Dr. Viktor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning explored the existential difficulty he and all human beings face during and after a life shattering experience such as what he and millions of other endured at the hands of the Nazis. Frankl’s written journey through the torture of the Nazi concentration camps tours the human mind, becoming a written map of the human experience. Dr. Frankl examines the different stages that people go through as they transition into a reality so different from their own, exploring how individuals cope with their new reality and how they react when facing a world so different from what they remember when that trauma is passed. By analyzing Viktor Frankl’s anecdotal account of the experience of the Nazi concentration camps, one is able to understand the context the provided his framework of existential understanding of the world.
Frankl’s exhaustive narrative of his experiences in Nazi concentration camps highlights many of the daily features of life as a prisoner of the Nazis. From his perspective, the reader learns what the thought process of a person in such dire straits is like and the nature of the thoughts that are given birth by tremendous suffering. Frankl describes an incident of a forced march in which he and other soldiers were made to cross many miles of frozen planes in the depths of winter. He describes how in this moment his mind was able to latch onto a notion of hope.
“Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.” (Frankl 55)
During this adversity, Dr. Frankl channeled the image of his wife whose fate was not known to him at that time. He pictured her and felt as though he was communicating with her. In actuality, Dr. Frankl communicated with himself, with the part of himself that he held most dear. This was his eternal and everlasting love for his wife. This was the unshakable and immovable part of his being which the Germans were unable to separate from him. This incident serves as the moment of revelation where Frankl identifies true meaning in life.
“The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know 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 sufferings 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.” (Frankl 56-57)
Frankl proceeds to follow this path logically. If love can be experienced by all people, and love is the center of meaning, then there is meaning for all people in their lives, just by virtue of their existence. The difficulty then is finding a direction for this meaning, a target at which to focus one’s life. This notion is explored in Frankl’s survey of how survivors of the holocaust faced the world after being liberated. After reclaiming their bodies, Frankl writes that survivors were challenged to reclaim their minds and emotions, facing a world where “feeling suddenly broke through the strange fetters which had restrained it” (111). In encountering a world that was suddenly different from what one remembered there was a realization that the suffering had not ended because homes that people dreamed of were gone and loved ones were dead.
Frankle notes that the reintroduction into the world is the most difficult challenge for survivors to face because it requires a person to confront finding a new direction for their life, a new target of meaning, a new object of love to which one can give and from which one can receive. Facing this reality, Frankl write, led on to “lack of feelingso disgusting that one finally felt like creeping into a hole and neither hearing nor seeing human beings any more" (113). Dr. Frankl points out that eventually this feeling passes as one begins to reclaim their life and direct the meaning of that life. He describes this concisely as the difference between “freedom” and “responsibleness” saying that freedom is not enough to give someone their life back but rather responsibleness is needed. Freedom alone allows a person to crawl into that whole and avoid humanity but responsibleness provides a context to one’s existence, a framework in which to operate, a target on which to focus.
In conclusion, Dr. Viktor Frankl’s work provides an outline for how he arrived at finding meaning in everyday life, even everyday life in the concentration camps, as well as an understanding of the components necessary for a person to focus that meaning. Frankl supposes that love is a right granted to each person and that love gives meaning to every moment of a person’s life. Given that one’s life has meaning, it has importance and a person has the ability to make important changes to the world as a result. For this to be accomplished according to Frankl, a person needs first freedom to do so, and responsibleness to pursue the goals of decent men.
. Frankl, Dr. Viktor E. Man’s Search For Meaning. Boston: Beacon Press, 1959.
