat conception I had of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. You probably remember that pyramid diagram from school:
According to Maslow, human needs are arranged in the form of a hierarchy, with survival needs at the bottom, and the more creative and intellectually oriented ‘self-actualization’ needs at the top. He paints a picture that our higher-level, psychological needs only emerge once our basic survival needs are satisfied.
But this book, and Frankl’s ideas, despite sharing lots in common with Maslow’s theory of motivation, do call into question the linear order of the pyramid. Man’s search for meaning shows, by experience and observation, that if our very reason for existence is undermined, then our motivation to meet our survival needs will dissipate too.
For me, Frankl’s discoveries hit at the heart of why this work that we are doing to find our vocation, and to help others find theirs, is so vital. Not just important, but necessary.
It provides clear confirmation that this stuff we’re talking about is not some luxury pursuit for the privileged, detached from everyday life. Or just some intellectual game we can choose to play, which leads to nothing. It’s as real as it gets. It’s about connecting or reconnecting to our very reason for living and finding a renewed vitality for life, which for some is a matter of emergency.
Have you read this book? I’d love to hear what you took from it.
Godspeed,
T Mo.