Book review: “Man’s Search for Meaning: An introduction to Logotherapy” by Viktor E. Frankl

On the last pages of his landmark book about his concentration camp experiences, Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl recalls a prediction from Sigmund Freud about what would happen if a diverse set of people were all exposed to hunger: “With the increase in the imperative urge of hunger, all individual differences will blur, and in their stead will appear the uniform expression of one unstilled urge.”

But Freud was wrong, as Frankl found out during three years in Auschwitz, Dachau and other camps.

Freud, Frankl writes, was lucky he never knew the concentration camps from the inside, never knew “the filth of Auschwitz.”

There [in the camps], the “individual differences” did not “blur” but, on the contrary, people became more different: people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints.

And the mediocre.

And those with a will to live. And those who had lost the will to live.

 

“Endless little problems”

As Frankl details in his intense memoir, written in 1946, the hunger, degradation, cold, boredom, despair, fear of death and apathy were common for all inmates, but were felt by each individually.

I remember a personal experience. Almost in tears from pain (I had terrible sores on my feet from wearing torn shoes), I limped a few kilometers with our long column of men from the camp to our work site. Very cold, bitter winds struck us.

And, as he walked along, Frankl went through a litany of the daily, tiny, although potentially life-threatening, worries and anxieties of a camp inmate:

I kept thinking of the endless little problems of our miserable life. What would there be to eat tonight? If a piece of sausage came as extra ration, should I exchange it for a piece of bread? Should I trade my last cigarette, which was left from a bonus I received a fortnight ago, for a bowl of soup? How could I get a piece of wire to replace the fragment which served as one of my shoelaces? Would I get to our work site in time to join my usual working party or would I have to join another, which might have a brutal foreman? What could I do to get on good terms with the Capo, who could help me to obtain work in camp instead of undertaking this horribly long daily march?

 

“An interesting psychoscientific study”

Frankl writes that, as he teased each of these trivial worries, as he did day in and day out, he forced himself onto another track completely.

Suddenly, I saw myself standing on the platform of a well-lit, warm and pleasant lecture room. In front of me sat an attentive audience on comfortable upholstered seats. I was giving a lecture on the psychology of the concentration camp!

In that moment, Frankl writes, all that was oppressing him became objective, rather than subjective. It was seen from a remote perspective, as if he were in that future (he hoped) place, looking back on this moment.

By this method I succeeded somehow in rising above the situation, above the sufferings of the moment, and I observed them as if they were already in the past. Both I and my troubles became the object of an interesting psychoscientific study undertaken by myself.

 

“An inner decision”

Make no mistake. Frankl isn’t suggesting that his sufferings disappeared. He still had to endure them. But, for a moment at least, he could endure them by seeing them from this distant place.

At the heart of this momentary respite from all the oppressive anxieties was a realization that Frankl came to.  He writes:

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.

It became clear, he writes, that, despite all of the privations, “the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision.”

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.

 

“Continued sipping my soup”

In retaining one’s dignity, there was no room for sentiment or fine feeling. Survival from moment to moment was the central worry. Consider this moment from the typhus hut where Frankl worked:

As one of them had just died, I watched without any emotional upset the scene that followed, which was repeated over and over again with each death.

One by one, the prisoners approached the still warm body. One grabbed the remains of a messy meal of potatoes; another decided that the corpse’s wooden shoes were an improvement on his own, and exchanged them. A third man did the same with the dead man’s coat, and another was glad to be able to secure some — just imagine! — genuine string.

Frankl asked a “nurse” to remove the body, and the man did so by taking the corpse by the legs and dragging it along the floor and up the two steps to the outside, “finally — with an uncanny rattling noise — the head of the corpse bumped up the two steps.

While my cold hands clasped a bowl of hot soup from which I sipped greedily, I happened to look out the window. The corpse which had just been removed stared in at me with glazed eyes. Two hours before I had spoken to that man. Now I continued sipping my soup.

 

“My wife’s image”

It was on another march to work, Frankl writes, that he was startled with a sudden insight.  The man marching next him muttered under his breath, “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.”

And, as they marched along, both men were thinking of their wives.  Frankl looked at the sky as the pink light of morning was rising.

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…

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.

This, he writes, was an example of how the prisoner could intensify his inner life as “a refuge from the emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty of his existence.”

 

Envisioning a future

Connected to this intensification of the inmate’s inner life was the idea of a future.  The prisoners had no idea of when or if their captivity would end.

Nonetheless, it was important, Frankl writes, to envision the future — a future — for an inmate to survive.

For Frankl, it was the hope of seeing his wife again — a hope unfulfilled. She died in the camp she was in.

It was the idea of reconstructing the book manuscript about his approach to psychotherapy — logotherapy — which had been lost when he was taken to the camp.

It was the idea of being in a lecture hall and talking about that theory and how it fit the concentration camp experience.

 

The will to meaning

Since it was first published, many versions of Man’s Search for Meaning have been issued. The one I read has Frankl’s memoir as Part One. Part Two is “Logotherapy in a Nutshell” from 1992, and Part Three is “The Case for a Tragic Optimism.”

In Part Two, Frankl contrasts his approach with those of his Viennese predecessors: Freud and Alfred Adler with regard to the primary motivation of humans:

• Freud: the will to pleasure — the pleasure principle
• Adler: the will to power — the striving for superiority
• Frankl: the will to meaning.

Frankl’s argument — and the basis of logotherapy — is that, more than pleasure and more than power, human beings are searching for meaning.

 

“A why to live for”

This is the insight he drew from his life in the camps.

There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one’s life. There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

He writes that, in some way, suffering ceases to be suffering one it finds a meaning.

And meaning is not imposed from outside. Each person has to find his or her personal meaning.

One should not search for an abstract meaning of 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. Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.

 

“Hear, O Israel!”

In the moments after he had arrived at the camp and been forced to strip and had lost his manuscript — “my mental child” — Frankl was confronted “with the question whether under such circumstances my life was ultimately void of any meaning.”

And, after the common shower, he was given “the worn-out rags of an inmate who had already been sent to the gas chamber,” and, inside the pocket of the ragged coat, he found a single page from the Hebrew prayer book, the first verse of Deuteronomy, Shema Yisrael.

“Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God! The Lord is One!”

He saw in this moment a challenge to live his thoughts — to live his belief in the will to meaning — instead of just putting them on paper.

And he thought:

“Has all this suffering, this dying around us, a meaning? For, if not, then ultimately there is no meaning to survival; for a life whose meaning depends upon such a happenstance — as whether one escapes or not — ultimately would not be worth living at all.”

 

Patrick T. Reardon

9.10.25

NOTE: If you’d like to see how I wrote about this book in 2014, you can see my review here.  I didn’t read the 2014 review before writing this one, and I find it interesting that, in both, I open with the quote from Freud and end with the prayer found in the coat. The interior of the two reviews cover similar but not identical ground.