The Therapist as Philosopher: Viktor Frankl and the Meaning of Man’s Life

My first exposure to Viktor Emil Frankl was by way of his 1959 classic Man’s Search for Meaning, as I suspect has been the case with most non-German speaking readers. That book and its author enjoy a veritable cult status in many countries, most notably in the US, but, even skeptics freely admit that it’s one of the most important books to have come out of the Holocaust. Frankl, a Viennese Jew, spent nearly three years in several Nazi concentration camps, and lost both his parents, his brother and his wife  variously to starvation, disease and the gas chamber at Auschwitz and other camps.

And yet Frankl, who survived the camps, returned after the war to a long and astonishingly productive life as a prominent neuro-scientist and psychotherapist, university teacher, acclaimed motivational speaker and writer on mental hygiene issues, and an indefatigable champion of logotherapy, the discipline of holistic psychotherapy founded and developed by himself which diverged significantly in approach and focus from the Freudian and Adlerian schools of psychotherapy.

A prolific writer, Frankl published as many as 39 books, with Man’s Search for Meaning, by far the best known among them, having sold over 16 million copies. Embracing Hope: On Freedom, Responsibility & the Meaning of Life, only recently translated into English, is made up of four parts: a 1955 article published in a medical journail on the “collective neuroses” Frankl believed humankind had lapsed into post World War II; the transcript of a 1977 television interview examining how, to find meaning in life, one needed to look outside of oneself and engage with the lives of others; and two lectures, given in 1946 and 1984, exploring the close linkages between freedom and personal responsibility. Viktor Frankl died in Vienna in 1997, aged 92. 

Derived from the Greek word logos (commonly standing for ‘word’ or ‘message’), logotherapy foregrounds the art and science of ‘healing through meaning’. It is premised on the belief that finding meaning in life is a primary motivational force for humans. From that standpoint, logotherapy aims to help individuals discover and pursue the sense of meaning or purpose that uniquely animates the core of every individual’s psyche. Frankl believed that while Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalysis located man’s central motivating force in the ‘will to pleasure’ and Alfred Adler’s Individual Psychology cited ‘will to power’ as man’s motivational core, a truly holistic therapy needed to recognise that every individual was uniquely and irreplaceably endowed with a ‘will to meaning’. Anchored in that recognition, logotherapy then proceeds to unveil for an individual the meaning of their life and equip them with the awareness that they had both the freedom of choice and the personal responsibility to realise that meaning. In Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl had told readers how he thought the ‘will to meaning’. If resolutely preserved, could help individuals to not only survive with dignity but actually triumph over even the most degrading, dehumanising condition human beings could conceivably find themselves in – life as prisoner in a Nazi death camp.  Embracing Hope enlarges on essentially the same theme across its four sections, though the concentration camp admittedly does not loom so large here as in Frankl’s magnum opus. It also dwells in greater length on how an individual’s freedom of choice ties in with their personal responsibility, an idea no doubt present in Frankl’s earlier work also, but more as a corollary to the main thesis than as one of the keynotes, as it is posited here.

Appropriately titled Embracing Hope, the new collection endeavours to light for the disoriented, dispirited and diseased post-War generation a possible way to finding life’s meaning. The first section, captioned The Crisis of Meaning and the Zeitgeist, lays bare the pathology of the condition, identified by Frankl as Collective Neuroses. Symptoms of the neuroses are enumerated as (1) a provisional attitude to life (induced by an acute sense of precarity), (2) a fatalistic attitude to life (engendered by hopelessness), (3) collectivist (as opposed to individuated) thinking, and (4) fanaticism. Segment two, headlined Ways of Finding Meaning, surveys the possible remedies, broadly categorised as creative (through work or by accomplishing a task), experiential ( by way of love, appreciation or gratitude), and attitudinal (via the acknowledgement that some things are irremediable, and so must not only be lived with but, if possible, assimilated into our moral consciousness and, in that sense, triumphed over). Here, among other things, Frankl talks about “the most human among all human capacities, which is to turn a tragedy into a personal triumph, to turn your predicament into an achievement on the human level”.

Also read: Descendants of Holocaust Survivors Are Replicating Auschwitz Tattoos on Their Own Bodies

Books 3 and 4, dedicated respectively to Freedom and Responsibility, and Meaning and Responsibility in the Face of Transience, delve into some of the fundamental postulates of the philosophy of Existentialism, namely that it is death that gives meaning to the act of living, and that personal freedom, individual responsibility, and deliberate choice are essential to the pursuit of life’s meaning. (Frankl, though, clearly is not on the same page when existentailism insists that there is no God or that the universe is a whirl of irrationality and absurdity. He was essentially religious – in fact, in his later years, a practising Jew.)

Everything that such a person as Viktor Frankl says deserves our attention. After all, his own life is a tribute to humankind’s capacity for resilience, hope and courage, and nearly everything he has written is shot through with the conviction that that capacity is not only  universal, it is also inextirpable – no matter the odds. But, in itself no doubt noble, such thinking can yet come across as rather too big a leap of faith when the context is one of pure evil. Thus, while it is possible to respond with unmixed enthusiasm to 

“Everything  can be taken from a man but (for) one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way,”

that enthusiasm is likely to be tempered with caution as Frankl goes on to assert that

“Man is that being who has invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who has entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips. 

