MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING

VIKTOR E. FRANKL

WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS                        1959

PART I

 

Preface by Gordon W. Allport, formerly a professor of psychology at Harvard University

Dr. Frankl, author-psychiatrist, sometimes asks his patients who suffer from a multitude of torments great and small, “Why do you not commit suicide?” From their answers he can often find the guide-line for his psychotherapy: in one life there is love for one’s children to tie to; in another life, a talent to be used; in a third, perhaps only lingering memories worth preserving. To weave these slender threads of a broken life into a firm pattern of meaning and responsibility is the object and challenge of logotherapy, which is Dr. Frankl’s own version of modern existential analysis.

In this book, Dr Frankl explains the experience which led to his discovery of logotherapy. As a long-time prisoner in bestial concentration camps he found himself stripped to naked existence. His father, mother, and his wife died in camps or were sent to the gas ovens, so that, excepting for his sister, his entire family perished in these camps. How could he – every possession lost, every value destroyed, suffering from hunger, cold and brutality, hourly expecting extermination – how could he find his life worth preserving? A psychiatrist who personally has faced such extremity is a psychiatrist worth listening to. He, if anyone, should be able to view our human condition wisely and with compassion. Dr Frankl’s words have a profoundly honest ring, for they rest on experiences too deep for deception. What he has to say gains in prestige because of his present position on the Medical Faculty of the University in Vienna and because of the renown of the logotherapy clinics that today are springing up in many lands, patterned on his own famous Neurological Policlinic in Vienna.

• Freud finds the roots of these distressing disorders in the anxiety caused by conflicting and unconscious motives. Frankl distinguishes several forms of neurosis, and traces some of them to the failure of the sufferer to find meaning and a sense of responsibility in his existence.
• Freud stress frustration in the sexual life; Frankl frustration in the “will-to-meaning.”
• The present narrative, brief though it is, is artfully constructed and gripping. On two occasions I have read it through at a single sitting, unable to break away from its spell. Only after finishing the book does the reader realize that here is an essay of profound depth, and not just one more brutal tale of concentration camps.
• From this autobiographical fragment the reader learns much. He learns what a human being does when he suddenly realizes he has “nothing to lose except his so ridiculously naked life.”
• Hunger, humiliation, fear and deep anger at injustice are rendered tolerable by closely guarded images of beloved persons, by religion, by a grim sense of humor, and even by glimpses of the healing beauties of nature – a tree or a sunset.
• But these moments of comfort do not establish the will to live unless they help the prisoner make larger sense out of his apparently senseless suffering. To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering.
• If there is a purpose in life at all, there must be a purpose in suffering and in dying. But no man can tell another what this purpose is. Each must find out for himself, and must accept the responsibility that his answer prescribes.
• If he succeeds he will continue to grow in spite of all indignities. Frankl is fond of quoting Nietzsche, “He who has a why to live can bear with almost and how.”
• In the concentration camp every circumstance conspires to make the prisoner lose his hold. All the familiar goals in life are snatched away. What alone remains is “the last of human freedoms” – the ability to “choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances.”
• The prisoners were only average men, but some, at least, by choosing to be “worthy of their suffering” proved man’s capacity to rise above his outward fate.
• For a writer who faces fully the ubiquity of suffering and the forces of evil, he takes a surprisingly hopeful view of man’s capacity to transcend his predicament and discover an adequate guiding truth.

 

Preface to the 1984 Edition by V.E.F, Vienna, 1983

• This book has now lived to see its 73^rd printing in English – in addition to having been published in 19 other languages. The English editions alone have sold almost two and a half million copies.
• I do not at all see in the bestseller status of my book so much an achievement and accomplishment on my part as an expression of the misery of our time: 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 finger nails.
• To be sure, something else may have contributed to the impact of the book: its second, theoretical part (‘Logotherapy in a Nutshell”) boils down, as it were, to the lessons one may distill from the first part, the autobiographical account (“Experiences in a Concentration Camp”). Thus both parts mutually support their credibility.
• I had none of this in mind when I wrote the book in 1945. And I did so within nine successive days and with the firm determination that the book would be published anonymously. In fact, the first printing of the original German version does not show my name on the cover.
• It had been written with the absolute conviction that, as an anonymous opus, it could never earn its author literary fame. I had wanted simply to convey to the reader by way of a concrete example that life holds a potential meaning under any conditions, even the most miserable ones.
• I thought that if the point were demonstrated in a situation as extreme as that in a concentration camp, my book might gain a hearing. I therefore felt responsible for writing down what I had gone through, for I thought it might be helpful to people who are prone to despair.
• It is both strange and remarkable that – among some dozens of books I have authored – precisely this one, which I had intended to be published anonymously so that it could never build up any reputation on the part of the author, did become a success.
• Again and again I therefore admonish my students:

“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, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run – in the long run, I say! – success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.”

• Should the following text of this book, dear reader, give you a lesson to learn from Auschwitz, the foregoing text of its preface can give you a lesson to learn from an unintentional bestseller.

