Man’s Search for Meaning Book Review
All of us at some point of time have the questions – ‘What is the meaning of life?‘, ‘How to be happy?’, ‘How to deal with suffering?’
Man’s Search for Meaning is the book to read if you are looking for some answers.
If hundreds of thousands of people reach out for a book whose very title promises to deal with the question of a meaning to life, it must be a question that burns under their fingernails.
Viktor Frankl
Viktor Frankl was a leading psychologist in Vienna when he was arrested for being a Jew by the Nazis and sent to concentration camp during the Second World War.
Viktor survived to write this beautiful book about the meaning of life. The book is about survival and sources of strength to survive. Frankl’s is less concerned with the question why most died, but more with the question why anyone at all survived the worst crimes that humans can inflict on each other.
According to the author, man’s deepest desire is to search for meaning and purpose, echoing Nietzsche, who said, “He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.” The task for any person is to find the unique meaning in his or her life.
Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning in life:
- In work (doing something significant),
- In love (caring for another person, as Frankl held on to the image of his wife through the darkest days in Auschwitz), and
- In courage in difficult times.
Like Stoic philosophy, he believed that in all our suffering we never lose our freedom to choose how to respond to any situation. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.
On success and happiness, Viktor believed:
For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.
The book is divided into two parts – the first, and darker, part is about the author’s experiences in a concentration camp and the second part outlines Logotherapy (a form of psychotherapy) to help people find the meaning of their existence.
Must read for anyone above the age of 21.
Man’s Search for Meaning Book Summary
Note: This summary is made up of my notes, thoughts and highlights of important passages while reading the book. I keep updating the summary when I revisit it, and occasionally may edit it to reduce summary length. Don’t be surprised if it has changed between visits. The author’s words are in normal font, while my interpretations are in italics.
Experiences in a Concentration Camp
These might become a contribution to the psychology of prison life, which was investigated after the First World War, and which acquainted us with the syndrome of “barbed wire sickness.”
We are indebted to the Second World War for enriching our knowledge of the “psychopathology of the masses,” for the war gave us the war of nerves and it gave us the concentration camp.
In psychiatry there is a certain condition known as “delusion of reprieve.”
The condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute.
An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.
If my lack of emotion had not surprised me from the standpoint of professional interest, I would not remember this incident now, because there was so little feeling involved in it.
It is not the physical pain which hurts the most (and this applies to adults as much as to punished children); it is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all.
If you could learn from me how to do a brain operation in as short a time as I am learning this road work from you, I would have great respect for you.
Apathy, the main symptom of the second phase, was a necessary mechanism of self-defense.
When the last layers of subcutaneous fat had vanished, and we looked like skeletons disguised with skin and rags, we could watch our bodies beginning to devour themselves. The organism digested its own protein, and the muscles disappeared.
Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain, but the damage to their inner selves was less. They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches.
The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. The salvation of man is through love and in love.
The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.
Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present (or alive at all), ceases somehow to be of importance.
The dawn was grey around us; grey was the sky above; grey the snow in the pale light of dawn; grey the rags in which my fellow prisoners were clad, and grey their faces. I was again conversing silently with my wife. Against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious “Yes”.
Humor was another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation. The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living.
Suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the “size” of human suffering is absolutely relative.
The meager pleasures of camp life provided a kind of negative happiness, – “freedom from suffering,” as Schopenhauer put it – and even that in a relative way only. Real positive pleasures, even small ones, were very few.
No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.
A man’s character became involved to the point that he was caught in a mental turmoil which threatened all the values he held and threw them into doubt.
One literally became a number: dead or alive – that was unimportant; the life of a “number” was completely irrelevant. What stood behind that number and that life mattered even less: the fate, the history, the name of the man.
The consciousness of one’s inner value is anchored in higher, more spiritual things.
Since the prisoner continually witnessed scenes of beatings, the impulse toward violence was increased.
Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.
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.
Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom.
The sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone. Fundamentally any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him – mentally and spiritually.
An active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity to realize values in creative work, while a passive life of enjoyment affords him the opportunity to obtain fulfillment in experiencing beauty, art, or nature.
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 behavior: namely, in man’s attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces.
If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering.
Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.
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.
Everywhere man is confronted with fate, with the chance of achieving something through his own suffering.
When we ourselves were confronted with a great destiny and faced with the decision of meeting it with equal spiritual greatness, by then we had forgotten our youthful resolutions of long ago, and we failed.
I often talk to this tree, she said to me.
Was she delirious?
Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied.
Yes.
What did it say to her?
She answered, It said to me, ‘I am here – I am here – I am life, eternal life.’
That which was ultimately responsible for the state of the prisoner’s inner self was not so much the enumerated psychophysical causes as it was the result of a free decision.
A man who could not see the end of his “provisional existence” was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life. He ceased living for the future, in contrast to a man in normal life.
The whole structure of his inner life changed; signs of decay set in which we know from other areas of life. The unemployed worker, for example, is in a similar position.
“Time experience.”
- In camp, a small time unit, a day, for example, filled with hourly tortures and fatigue, appeared endless.
- A larger time unit, perhaps a week, seemed to pass very quickly.”
A man who let himself decline because he could not see any future goal found himself occupied with retrospective thoughts.
Instead of taking the camp’s difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised it as something of no consequence. Life for such people became meaningless.
Most men in a concentration camp believed that the real opportunities of life had passed. Yet, in reality, there was an opportunity and a challenge. One could make a victory of those experiences, turning life into an inner triumph.
It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future – sub specie aeternitatis. And this is his salvation in the most difficult moments of his existence, although he sometimes has to force his mind to the task.”
Spinoza says in his Ethics – “Affectus, qui passio est, desinit esse passio simulatque eius claram et distinctam formamus ideam.” Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.
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.
Those who know how close the connection is between the state of mind of a man – his courage and hope, or lack of them – and the state of immunity of his body will understand that the sudden loss of hope and courage can have a deadly effect.
As we said before, any attempt to restore a man’s inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal.
Nietzsche’s words, “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,” could be the guiding motto for all psychotherapeutic and psychohygienic efforts regarding prisoners.
Whenever there was an opportunity for it, one had to give them a why – an aim – for their lives, in order to strengthen them to bear the terrible how of their existence.
Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost.
We had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.
We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct.
Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.
Therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment.
It is impossible to define the meaning of life in a general way.
Questions about the meaning of life can never be answered by sweeping statements.
“Life” does not mean something vague, but something very real and concrete, just as life’s tasks are also very real and concrete. They form man’s destiny, which is different and unique for each individual.
No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny.
Every situation is distinguished by its uniqueness, and there is always only one right answer to the problem posed by the situation at hand.
When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe.
No one can relieve him (man) of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.
This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love.
Not only our experiences, but all we have done, whatever great thoughts we may have had, and all we have suffered, all this is not lost, though it is past; we have brought it into being.
Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.
Human life, under any circumstances, never ceases to have a meaning, and that this infinite meaning of life includes suffering and dying, privation and death.
A comrade who on his arrival in camp had tried to make a pact with Heaven that his suffering and death should save the human being he loved from a painful end. For this man, suffering and death were meaningful.
Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn. Boundaries between groups overlapped and we must not try to simplify matters by saying that these men were angels and those were devils.
The rift dividing good from evil, which goes through all human beings, reaches into the lowest depths and becomes apparent even on the bottom of the abyss which is laid open by the concentration camp.
“Freedom” – we repeated to ourselves, and yet we could not grasp it. We had said this word so often during all the years we dreamed about it, that it had lost its meaning. We had said this word so often during all the years we dreamed about it, that it had lost its meaning.
Its reality did not penetrate into our consciousness; we could not grasp the fact that freedom was ours. The first spark of joy came when we saw a rooster with a tail of multicolored feathers. But it remained only a spark; we did not yet belong to this world.
Psychologically, what was happening to the liberated prisoners could be called “depersonalization.” Everything appeared unreal, unlikely, as in a dream.
The body has fewer inhibitions than the mind.
A man who has been under such enormous mental pressure for such a long time is naturally in some danger after his liberation, especially since the pressure was released quite suddenly.
No one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them.
The experience of disillusionment is different. Here it was not one’s fellow man (whose superficiality and lack of feeling was so disgusting that one finally felt like creeping into a hole and neither hearing nor seeing human beings any more) but fate itself which seemed so cruel. A man who for years had thought he had reached the absolute limit of all possible suffering now found that suffering has no limits, and that he could suffer still more, and still more intensely.
Logotherapy in a Nutshell
Logotherapy focuses rather on the future, that is to say, on the meanings to be fulfilled by the patient in his future. (Logotherapy, indeed, is a meaning-centered psychotherapy.)
Logotherapy defocuses all the vicious-circle formations and feedback mechanisms which play such a great role in the development of neuroses. Thus, the typical self-centeredness of the neurotic is broken up.
