Work left unfinished, someone loved, a response to suffering: Frankl describes reasons to keep living when much of life has been taken away.
Man's Search for Meaning /3 sources of meaning/ 7 min read
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The book
Something still worth doing
A lost manuscript gave Viktor Frankl work to do inside a Nazi camp. His book about psychotherapy had been taken from him at Auschwitz. Later, ill in Bavaria, he made notes so he could write it again if he survived. He believed the prospect helped him endure.
Man's Search for Meaning connects that experience to his claim that people need a reason to live. A task or a person you love can give you something to care about beyond your distress. He also thinks a life can retain meaning when work and pleasure are no longer possible. His argument depends on how much freedom remains under conditions a person did not choose.
The memoir doesn't establish why some prisoners survived and others died. Murder, forced labor, starvation and disease determined their circumstances; selection, help from others and chance could decide their fate. Frankl acknowledges luck in his own survival. The murdered had loved ones and unfinished work, too.
Frankl was a Jewish psychiatrist in Vienna. He was deported to Theresienstadt in 1942, then to Auschwitz in 1944. After a few days there, he was transferred to Kaufering and later Türkheim, both subcamps of Dachau. He was liberated at Türkheim in April 1945. His father died at Theresienstadt; his mother and brother were murdered at Auschwitz. His wife, Tilly, died at Bergen-Belsen.
The memoir was published in German in 1946. The English book combines it with a later account of logotherapy, his psychotherapy centered on meaning. Frankl had used that name as early as 1926 and begun his manuscript before deportation. The camps became part of his argument for a theory he already held.
The diagnosis
A life with nothing to aim at
Frankl calls the desire for a life that matters the will to meaning. He ranks it ahead of the pleasure principle he associates with Freud and the striving for superiority he associates with Adler. These are compressed portraits of their theories.
His ordinary example is someone who gets through a busy week and feels empty on Sunday. The schedule supplies activity without answering what the activity is for. He calls this emptiness the existential vacuum, and thinks the pursuit of money, pleasure or conformity can fill the time without resolving it. He also distinguishes a crisis of meaning from an illness: uncertainty about what to do with your life does not, by itself, make you a psychiatric patient.
The meaning Frankl has in mind changes with the person and the situation. He describes two prisoners who had given up on life. One had a child waiting abroad; the other had scholarly work to complete. He tried to help each see a responsibility that remained his own.
Frankl makes stronger claims when he describes prisoners losing hope. He recounts a rise in deaths around Christmas and a fellow prisoner who died of typhus after a hoped-for date of liberation passed. He accepts the camp doctor's view that disappointment contributed to the Christmas deaths. These are recollections and interpretations, without the records needed to separate despair from infection, hunger or exhaustion. They cannot show that a reason to live would have saved those men.
The central claim
How much choice remained?
Frankl recalls prisoners who comforted others and shared bread. Their behavior is the basis for his claim that a person can still respond to circumstances rather than be wholly determined by them. His famous passage names the freedom:
Frankl's descriptions of apathy show how hunger, terror and illness could damage the capacity to think and choose. The acts of generosity he remembers establish that such acts were possible. They don't establish that every prisoner could summon the same response, or that those who couldn't were responsible for being overcome.
The possibilities
Three sources of meaning
Part Two groups the possibilities into doing something worthwhile, experiencing something or loving someone, and responding to suffering that cannot be removed. The cards' closing lines are paraphrases.
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One
Work and action
The manuscript became The Doctor and the Soul. His camp notes were preparation for a future he might never reach. He treats that task as one reason he wanted to remain alive.
This category includes an act done for someone else as well as a book, a job or a large project. The postscript distinguishes a person's dignity from their usefulness: someone who can no longer work retains the value of their life.
A task can matter before you know whether you'll get to finish it.
Paraphrase. Part Two, “Noö-dynamics” and “The Meaning of Life.”
Two
Love and experience
On a march to a work site, Frankl imagines talking with his wife. He has no way to learn whether she is alive. He finds comfort in loving her while separated from her. The passage does not tell us whether she had already died.
The category is wider than romantic love. In Part Two it includes encountering goodness or beauty, including nature and art. Receiving something from the world can give life meaning without producing anything in return.
Someone loved can remain present in thought when contact is impossible.
Paraphrase. Part One, march before dawn; Part Two, “The Meaning of Love.”
Three
Unavoidable suffering
Frankl describes a doctor grieving for his wife. He asks how she would have suffered if the doctor had died first. The man sees his grief as the cost of having spared her that loss. Frankl reports that this change of perspective helped him.
That interpretation won't console every bereaved person. Frankl also says suffering isn't necessary for meaning. If its cause can be removed, through treatment or a change in political conditions, removing it is the worthwhile action.
Responding to a loss may matter even when the loss cannot be undone.
Paraphrase. Part Two, “The Meaning of Suffering.”
Logotherapy
The therapist's part
The therapist helps a person recognize possible commitments and decide how to respond to them. Frankl compares this work to widening a patient's field of vision. He says the therapist should leave the judgment to the patient. A therapist prescribing their own religion or life purpose would violate that principle.
He also describes paradoxical intention, a technique for breaking a cycle in which fear of a symptom helps bring it on. One patient fears sweating in public. Frankl asks him to try, with some humor, to sweat even more; the patient reports that the anxiety eases. These case reports illustrate the method, but cannot establish how often it works.
Frankl advises giving your attention to a person or a task rather than monitoring whether you're happy. In the 1984 postscript he makes a stronger claim: once someone finds a reason for happiness, happiness follows automatically. The book offers examples of renewed purpose, but doesn't demonstrate that this always makes a person happy. Continuing unhappiness doesn't show that someone has chosen badly.
Frankl places that acknowledgment near the beginning. Later, his language about despair and death sometimes suggests a much stronger connection between inner strength and survival. The acknowledgment doesn't resolve that tension.
The memoir tells us how one survivor understood what he endured. It cannot recover the experience of people who were murdered, or explain their deaths through what they thought. Its claims about meaning remain open to a reader's judgment even when its account of particular acts of care is persuasive.
The familiar line beginning “Between stimulus and response” has no verified source in Frankl's writing. The Viktor Frankl Institute reports that Stephen Covey found it in a library book whose author and title he didn't record, and thought it expressed Frankl's views. That history leaves its original author unidentified.
Sources
The text and the historical record
The two short quotations use the Ilse Lasch translation. I cite their locations within Part One rather than give approximate page numbers. The card summaries and other explanations are paraphrases. The memoir is the source for Frankl's recollections and interpretations; the biographical and camp references supply historical context.
Text, biography and image sources
Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning. Trans. Ilse Lasch. Beacon Press, 2006. Part One supplies the manuscript, wife, bread-sharing and loss-of-hope episodes. Part Two supplies the account of meaning and the therapeutic examples. The postscript distinguishes human dignity from usefulness. Publisher's 2006 edition; searchable transcription, labeled fourth edition and including the 1992 preface. The transcription's page numbers don't match the paperback.
Viktor Frankl Institute, Vienna.Biographical chronology. Dates for his prewar work, deportation, transfers, family losses and publication.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.Dachau. The camp system, forced labor, selection and conditions contributing to deaths.
Viktor Frankl Institute, Vienna.Alleged quote. The institute's account of Covey's unsourced library quotation.