 

PART ONE: EXPERIENCES IN A CONCENTRATION CAMP

 

• This book does not claim to be an account of facts and events but of personal experiences, experiences which millions of prisoners have suffered time and again. It is the inside story of a concentration camp, told by one of its survivors. It will try to answer the question: How was everyday life in a concentration camp reflected in the mind of the average prisoner?
• Most of the events described here did not take place in the large and famous camps, but in the small ones where most of the real extermination took place.
• It is not so much concerned with the sufferings of the mighty, but with the sacrifices, the crucifixion and the deaths of the great army of unknown and unrecorded victims. It was these common prisoners, who bore no distinguishing marks on their sleeves, whom the Capos really despised.
• Whilst these ordinary prisoners had little to eat, the capos were never hungry; in fact many of the Capos fared better in the camp than they had in their entire lives.
• Often they were harder on the prisoners than were the guards, and beat them more cruelly than the SS men did. They soon became much like the SS men and the camp wardens and may be judged on a similar psychological basis.
• It is easy for the outsider to get the wrong conception of camp life, a conception mingled with sentiment and pity. Little does he know of the hard fight for existence which raged among the prisoners. This was an unrelenting struggle for daily bread and for life itself, for one’s own sake or for that of a good friend.
• A selection of sick or feeble prisoners incapable of work would be sent to one of the big central camps which were fitted with gas chambers and crematoriums. The selection process was the signal for a free fight among all the prisoners, or of group against group.
• All that mattered was that one’s own name and that of one’s friend were crossed off the list of victims, though everyone knew that for each man saved another victim had to be found.
• A definite number of prisoners had to go with each transport. It did not really matter which, since each of them was nothing but a number.===
• There was neither time nor desire to consider moral or ethical issues. Every man was controlled by one thought only: to keep himself alive for the family waiting for him at home, and to save his friends. With no hesitation, therefore, he would arrange for another prisoner, another “number,” to take his place in the transport.
• On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves.
• As this story is about my experiences as an ordinary prisoner, it is important that I mention, not without pride, that I was not employed as a psychiatrist in camp, or even as a doctor, except for the last few weeks. A few of my colleagues were lucky enough to be employed in poorly heated first-aid posts applying bandages made of scraps of waste paper.
• I was Number 119,104, and most of the time I was digging and laying tracks for railway lines. At one time my job was to dig a tunnel, without help, for a water main under a road. I was presented with a gift of so-called “premium coupons,” exchangeable for cigarettes, issued by the construction firm to which we were practically sold as slaves.
• Three phases of the inmate’s mental reactions to camp life became apparent: the period following his admission; the period when he is well entrenched in camp routine; and the period following his release and liberation.
• The symptom that characterizes the first phase is shock. I shall give as an example the circumstances of my own admission.
• Fifteen hundred persons had been traveling by train for several days and nights. There were eighty people in each coach. Eventually we moved into the station. The carriage doors were flung open and a small detachment of prisoners stormed inside. They wore striped uniforms, their heads were shaved, but they looked well fed.
• In psychiatry there is a certain condition known as “delusion of reprieve.” The condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the delusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute.
• We, too, clung to shreds of hope and believed to the last moment that it would not be so bad. Little did we know then that they formed a specially chosen elite, who for years had been the receiving squad for new transports as they rolled into the station day after day.
• Fifteen hundred captives were cooped up in a shed built to accommodate probably two hundred at the most. We were cold and hungry and there was not enough room for everyone to squat on the bare ground, let alone to lie down.
• One five-ounce piece of bread was our only food in four days. Yet I heard the senior prisoners in charge of the shed bargain with one member of the receiving party about a tie-pin made of platinum and diamonds. Most of the profits would eventually be traded for liquor.
• There was another group of prisoners who got liquor supplied in almost unlimited quantities by the SS: these were the men who were employed in the gas chambers and crematoriums, and who knew very well that one day they would be relieved by a new shift of men, and that they would have to leave their enforced role of executioner and become victims themselves.
• Nearly everyone in our transport lived under the illusion that he would be reprieved, that everything would yet be well. We did not realize the meaning behind the scene that was to follow shortly.
• We were told to leave our luggage in the train and file past a senior SS officer. I had the courage to hide my haversack under my coat. Instinctively, I straightened on approaching the officer, so that he would not notice my heavy load.
• His right hand was lifted and pointed to right or left. None of us had the slightest idea of the sinister meaning behind that little movement of a man’s finger, pointing now to the right and now to the left, but far more frequently to the left.
• The SS man looked me over, appeared to hesitate, then put both his hands on my shoulders. I tried very hard to look smart, and he turned my shoulders very slowly until I faced right, and I moved over to that side.
• The significance of the finger game was explained to us in the evening. It was the first selection, the first verdict made on our existence or non-existence. For the great majority of our transport, about 90%, it meant death. Their sentence was carried out within the next few hours.
• We who were saved, the minority of our transport, found out the truth in the evening. I inquired where my friend had been sent. A hand pointed to the chimney a few hundred yards off, which was sending a column of flame up into the grey sky of Poland.
• “That’s where your friend is, floating up to Heaven.” But I still did not understand until the truth was explained to me in plain words.
• I tried to take one of the old prisoners into my confidence. “Look, this is the manuscript of a scientific book. I must keep this manuscript at all costs; it contains my life’s work.”
• A grin spread slowly over his face, first piteous, then more amused, mocking, insulting, until he bellowed one word at me, a word that was ever present in the vocabulary of the camp inmates: “Shit!”
• At that moment I saw the plain truth and did what marked the culminating point of the first phase of my psychological reaction: I struck out my whole former life.
• While we were waiting for the shower, our nakedness was brought home to us: we really had nothing now except our bare bodies – even minus hair; all we possessed, literally, was our naked existence.
• Thus the illusions some of us still held were destroyed one by one, and then, quite unexpectedly, most of us were overcome by a grim sense of humor. We knew that we had nothing to lose except our so ridiculously naked lives.