Man's Search for Meaning Part 4

MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING

VIKTOR E. FRANKL

WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS                        1959

PART IV

PART ONE: EXPERIENCES IN A CONCENTRATION CAMP (Cont)

• There were always choices to make. 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; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into a form of the typical inmate.
• In the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone. Any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him – mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp.
• Dostoevski said once, “There is only one thing I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.” These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost.
• The way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom – which cannot be taken away – that makes life meaningful and purposeful.
• If there is a meaning to life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. 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.
• Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.
• It is true that only a few people are capable of reaching such high moral standards. Of the prisoners only a few kept their full inner liberty and obtained those values which their sufferings afforded, but even one such example is sufficient proof that man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate.
• Some details of a particular man’s inner greatness come to mind, like the story of the young woman whose death I witnessed in a concentration camp. This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge.
• “I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,” she told me. “In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.” Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, “This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness.”
• Through the window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. “I often talk to this tree,” she said to me. I was startled and didn’t quite know how to take her words. 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.’”
• On entering camp a change took place in the minds of the men. With the end of uncertainty there came the uncertainty of the end. It was impossible to foresee whether or when, if at all, this form of existence would end.
• The latin word finis has two meanings: the end or the finish, and a goal to reach. 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 unemployed worker is in a similar position. His existence has become provisional and in a certain sense he cannot live for the future or aim at a goal.
• One of the prisoners, who on his arrival marched with a long column of new inmates from the station to the camp, told me later that he had felt as though he were marching at his own funeral. His life had seemed to him absolutely without future. He regarded it as over and done, as if he had already died.
• A man who let himself decline because he could not see any future found himself occupied with retrospective thoughts. It became easy to overlook the opportunities to make something positive of camp life, opportunities which really did exist.
• Such people forget that often it is just such an exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself.
• 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. They preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past. Life for such people became meaningless.
• Only a few people were capable of reaching great spiritual heights. But a few were given the chance to attain human greatness even through their apparently worldly failure and death, an accomplishment which in ordinary circumstances they would never have achieved.
• To the others of us, the mediocre and the half-hearted, the words of Bismark could be applied: “Life is like being at the dentist. You always think that the worst is still to come, and yet it is over already.”
• Varying this, we could say that 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, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did the majority of the prisoners.
• Almost in tears from pain, I limped a few kilometers with our long column of men from the camp to our work site. I kept thinking of the endless little problems of our miserable life.
• I became disgusted with the state of affairs which compelled me, daily and hourly, to think of only such trivial things. I forced myself to turn to another subject.
• 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!
• All that oppressed me at that moment became objective, seen and described from the remote viewpoint of science. 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 of the past.
• Both I and my troubles became the object of an interesting psychoscientific study undertaken by myself. 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.
• I once had a dramatic demonstration of the close link between the loss of faith in the future and this dangerous giving up. F. had a dream in February 1945 that the camp would be liberated on March 30^th.
• When F. told me about the dream he was still full of hope and convinced the dream would be right. As the promised day drew nearer, the war news made it appear very unlikely that we would be free on the promised date.
• On March 29^th, F. suddenly became ill. On March 31^st he was dead. To all outward appearances he had died of typhus.
• The ultimate cause of my friend’s death was that the expected liberation did not come and he was severely disappointed. This suddenly lowered his body’s resistance against the latent typhus infection. His faith in the future and his will to live had become paralyzed and his body fell victim to illness – and thus the voice of his dream was right after all.
• The death rate in the week between Christmas, 1944, and New Year’s, 1945, increased in camp beyond all previous experience. The explanation for this increase did not lie in the harder working conditions or the deterioration of our food supplies or a change of weather or new epidemics.
• The majority of the prisoners had lived in the naïve hope that they would be home again by Christmas. As the time drew near and there was no encouraging news, the prisoners lost courage and disappointment overcame them.
• This had a dangerous influence on their powers of resistance and a great number of them died.
