Frankl's 'Man's Search for Meaning' is More Relevant than Ever

Frankl, as a writer, proves his optimism continuously through Man’s Search for Meaning, his novel about Auschwitz’s psychological toll and the foundation of logotherapy (a form of therapy centered around finding meaning, combatting neurosis along the way).

Even entering such a precarious situation, he’s able to separate his own fear, anger, and attachment to the world he once knew to survive in perhaps the cruelest of Nazi Germany’s death camps. It’s a testament to his prowess not only as a doctor of psychiatry, but as a very resilient, logical, and self – regulated individual.

Quotes like “There was little point in committing suicide, since, for the average inmate, life expectation, calculating objectively and counting all likely chances, was very poor” display an unusually predominant prefrontal cortex, as Frankl rationalized his options in a situation completely broken, punishing, and seemingly everlasting.

Some parts of the novel encourage philosophical and almost religious thinking, even at the end of the book’s preface. Frankl alludes to Man’s Search for Meaning’s strange coincidences with a story – he had been granted an American visa just before the start of the Holocaust and arrived home, in Austria, to visit his parents.

A stone slab lay on the dining room table, and when asked where it came from, his father plainly said: when the National Socialists burned down the largest Viennese synagogue, a piece of marble from the written Ten Commandments fell with it.

Frankl asked his father what Commandment it was, and “Honour thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land” proved enough for Frankl to stay with his parents. The mix of ‘tragic optimism’ – as Frankl calls it – and crushing tragedies leave a reader in awe after the book is long closed.

Actual camp life is grueling, soul – crushing, and continually taxing on one’s body, mind, and spirit. Although some individuals reach internal peace and richness throughout the chaos, Frankl points out that those were the minority.

Perhaps the reason why the book wasn’t published anonymously (as originally intended) was so Frankl’s commentary could be traced back and understood within the context of his own upbringing and professional experience.

This commentary is the driving force behind why Man’s Search for Meaning works as both a rendition of the Holocaust’s horrors and the process by which someone can find catharsis from those horrors. The second half of the book, which discusses Frankl’s brainchild, logotherapy, is an invaluable piece of psychological literature.

Without the context of Auschwitz’s excruciating toil, though, it would lose “half its value” – Frankl exposes flaws in Freud’s early conviction that drive is based on pleasure, as camp life never adhered to this line of reasoning.

Instead, Frankl supports meaning as the main objective of a person’s life. Cruel suffering, even, is tolerable when one has meaning to suffer for. This leads to Frankl’s own reasoning for his survival throughout many near – death experiences; he owed his continuous revival of spirit to love for Tilly Grosser, his late wife whose image was forever etched in his brain.

Even what was thought to be a farewell message, said to another campmate, demonstrated this clearly.

"Listen, Otto, if I don't get back home to my wife, and if you should see her again, then tell her that I talked of her daily, hourly. You remember. Secondly, I have loved her more than anyone. Thirdly, the short time I have been married to her outweighs everything, even all we have gone through here."

Undying resolve to love is what carried Frankl through the depths of the human psyche and back again to give lectures on the psychology of an extermination camp. It was his own meaning, placed on what seemed to be a completely deprived, worthless, and destitute period of life, that broke him through the bog of hopelessness and despair so many others succumbed to.

In the end, Man’s Search for Meaning is a testament to Frankl’s spirit and extends that praise to every member of the living.

It’s a sense of purpose that separates the living and the non – living, and Frankl emphasizes finding it both within and without.

Too much importance is placed on one’s internal state, he says. Individuals need to find a cause greater than themselves, and happiness, success, and love will inevitably follow as effects of that greater cause.

Undoubtedly, Man’s Search for Meaning is a quintessential read that cuts through the drudgery and often misleading rhetoric of the self – help industry. It’s a classic account of spiritual richness, resilience, and even humor.

Every last edge of Frankl’s experience as a psychiatrist is reflected upon and used to the fullest extent, which reveals even more about his perpetual development of character.

"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!"