Man's Search for Meaning

Frankl trained inside the two great schools of Viennese psychology, and he came to think both had the engine wrong. Sigmund Freud said the force underneath everything was the pull toward pleasure, the wish to satisfy a drive and ease the tension. Alfred Adler said it was the will to power, the push to come out on top. Frankl, who would later watch men in a place with no pleasure left to chase and no power left to win, named a third thing and put it under the other two.

Man's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a "secondary rationalization" of instinctual drives.Man's Search for Meaning, Part Two

He called it the will to meaning. Not the will to feel good, and not the will to win, but the need to have a why: a reason your particular life is worth the trouble of living. Pleasure and power, he thought, are what you reach for when the meaning has gone missing, the way a man with nothing to live for reaches for a drink. They are the symptom, not the source.

In the camp this stopped being a lecture-hall argument. He watched it decide who lived. A prisoner who lost the sense that his life still had a future, some task or some person waiting for him on the outside, would slip in a way you could see coming. He would stop washing, stay in his bunk, trade his last cigarettes for a moment's comfort. Within days he was usually dead.

The prisoner who had lost faith in the future, his future, was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay.Man's Search for Meaning, Part One

The Christmas deaths were the same thing at scale. So was a man Frankl writes about under the initial F., a composer who told him, in February, that he had dreamed a voice promising the war would be over for him on the thirtieth of March. As the day came near and the front did not, his fever spiked. On the thirtieth he fell unconscious. On the thirty-first he was dead, of typhus the chart said, but the date the voice had given him was the date his reason to hold on ran out, and the body went soon after.

This is why Frankl kept returning to a line of Nietzsche's as the nearest thing the camp had to a law. A man with a why, a child to get back to, a piece of work only he could finish, could bear almost any how. A man with no why was the one to keep an eye on. It is the opposite of what we usually mean by toughness. It is not about how much you can take. It is about having somewhere to point it.

Here is the brutal question the camp forced. If meaning is what keeps a person alive, what meaning is left to a man who has had everything taken: his family, his name, his clothes, his work, every choice down to when he may use the latrine? Frankl's answer is the most quoted thing he ever wrote, and the most misread.

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.Man's Search for Meaning, Part One

The guards owned his body, his hours, whether he ate and whether he lived. What they could not reach was how he met it. Two men go to the same labor detail in the same cold on the same empty stomach; one goes bitter and one goes with some scrap of himself intact, and that gap is real, and it is the man's own. Frankl had watched it proven by the few who walked the huts comforting others and giving away their last bread. There were not many. There were enough to settle the point: even there, a person could choose the kind of person the place was going to make of him.

So you are not chasing pleasure, and you cannot pick your circumstances. Where is meaning supposed to come from, in practice? Frankl, a working therapist again by the time he wrote the second half, gives a famously plain answer. Three places. He thought every meaning a human life can hold comes through one of these doors.

We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.Man's Search for Meaning, Part Two

Take them one at a time. Each card below is one door, with the example Frankl reached for, which more often than not was his own.

Back in Vienna, in a city and a life that had been taken apart, Frankl turned all of this into a method and gave it a name.

Logos is a Greek word which denotes "meaning." Logotherapy, or, as it has been called by some authors, the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy, focuses on the meaning of human existence as well as on man's search for such a meaning.Man's Search for Meaning, Part Two

Freud's was the first school of psychotherapy to come out of Vienna, Adler's the second, and this was the third. The difference is in which direction it faces. Where Freud's patient lay back and dug through the past for the buried cause of the trouble, Frankl's patient sat up and looked forward, at what was still worth doing. The aim is not to feel better. The aim is to find something worth doing and go do it. The feeling, if it comes, comes second, and it comes on its own.

That last point is the one piece of the book most worth taping to a wall. Frankl noticed that the patients most fixed on being happy were reliably the least happy, and that the harder they chased it the faster it backed away. Happiness, he decided, is not a thing you can aim at directly.

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.Man's Search for Meaning, preface to the 1992 edition

Give yourself to a piece of work or to a person, lose the running tally of how happy it is making you, and the happiness arrives behind your back as a side effect. Aim straight at it and you will spend your life watching it retreat. He built a whole technique on the same backwards logic: an insomniac told to lie there and try hard to stay awake, a sweating, blushing patient told to go out and try to sweat and blush as much as possible. Stop fighting the thing, aim at the opposite, and the grip lets go. Meaning works the same way. You do not feel your way to it. You act your way there, and the feeling follows.

A book this loved is worth being hard on, so here is the strongest case against taking it at face value, and what survives it.

We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles, whatever one may choose to call them, we know: the best of us did not return.Man's Search for Meaning, Part One

Even the setting gets misread. The name the book leans on is Auschwitz, where Frankl in fact spent only a few days, a sorting point on the way to somewhere else. Almost the entire memoir takes place in two small labor camps that fed Dachau, which he never names. The events are real; the famous backdrop is mostly borrowed, and critics have fairly noted it. None of it sinks the book. It just means you should read it as one honest witness from inside the thing, which is what it is, and not as the war's official record.

One last cleanup, because you have almost certainly met Frankl already, in the form of a sentence he never wrote. It goes: between stimulus and response there is a space, and in that space is our power to choose our response. It is on a lot of office walls under his name. It is not in this book, and as far as anyone has been able to find, not anywhere in his work. The Viktor Frankl Institute files it as an "alleged quote" and traces it to Stephen Covey, who said he came across the idea in a library book he could later never find again and wrote it out in his own words. The thought is genuinely Frankl's. The polished sentence is Covey's. The real Frankl is plainer, and harder won, and it is all in the pages above.

If the shape of this is familiar from elsewhere on this site, it should be. Frankl, working alone in German, landed in almost the same place a roomful of drunks in Ohio reached the same decade, coming the other way.

The heart of Alcoholics Anonymous is a short prayer about sorting the world into two piles: the things you can change, the things you cannot, and the wit to know which is which. Frankl's third door, the stance you take toward unavoidable suffering, is that prayer with the praying removed. Accept what you cannot change; choose how you meet it; spend yourself on what is still open. Same move, no God required.

The book that closes this whole great-books series, The Spirituality of Imperfection, names the pattern across a dozen traditions at once: the trouble starts the moment you insist on running the show, and the way through starts the moment you stop. Frankl is the clinical, secular edition of that idea, written by a man who earned the right to say it in a place built to prove the opposite. He asks you to believe nothing. He asks you to find a reason, to love someone, and to own the one part of any situation that is still yours.

This is a distillation of one book, told in my own words; the ideas are Frankl's. Quotes are kept short and are reproduced for study and comment, checked word for word against two full texts of the Ilse Lasch translation and cited by part. Page numbers are from the 2006 Beacon paperback and given as "about p. N," because Beacon's pagination drifts by a few pages between printings. A handful of the quotes use an em dash in the original; the site does not, so those are shown with a comma instead, with no change to the words. No em dashes, anywhere.