• 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.
• What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, 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 – daily and hourly. 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.
• These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment. Thus it is impossible to define the meaning of life in a general way. No situation repeats itself, and each situation calls for a different response.
• 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 sufferings as his task; his single and unique task. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.
• For us, as prisoners, long ago we had passed the stage of asking what was the meaning of life, a naïve query which understands life as the attaining of some aim through the active creation of something of value. For us, the meaning of life embraced the wider cycles of life and death, of suffering and of dying.
• Once the meaning of suffering had been revealed to us, we refused to minimize or alleviate the camp’s tortures by ignoring them or harboring false illusions and entertaining artificial optimism. Suffering had become a task on which we did not want to turn our backs.
• The tender beginnings of psychotherapy or psychohygiene were often a kind of “life-saving procedure”, usually concerned with the prevention of suicides. I remember two cases of would-be suicide.
• Both used the typical argument – they had nothing more to expect from life. In both cases it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them: something in the future was expected of them.
• For one it was his child whom he adored and who was waiting for him in a foreign country. The other was a scientists who had written a series of books which still needed to be finished. His work could not be done by anyone else, any more than another person could ever take the place of the father in his child’s affections.
• 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. When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude.
• A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how.”
• The opportunities for collective psychotherapy were naturally limited in camp. The right example was more effective than words could ever be.
• I remember an incident when there was occasion for psychotherapeutic work on the inmates of a whole hut, due to an intensification of their receptiveness because of a certain external situation.
• A few days previously a semi-starved prisoner had broken into the potato store to steal a few pounds of potatoes. The camp authorities ordered that the guilty man be given up to them or the whole camp would starve for a day. Naturally the 2,500 men preferred to fast.
• On the evening of this day of fasting we lay in our earthen huts in a very low mood. But our senior block warden was a wise man. He improvised a little talk about all that was on our minds at that moment. He talked about the many comrades who had died in the last few days, either of sickness or of suicide.
• But he also mentioned what may have been the real reason for their deaths: giving up hope. He maintained that there should be some way of preventing possible future victims from reaching this extreme state. And it was to me that the warden pointed to give this advice.
• I began by mentioning the most trivial of comforts first. I said that even in this Europe in the sixth winter of the Second World War, our situation was not the most terrible we could think of.
• I said that each of us had to ask himself what irreplaceable losses he had suffered up to then. I speculated that for most of them these losses had really been few. Whoever was still alive had reason for hope.
• Health, family, happiness, professional abilities, fortune, position in society – all these were things that could be achieved again or restored. After all we still had all our bones intact.
• Whatever we had gone through could still be an asset to us in the future. I quoted from Nietzsche: “That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.”
• Then I spoke about the future. I said that to the impartial the future must seem hopeless. I agreed that each of us could guess for himself how small were his chances of survival.
• I told them that although there was still no typhus epidemic in the camp, I estimated my own chances at about one in twenty. But I also told them that, in spite of this, I had no intention of losing hope and giving up.
• One might be attached unexpectedly to a special group with exceptionally good working conditions  – for this was the kind of thing which constituted the “luck” of the prisoner.
• I did not only talk of the future and the veil which was drawn over it. I also mentioned the past; all its joys, and how its light shone even in the present darkness. I quoted a poet: “What you have experienced, no power on earth can take away from you.”
• Then I spoke of the many opportunities of giving life a meaning. Human life, under any circumstances, never ceases to have a meaning, and this infinite meaning of life includes suffering and dying, privation and death.
• They must not lose hope but should keep their courage in the certainty that the hopelessness of our struggle did not detract from its dignity and its meaning.
• Someone looks down on each of us in difficult hours – a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or a God – and he would not expect us to disappoint him. He would hope to find us suffering proudly – not miserably – knowing how to die.
• Finally I spoke of our sacrifice, which had meaning in every case. It was in the nature of this sacrifice that it should appear to be pointless in the normal world, the world of material success. But in reality our sacrifice did have a meaning.
• Those of us who had any religious faith could understand without difficulty. I told them of 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; his was a sacrifice of the deepest significance. He did not want to die for nothing. None of us wanted that.
• The purpose of my words was to find a full meaning in our life, then and there, in that hut and in that practically hopeless situation. I saw that my efforts had been successful.
• When the electric bulb flared up again, I saw the miserable figures of my friends limping towards me to thank me with tears in their eyes.