The Will to Meaning
Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a “secondary rationalization” of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone.
Man’s search for meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning.
Existential Frustration
Man’s will to meaning can also be frustrated, in which case logotherapy speaks of “existential frustration.”
Noogenic neuroses
Noogenic neuroses do not emerge from conflicts between drives and instincts but rather from existential problems. Among such problems, the frustration of the will to meaning plays a large role.
Not every conflict is necessarily neurotic; some amount of conflict is normal and healthy.
A man’s concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.
Logotherapy regards its assignment as that of assisting the patient to find meaning in his life.
Logotherapy deviates from psychoanalysis insofar as it considers man a being whose main concern consists in fulfilling a meaning, rather than in the mere gratification and satisfaction of drives and instincts.
Noo-Dynamics
To be sure, man’s search for meaning may arouse inner tension rather than inner equilibrium. However, precisely such tension is an indispensable prerequisite of mental health.
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.
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.
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.
What man needs is not homeostasis but what I call “noo-dynamics” – the existential dynamics in a polar field of tension where one pole is represented by a meaning that is to be fulfilled and the other pole by the man who has to fulfill it.
They lack the awareness of a meaning worth living for. They are haunted by the experience of their inner emptiness, a void within themselves; they are caught in that situation which I have called the “existential vacuum.”
Existential Vacuum
At the beginning of human history, man lost some of the basic animal instincts in which an animal’s behavior is imbedded and by which it is secured. Such security, like Paradise, is closed to man forever; man has to make choices.
No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do or he does what other people wish him to do.
The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom.
Boredom is now causing, and certainly bringing to psychiatrists, more problems to solve than distress.
The Meaning of Life
The meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.
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.
Everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.
Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life. Each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.
Logotherapy sees in responsibleness the very essence of human existence.
The Essence of Existence
“Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!”
There is nothing which would stimulate a man’s sense of responsibleness more than this maxim, which invites him to imagine first that the present is past and, second, that the past may yet be changed and amended.
By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche.
“The self-transcendence of human existence.”
- It 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.
Self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.
We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways:
- by creating a work or doing a deed;
- by experiencing something or encountering someone; and
- by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.
The way of finding a meaning in life is by experiencing something – such as goodness, truth and beauty – by experiencing nature and culture or, last but not least, by experiencing another human being in his very uniqueness – by loving him.
The Meaning of Love
Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality.
No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him.
By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized.
By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.
In logotherapy, love is not interpreted as a mere epiphenomenon of sexual drives and instincts in the sense of a so-called sublimation.
Love is as primary a phenomenon as sex. Normally, sex is a mode of expression for love. Sex is justified, even sanctified, as soon as, but only as long as, it is a vehicle of love.
Love is not understood as a mere side-effect of sex; rather, sex is a way of expressing the experience of that ultimate togetherness which is called love.
The Meaning of Suffering
We must never forget that we may also find meaning in life even when confronted with a hopeless situation, when facing a fate that cannot be changed.
What then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn one’s predicament into a human achievement.
When we are no longer able to change a situation – just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer – we are challenged to change ourselves.
Once, an elderly general practitioner consulted me because of his severe depression. He could not overcome the loss of his wife who had died two years before and whom he had loved above all else.
Now, how could I help him? What should I tell him?
Well, I refrained from telling him anything but instead confronted him with the question, “What would have happened, Doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?”
“Oh,” he said, “for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!”
Whereupon I replied, “You see, Doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it was you who have spared her this suffering—to be sure, at the price that now you have to survive and mourn her.”
In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.
First, his despair was no disease; and second, I could not change his fate; I could not revive his wife.
But in that moment I did succeed in changing his attitude – from that time on he could at least see a meaning in his suffering.”
It is one of the basic tenets of logotherapy that man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life.
Meaning is possible even in spite of suffering – provided, certainly, that the suffering is unavoidable. If it were avoidable, however, the meaningful thing to do would be to remove its cause, be it psychological, biological or political.
To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.
In no way is suffering necessary to find meaning.
Logotherapy “may help counteract certain unhealthy trends in the present-day culture of … where the incurable sufferer is given very little opportunity to be proud of his suffering and to consider it ennobling rather than degrading.“
Life’s meaning is an unconditional one, for it even includes the potential meaning of unavoidable suffering.
“Has all this suffering … 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.”
Meta-Clinical Problems
More and more, a psychiatrist is approached today by patients who confront him with human problems rather than neurotic symptoms.
