Book Review: Viktor Frankl - Man's Search for Meaning

This is one of those "everyone has read this" classics that contains a lot of hard-won wisdom, and whose insights are worth reiterating even if you've read similar books about therapy or happiness. It's two books in one, and the relationship between the two is interesting even above and beyond their contents. The first half is an extremely moving portrait of the horrors of his time in several WW2 concentration camps, and like a non-fiction equivalent to Varlam Shalamov's fictional Kolyma Tales, Frankl's near-death experiences are made even more powerful by his calm, detached narration. His dry descriptions of the camp, the guards, and the lives of the prisoners are set against the grim absurdities of his near-helplessness at the chance events which determined whether someone lived or died, and those physical struggles are contrasted with his emotional striving to find something to live for, the spiritual sustenance that is almost more important than physical sustenance for a human being to survive the worst that his fellow humans can subject him to. The second half is a brief description of Frankl's chosen psychological discipline of logotherapy, a type of therapy which seems to descend from Stoicism and have left a legacy in modern cognitive-behavioral therapy. It was not nearly as affecting as the first half, but as Frankl himself considers it the more important part, the two haves together are more valuable than either alone.

Outside of questionably authentic thriller novels like Papillon, prison literature tends to be on the grim side. It's just really hard to avoid emphasizing how brutal prison is, and that goes more so for anything about gulags or concentration camps, where death is typically the only way out. The short fiction of the Kolyma Tales remains my gold standard for depictions of bureaucratized horror, but the added realism of Frankl's experiences is not any less harrowing. This section is full of ethical dilemmas, inhuman atrocities, nightmarish gambles (should you volunteer for an extra shift of duty, which could bring you some extra favor but also carries the risk of a quick death?), and cruelty that is not any less cruel for being done out of impersonal duty rather than personalized malice. The only way to remain sane is to concentrate on the good, to find something to live for beyond yourself, yet with the knowledge that fate has its own ideas (Frankl mentions the fable "Death in Tehran", which I'd previously read as "Appointment in Samarra", wherein a man's efforts to avoid his scheduled death only hasten it). The peculiar mixture of constant background risk of death and unbearable tedium reminds him of a Bismarck quote: "Life is like being at the dentist. You always think that the worst is still to come, and yet it is over already." To find your purpose won't save you from death, but without something to live for you're dead even before your body grows cold.

Though it's those narrative parts that will be most likely to stick with readers, in the Preface to my 1992 edition Frankl mentions that the first half of the book is really just an explication of the second half about logotherapy, which is very important to him: his precious manuscript which he lost on his first day in camp was about logotherapy, so it's interesting to see how his drive to see it through to publication helped him survive four different concentration camps before he even published it. I won't pretend to fully understand it - there are too many terms like "noögenic neuroses" and "the existential vacuum" for me to be really comfortable - but it's striking how the purpose of publishing the manuscript helped Frankl popularize a discipline that's intended to help people find purpose. There is much of his real life experience in that quotation from Nietzsche: "He who has a WHY to live for can bear almost any HOW." As he says:

Logotherapy, keeping in mind the essential transitoriness of human existence, is not pessimistic but rather activistic. To express this point figuratively we might say: 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. On the other hand, 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. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest.

There's a great Kafka aphorism that I wish Frankl had referenced, because it bears directly on that insistence that logotherapy be attuned to action:

You can hold back from the suffering of the world, you have free permission to do so, and it is in accordance with your nature. But perhaps the holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.

We know that not nearly all psychological issues can be solved by calm discussion with a therapist, no matter how well trained, and that sometimes suffering isn't ennobling but merely enervating. Frankl is a powerful example of someone who used his suffering to find meaning and achieve good things in the world, and he acknowledges that there were many others who tried no less hard who never made it out of Auschwitz. But while suffering is not a necessary or sufficient condition for finding a purpose, Frankl is absolutely correct in asserting that finding meaning is possible even in the face of seemingly unendurable suffering, which should cheer up people who are in circumstances less dire than Auschwitz (i.e. just about all of us). Perhaps meaning is where you find it, and the clear corollary - that almost any road could lead there - means that logotherapy is no shortcut to psychic satisfaction, but if "the journey can be the destination", and "the real meaning is the friends we made along the way", and so forth through those clichés, then merely by encouraging people to actively find meaning in their lives Frankl has done the world a valuable service, and proved his own point in the process. Not bad!