#5 – Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl

When I was in high school I worked in the kitchen of a fast food restaurant. I was happier at that job than at any other job I’ve ever had. I worked with some of my best friends, and we had fun. It wasn’t a hugely demanding job, but it was more challenging than it looks. They weren’t the kind of challenges that I’d look for in a job today, but at the time they were enough. I was happy there, but not fulfilled. The job wasn’t what brought meaning to my life. Happiness, as Frankl correctly asserts, is not everything. It’s not even the most important thing. That’s not something we like to hear in this day and age, but I have no doubt that it’s true, and many of us need to hear it.

I’ve been putting off writing this for a long time. I finished reading Man’s Search for Meaning almost two months ago, but it’s presented me with problems like no other book has. How does one review a holocaust memoir? The simple fact is that one can’t. What could one possibly say about the content? I’m not Jewish, but my maternal grandmother was Romany. She survived the war, but I lost whole branches of my family to the camps. Some didn’t even make it that far, according to the stories that have been passed down; they were simply lined up against the wall and shot. To take a critical approach, even the incredibly lax approach I take on this site, to reading such a book would seem, well, almost taboo. The second half of the book is a basic primer on logotherapy, Frankl’s approach to psychotherapy. I don’t know much about psychology, and I know even less about psychotherapy, and although I don’t mind admitting that I’ve sought counseling with a psychologist in the past, I don’t know anything about what school of therapeutic treatment he subscribed to. I’ll do my best to represent Frankl’s thinking as best I understand it, but to really talk about this book and the impact reading it had on me, I’m going to have to talk about myself and my life more, a lot more, than I’m normally willing to do on this site. Ten years ago I read Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Tao Te Ching, and it’s the only other book to have affected my thinking as much as this one. I simply won’t be capable of taking myself out of the conversation. Don’t worry, I won’t name names.

So: happiness isn’t everything. Frankl’s ideas are more complicated than that, obviously, but for the modern reader I think that’s one of the most important things to take away from this book, if not the most important. In Frankl’s view, meaning is paramount and happiness is among its potential consequences. Frankl makes the point a number of times, but never as succinctly as this (although I would now expand his point to most of the industrialized world, and not just the United States):

To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to “be happy.” But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to “be happy.” Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation. (p. 138)

The problem is that of course too many of us are in pursuit of happiness rather than meaning. (Frankl never really gives us a proper definition for “meaning”, except to say that what constitutes “meaning” will necessarily be different for each of us.) The frantic pursuit of happiness is a self-centred approach—in itself not a terrible thing—and self-centredness can lead, when a patient has genuine neuroses, to the proverbial vicious cycle, and in turn more and more problems breaking that cycle. By focusing solely on ourselves we lose sight of the fact that the world doesn’t work that way. Our friends, families, partners, jobs, pets, all those things that can bring meaning to our lives, all come from outside of us. They are things the world gives to us. I think, and I feel confident that Frankl would agree, that making those things about us, about our wants and desires could potentially lead to approaching our lives in more and more mercenary ways, and that is a bad thing. How will ever be able find meaning or satisfaction in a thing if we always have one foot out the door and our eyes looking out for something that might be even a tiny bit better. Life is more than a numbers game, but that’s really all that a mercenary outlook allows for. Anyway: onward and upward.

Frankl probably isn’t read (at least by laypersons like myself) for these ideas, though. His greatest contribution seems to be his approach to dealing with suffering. He often quotes Nietzsche, writing “he who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” I can attest to this with my own statistically irrelevant anecdotal experiences. I’ll no doubt be over simplifying things, but let me do my best to explain in my own words how Frankl suggests approach suffering. Bad things happen, and sometimes they can’t be fixed. Death, disease, the betrayal of a loved one, any number of things can happen that can cause a person to suffer, and there’s nothing we can do about those things. We also can’t judge the amount of pain and suffering that those things can cause in others, since…

…man’s suffering is similar to the behavior of a gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore “suffering” is absolutely relative. (p. 44)

When these bad things happen, it’s okay for us to be upset, to feel pain and to be unhappy. We don’t have to feel ashamed of those things. But that’s not really a way to cope. If the situation can’t be changed, what then? We change ourselves, the way we look at the situation. We find meaning in our pain. It’s not a matter of merely “thinking positive” or anything so trite; there’s often a great deal of work involved, and it doesn’t necessarily end happily. Life is like that.

Let me give you an example from my own life: some time ago, I was fiercely in love with a young woman, and she with me. She had to leave town for several months for a job, and while she was away, I agreed to care for her pet. She wasn’t gone long when she met someone else (a doctor, naturally), and decided that she didn’t love me at all; fierce wasn’t even in it. There were still several months left in her job, and here I was with this pet, a sweet, gentle animal to be sure, but a constant reminder of the amazing thing that had just been taken from me. I had any number of options. Should I take care of the pet until she got back? Give it to the OSPCA (or somebody else)? Some folks even suggested that I kill it as retribution (an idea that I found beyond appalling). What I did was take care of the animal to the best of my ability until the young woman returned to reclaim it. I don’t mind telling you that doing so sucked a lot. Every time I looked at that animal it was like being dumped all over again, a particularly horrible experience, as I still loved the young woman. I didn’t realize until after she took the animal back that there was actually meaning to my suffering. While I was taking care of her pet, I could at least say the following things: that I was fulfilling my responsibility as the guardian of a living thing that probably could not survive on its own. That I was also in some small way doing a good thing for someone that I loved, making her life easier, whether she loved me or not. And finally, no matter what else, I was doing the right thing, and living up the responsibilities that I agreed to take on. I don’t tell this story to make her look like a bad person or to make me look like some kind of saint; she and I are both just regular people trying to make our way as best we can. But when she came back and took the animal away, the burden of seeing that creature every day, that reminder of what I’d lost, was lifted, but the pain got harder to bear. Why? Because the meaning behind my suffering had gone as well. I was no longer hurting because I was doing the right thing, or hurting while helping someone I loved, or whatever. I was just hurting because something in my life sucked. I had to re-orient myself to once again find meaning for what was happening in my life. Finding meaning in suffering won’t necessarily bring you happiness, but happiness isn’t the point; it’s a superficial thing, next to meaning. A man with a why can bear almost any how.

I’d have to re-write the book entirely to do it any justice, that much is plain from this ramshackle “review”. I suppose what I’m really aiming to do here is to document the impact reading it had on me. I’m not just skeptical of self-help books, I actually have a certain disdain for most of the genre. Neither am I much of a fan of old-school psychology. Recently there has been much discussion about book blurbs claiming “this book will change your life,” and how inaccurate and preposterous such claims are. This book won’t keep you warm at night, pay off your loans, buy you a car, make the girl in the office across the hall fall in love with you, or put food on your table. But there are some things, some moments, some experiences—like the first time I was kissed by that fierce young woman—that change everything. You raise your head and look around you, and though everything is the same as it was a second before, nothing will ever be the same again. Reading this book was just such an experience, though I don’t mind admitting that I was dragged through that experience kicking and screaming, determined not to be taken in by some guru, holocaust survivor or not. I would recommend the experience of reading this book to anyone, particularly to anyone in pain, even if they have to be dragged kicking and screaming to get there.

Next is The Last Kingdom, by Bernard Cornwell.

August

Writer. Editor. Critic.

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