A Logodrama
Whether an ape which was being used to develop poliomyelitis serum, and for this reason punctured again and again, would ever be able to grasp the meaning of its suffering. Unanimously, the group replied that of course it would not..
And what about man? Are you sure that the human world is a terminal point in the evolution of the cosmos?
Is it not conceivable that there is still another dimension, a world beyond man’s world; a world in which the question of an ultimate meaning of human suffering would find an answer?
The Super Meaning
This ultimate meaning necessarily exceeds and surpasses the finite intellectual capacities of man; in logotherapy, we speak in this context of a super-meaning.
What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms.
Logos is deeper than logic.
I observed that procreation is not the only meaning of life, for then life in itself would become meaningless, and something which in itself is meaningless cannot be rendered meaningful merely by its perpetuation.
Life’s Transitoriness
The only really transitory aspects of life are the potentialities; but as soon as they are actualized, they are rendered realities at that very moment; they are saved and delivered into the past.
In the past, nothing is irretrievably lost, but rather, on the contrary, everything is irrevocably stored and treasured.
The transitoriness of our existence in no way makes it meaningless. But it does constitute our responsibleness; for everything hinges upon our realizing the essentially transitory possibilities.
Man constantly makes his choice concerning the mass of present potentialities; which of these will be condemned to nonbeing and which will be actualized?
At any moment, man must decide, for better or for worse, what will be the monument of his existence.
I should say ‘having been’ is the surest kind of being.
Logotherapy, keeping in mind the essential transitoriness of human existence, is not pessimistic but rather activistic.
The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. The person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back.
For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him? “No, thank you,” he will think. “Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered.
Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud.
Logotherapy as a Technique
A realistic fear, like the fear of death, cannot be tranquilized away by its psychodynamic interpretation.
A neurotic fear, such as agoraphobia, cannot be cured by philosophical understanding.
Anticipatory anxiety. It is characteristic of this fear that it produces precisely that of which the patient is afraid. An individual, for example, who is afraid of blushing when he enters a large room…
Fear brings to pass what one is afraid of, likewise a forced intention makes impossible what one forcibly wishes.
Pleasure is, and must remain, a side-effect or by-product, and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it is made a goal in itself.
Excessive attention, or “hyper-reflection,” as it is called in logotherapy, may also be pathogenic (that is, lead to sickness).
Logotherapy bases its technique called “paradoxical intention” on the twofold fact that fear brings about that which one is afraid of, and that hyper-intention makes impossible what one wishes.
This procedure consists of a reversal of the patient’s attitude, inasmuch as his fear is replaced by a paradoxical wish. By this treatment, the wind is taken out of the sails of the anxiety.
The fear of sleeplessness results in a hyper-intention to fall asleep, which, in turn, incapacitates the patient to do so.
Paradoxical intention is no panacea. Yet it lends itself as a useful tool in treating obsessive-compulsive and phobic conditions, especially in cases with underlying anticipatory anxiety.
One of “the more common illusions of Freudian orthodoxy,” to quote the late Emil A. Gutheil, “is that the durability of results corresponds to the length of therapy.”
Anticipatory anxiety has to be counteracted by paradoxical intention; hyper-intention as well as hyper-reflection have to be counteracted by dereflection.
The Collective Neurosis
There is a danger inherent in the teaching of man’s “nothingbutness,” the theory that man is nothing but the result of biological, psychological and sociological conditions, or the product of heredity and environment.
To be sure, a human being is a finite thing, and his freedom is restricted. It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions.
Critique of Pan-Determinism
Dangerous assumption, namely, that which I call “pan-determinism.” By that I mean the view of man which disregards his capacity to take a stand toward any conditions whatsoever.
Man is not fully conditioned and determined but rather determines himself whether he gives in to conditions or stands up to them. In other words, man is ultimately self-determining.
Every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.
The individual personality, however, remains essentially unpredictable.
One of the main features of human existence is the capacity to rise above such conditions, to grow beyond them. Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary.
We may predict the movements of a machine, of an automaton; more than this, we may even try to predict the mechanisms or “dynamisms” of the human psyche as well. But man is more than psyche.
Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.
The Psyciatric Credo
There is nothing conceivable which would so condition a man as to leave him without the slightest freedom.
An incurably psychotic individual may lose his usefulness but yet retain the dignity of a human being.
Psychiatry Rehumanized
A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes – within the limits of endowment and environment – he has made out of himself.
In the concentration camps we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints.
Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.
