Man's Search for Meaning

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1946

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface

Part I

Part II

Postscript

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Themes

Meaning in Extreme Conditions

The author describes in detail the thoughts and feelings that allowed him to maintain his belief in his life’s meaning. He attributes his survival to his unshakeable belief in that meaning.

First, and most obvious, was Frankl’s love for his wife. They were separated, and she was quite possibly already dead, but Frankl kept alive the hope of seeing her again. Later, when this hope dimmed, he was boosted by a mental image of his beloved. She was still in his mind, and his love for her helped him.

Frankl also believed that a drive to achieve, to accomplish something and make a contribution, provides essential meaning in life. In his case, he had already developed an early version of his approach to psychotherapy and had drafted a book about his theory. When he arrived at Auschwitz, the manuscript was hidden underneath his clothes. When he and the other prisoners were stripped and their clothing taken away, he lost the pages. But motivated by the hope that his work would still be published somehow, he reconstructed parts of it on scraps of paper in the camps. This provided him with a sense of meaning: he, Victor Frankl, would achieve a breakthrough in understanding human psychology, and his theories would lead to innovations in therapy that would change people’s lives. All of this came true for Frankl after the war.

Finally, the author observed meaning in the dignity and courage with which his fellow prisoners faced suffering and death. He witnessed countless people die bravely. And he saw how the prisoners maintained their essential sense of self despite their captors’ efforts to dehumanize them.

Lacking Meaning in One’s Life

The primary theme of the whole book is reflected in the title, Man’s Search for Meaning. In the concentration camps, the author observed what happened to people under extreme circumstances. Most of the prisoners were held only temporarily before they were killed. Those spared the gas chambers worked as slave laborers.

Frankl witnessed his fellow prisoner workers endure beatings, starvation, sickness, and death. This led many of them to lose hope and sink into a despair that took away their will to live. These were the ones who lacked the essential meaning in their lives that would motivate and inspire them to survive.

It is easy for the reader to see why these prisoners would not want to go on. They had lost everything that Frankl considers vital to finding meaning in life: their family and friends were dead; there was no possibility of a productive and satisfying future in which they might pursue their dreams; and they were deprived of the basic dignity of a human being with a will and the capacity to make choices.

Frankl describes some of the signs that a prisoner had succumbed to the will-sapping despair of losing all meaning in his life. The prisoner would give up the daily struggle for survival, the quest for food and warmth and shelter. He would no longer care about preserving resources. For example, there was no point in saving a precious cigarette, which could be used as currency to buy a bowl of soup. The man in despair would simply smoke the cigarette for the few moments of pleasure it afforded. Very often the smoker would be dead by the next morning.

Faith

Frankl was Jewish and thus faith in God and belief in a spiritual reality beyond the material world was an important aspect of his true self. Frankl mentions his discovery of one page of the Jewish prayer Shema Yisrael in the pocket of a garment he was given. This helped inspire him to keep praying to and believing in God.

There was never a moment, at least none recorded in the author’s account, where he asked, “Why?” of his God. On the contrary, whenever he had an opportunity to pray or participate in a makeshift religious service he found the experience moving and inspiring. “The religious interest of the prisoners, as far and as soon as it developed, was the most sincere imaginable. The depth and rigor of religious belief often surprised and moved a new arrival. Most impressive in this connection were improvised prayers or services in the corner of a hut, or in the darkness of the locked cattle truck in which we were brought back from a distant work site, tired, hungry, and frozen in our ragged clothing” (34).

Human Decency

Frankl believes that human beings can be divided into two distinct categories: the decent and the indecent. For example, he argues that the guards in the camp might actually be decent people, while some of the prisoners would act even more brutally than the guards in order to earn the privileges of a trustee, or a Capo.

He writes, “From all we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only the two—the ‘race’ of the decent man and the ‘race’ of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people. In this sense, no group is of ‘pure race’—and therefore one occasionally found a decent fellow among the camp guards. Life in a concentration camp tore open the human soul and exposed its depths. Is it surprising that in these depths we again found only human qualities which n their very nature were a mixture of good and evil? The rift dividing good from evil . . . reaches into the lowest depths and becomes apparent even on the bottom of the abyss which is laid open by the concentration camp” (86-87).