In fact, one cannot help feeling somewhat troubled on reading this. Can one, however doughty or intrepid, yet reconcile to the idea of walking into a gas chamber with a smile on their face, one wonders. Or is it possible to agree with Frankl when he suggests that, all other things being equal, the attitude one took and the meaning of life one found could make the difference between death and survival in Auschwitz, as though survival in a death camp was anything other than a roll of the dice? Affirmations of this kind are but a short step from familiar tropes of quasi-religious literature. In the backdrop of the hell-hole of a Nazi deathcamp, they are bound to sound a tad wishy-washy – even if it turned out that they were true in a few cases.

Now, these quotes are of course from Man’s Search for Meaning, but Embracing Hope also contains an assortment of assessments which are curiously counter-intuitive, sometimes even a little puzzling. For example, the observation that 

“(V)irtually all neurotic symptomalogy disappeared in Auschwitz. And the degree to which suicide took place, in Auschwitz and Dachau, was astonishingly low…”

more so because this observation is juxtaposed with another which states that, by contrast, “in the welfare state of Austria”, the questions that most troubled most school-going fourteen- or fifteen-year olds revolved around ‘suicide’. Anecdotally, again, Frankl mentions:

“I always get from American prisons letters to the effect: “Only here in prison, a few hundred yards from the electric chair, I have found, at last, meaning in my life, only here!””

In another context, Frankl recalls his experience from the 1930s (presumably as the Great Depression played out) of dealing with unemployed youngsters struggling with conditions of severe depression:

“(T)he moment I had these youngsters turn to some organizations – such as Father Tom’s Youth Corps and so forth [in order to work as volunteers, for example] – they had a meaning to fulfil, even without earning a cent, and the depression was gone!”

In much the same vein, Frankl notes how, contrary to common sense once again,

“(e)nvironmental factors – such as material deprivation, the lack of the most basic necessities, loss of livelihood, the misery of being a refugee, or being uprooted – do not have a significant measurable impact on the occurrence of neuroses.”

Some of these assessments may well have evolved out of empirical observations, but their preponderance in Frankl’s thesis nevertheless points to a certain predilection for something bordering on messianism. It looks as though what is at play here is what some historians now recognise as a mythical quality that human memory often acquires: unknown to us, memory foregrounds some facts to the exclusion of some others. What drives this is an unconscious process of the hierarchizing of memories in alignment with one’s sense of right and wrong, or of good and evil. Timothy Pytell, well-known historian and Frankl’s biographer, suggests that this is how Viktor Frankl’s memory of life in the concentration camp may have been reordered.

Recent research has also established that, by an extraordinary stroke of luck, Viktor Frankl was actually at Auschwitz for no more than three or four days – that, too, not in the camp proper but in the hold area for prisoners – and that he was soon sent out to Theresienstadt, and later to Turkheim – both part of the concentration camp system alright, but both essentially labour camps, unlike Auschwitz, which was an out-and-out death camp and consumed in its hideous gas chambers and its macabre crematoria no fewer than 1.3 million lives. This no doubt happened because, as a a young, able-bodied medical doctor, Frankl must have been deemed useful by the Holocaust bureaucracy. (Nearly all of Frankl’s writing, however, most notably Man’s Search for Meaning but also Embracing Hope), refers almost exclusively to Auschwitz as the place where he happened to have been exposed to the Nazi concentration camp network.) It is possible that Frankl survived the war and the camps with fewer scars on his body and his mind thanks to this piece of good fortune. And in turn this may have made it possible for him to look back on his experiences with somewhat greater equanimity than it fell to the lot of those less lucky.

Another theme that Frankl returns to in section 3 here is that of collective guilt or collective responsibility in the specific context of Nazism. And here as elsewhere he seems to suggest that there is no such thing as collective responsibility. Or that, if such a thing does exist, it is broad enough to take in the whole of humankind. The manner in which Frankl presents his case on this merits particular attention.

“Evil is everywhere!…Of course, evil will not become a reality in every individual, but evil is present in everyone, at least as a possibility. And evil was not just a possibility in everyone in the past, but it is and remains a possibility in everyone (today). Just let us not believe this: that the devil took up residence in a nation or that he monopolised a particular party. Those that think that National Socialism created evil in the first place are also mistaken. That would be overestimating the powers of National Socialism because it was not creative or inventive, not even when it comes to evil. National Socialism did not create evil, it just encouraged it – perhaps like no other system before it.” (Emphasis added.)

If these thoughts were to be only slightly reworded, couldn’t they well have helped  build a case for Holocaust denial? They could, and this is not the first time that Frankl seemed to have come this close to making light of one of the most monstrous crime machines in history, as some commentators have atttested. And, when, from this standpoint, Frankl urges reconciliation – if not forgiveness – it is hard not to see that as his ambivalence towards the Nazi project. Or worse, for didn’t Frankl make his peace with post-War Austria which still had in place pretty much the entire pre-War elite – complicit in large measure with Nazi war crimes in that country? It’s also a fact that Frankl, in the 1990s, developed close ties with the radical right-wing head of the FPO Party, Jorg Haider. Also with Kurt Waldheim, even after Waldheim’s disgusting 1940s record as a middle-level Wehrmacht officer associated with – if not directly responsible for – large-scale civilian killings (a record Waldheim had successfully suppressed for many years) had come to light. It is indeed widely believed that Frankl lent his professional prestige and his standing as a well-known camp survivor to help rehabilitate the disgraced Waldheim’s image. These disquieting facts point to the possibility that while Frankl was surely not a collaborator with Nazism in Austria, he may not have been wholly averse to accomodating Nazi practice in some ways. In his case the motivation did not come from his sympathies for the Nazi cause – he clearly didn’t have  such sympathies – but perhaps from a deeply-felt urge to be at peace with the world around him.

A careful reading of Embracing Hope leaves one with this somewhat disagreeable thought.

Anjan Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com.