The Case for a Tragic Optimism
In brief it means that one is, and remains, optimistic in spite of the “tragic triad,” which consists of those aspects of human existence which may be circumscribed by:
- pain;
- guilt; and
- death.
Tragic optimism allows for:
- turning suffering into a human achievement and accomplishment;
- deriving from guilt the opportunity to change oneself for the better; and
- deriving from life’s transitoriness an incentive to take responsible action.
Optimism is not anything to be commanded or ordered.
One cannot even force oneself to be optimistic indiscriminately, against all odds, against all hope.
What is true for hope is also true for the other two components of the triad inasmuch as faith and love cannot be commanded or ordered either.
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.
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 actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.
If you want anyone to laugh you have to provide him with a reason, e.g., you have to tell him a joke. In no way is it possible to evoke real laughter by urging him, or having him urge himself, to laugh.
Once an individual’s search for a meaning is successful, it not only renders him happy but also gives him the capability to cope with suffering.
People have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning.
“Unemployment neurosis.” This neurosis really originated in a twofold erroneous identification:
- being jobless was equated with being useless, and
- being useless was equated with having a meaningless life.”
As soon as they could fill their abundant free time with some sort of unpaid but meaningful activity – their depression disappeared although their economic situation had not changed and their hunger was the same.
The truth is that man does not live by welfare alone.
Even if things only take such a good turn in one of a thousand cases who can guarantee that in your case it will not happen one day, sooner or later.
Artificially building up mutual aggressions between groups of boy scouts, and observed that the aggressions only subsided when the youngsters dedicated themselves to a collective purpose.
90 percent of the alcoholics she studied had suffered from an abysmal feeling of meaninglessness. Of the drug addicts studied by Stanley Krippner, 100 percent believed that “things seemed meaningless.”
The fact remains that meaning, and its perception, as seen from the logotherapeutic angle, is completely down to earth rather than afloat in the air or resident in an ivory tower.
How does a human being go about finding meaning?
Charlotte Buhler stated: All we can do is study the lives of people who seem to have found their answers to the questions of what ultimately human life is about as against those who have not”
Notion that experiencing can be as valuable as achieving is therapeutic because it compensates for our one-sided emphasis on the external world of achievement at the expense of the internal world of experience.
Even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by so doing change himself. He may turn a personal tragedy into a triumph.
Certain unhealthy trends in the present-day culture, where “he is not only unhappy, but also ashamed of being unhappy.” Where the incurable sufferer is given very little opportunity to be proud of his suffering and to consider it ennobling rather than degrading.
Without the suffering, the growth that I have achieved would have been impossible.
One cannot change a situation that causes his suffering, he can still choose his attitude.
Totally explaining one’s crime would be tantamount to explaining away his or her guilt and to seeing in him or her not a free and responsible human being but a machine to be repaired.
The criminal never has a chance to explain himself. He is offered a variety of excuses to choose from. Society is blamed and in many instances the blame is put on the victim.
“You are human beings like me, and as such you were free to commit a crime, to become guilty. Now, however, you are responsible for overcoming guilt by rising above it, by growing beyond yourselves, by changing for the better.”
At any time each of the moments of which life consists is dying, and that moment will never recur. And yet is not this transitoriness a reminder that challenges us to make the best possible use of each moment of our lives?”
Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.
As soon as we have used an opportunity and have actualized a potential meaning, we have done so once and for all. We have rescued it into the past wherein it has been safely delivered and deposited.
Man considers only the stubble fields of transitoriness and overlooks the full granaries of the past, wherein he had salvaged once and for all his deeds, his joys and also his sufferings.
The old have no opportunities, no possibilities in the future. But they have more than that. Instead of possibilities in the future, they have realities in the past – the potentialities they have actualized, the meanings they have fulfilled.
In view of the possibility of finding meaning in suffering, life’s meaning is an unconditional one, at least potentially. That unconditional meaning, however, is paralleled by the unconditional value of each and every person.
Just as life remains potentially meaningful under any conditions, even those which are most miserable, so too does the value of each and every person stay with him or her.
The value of each and every person stay with him or her, and it does so because it is based on the values that he or she has realized in the past, and is not contingent on the usefulness that he or she may or may not retain in the present.
Today’s society… blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness.
Nihilism does not contend that there is nothing, but it states that everything is meaningless.
“Sed omnia praeclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt” (but everything great is just as difficult to realize as it is rare to find) reads the last sentence of the Ethics of Spinoza.
For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best. So, let us be alert:
Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of.
And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.
Read More Like This
Recent Articles