If there is a meaning in life,
there must be a meaning in suffering.
—Holocaust
survivor Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s
Search for Meaning
Frankl’s
book, which I first read in my early thirties, made even a stronger impression
when I read it again last week. I was reminded that this slender work was far
more than a document of profound suffering. It was a work of philosophy—and an
optimistic one. During his three years at Auschwitz and other death camps,
Frankl had no way of knowing whether any of his family members had survived. He
especially pined for his wife. But this did not lead to despair. Hoping
fervently that she lived, he had long imaginary discussions with her.
As Frankl, a psychiatrist, recalled in his book published
about fifteen years later, “I understood how a man who has nothing left in this
world still may feel bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation
of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express
himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring
his suffering in the right way—an honorable way—in such a position man can,
through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve
fulfillment.
“In front of me a man stumbled and those following him
fell on top of him,” Frankl continued. “The guard rushed over and used his whip
on them all. Thus my thoughts were interrupted for a few minutes. But soon my
soul found its way back from the prisoner’s existence to another world, and I
resumed talk with my loved one: I asked her questions, and she answered; she
questioned me in return and I answered.”
Frankl was certainly aware that his words might be
interpreted as a delusion. But if so, it was a therapeutic delusion, one that
may have saved his life. Suicide in the death camps was common.
As Frankl wrote, “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 the person is actually present, whether or not he is
still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.”
Frankl and other prisoners were eventually transferred by train to
a work camp in Bavaria, where the conditions were not as brutal as in Auschwitz
– one of many fortunate incidents that made possible his survival. Another, more
subtle factor, according to Frankl, was an appreciation for beauty, both in the
form of recollected poetry and the view afforded of the snow-capped Austrian
Alps through their prison car.
Frankl wrote, “If someone had seen our faces ... as we
beheld the mountains of Salzburg with their summits glowing in the sunset,
through the little barred windows of the prison carriage, he would never have
believed that those were the faces of men who had given up all hope of life and
liberty.”
But a glimpse of natural beauty, however lovely, is
fleeting, and for Frankl and his fellow prisoners, the key question in the
Bavarian prison camp was whether, or when, to plot an escape. By this time, in
the early spring of 1945, the war was winding down, but the prisoners had no
idea how long it would go on. Frankl ultimately chose not to join in the
uprising. It turned out to be the right decision. Within days, International
Red Cross vehicles arrived with food and medicine for the emaciated prisoners.
Frankl, who died in 1997 at age ninety-two, went on to
pioneer a variant of psychoanalysis called logotherapy, defined as “less retrospective
and less introspective than conventional psychoanalysis.” The Greek word logos means “meaning.” In his book, Frankl
commented, “Man’s search for meaning is a primary factor and not a ‘secondary
rationalization’ [as Freudians might assume] of instinctual drives. This
meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him
alone; only then does it achieve a significance that will satisfy his own will
to meaning.”
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