Jottings - Slice of life - 286 (“Man’s search for meaning” by Dr. Viktor Frankl)

Jottings - Slice of life - 286 (“Man’s search for meaning” by Dr. Viktor Frankl)

Last week, on my way back to Atlanta, a young man rushed into the flight, almost at the close of boarding gates, to occupy the seat next to me in the business class cabin. He looked flushed. In one hand, he was holding a thin book, and in the other, he was balancing a carry-on bag and a jacket. He quickly dropped his bag and jacket underneath the seat, sat down gasping for breath, turned to give me a quick nod, and opened the book in a hurry ( almost as if the boarding the flight was a distraction he could have done without) and continued reading. He didn’t give himself even a few minutes to settle down, adjust the air vent, or drink some water. It was obvious that the book he was possessively holding in his hands was irresistible, and he couldn’t wait to read the remaining pages.

It was then that I glanced at the title, and knew exactly what was going on. There are few books that can change the course of one's life if it happens to find you at the right juncture. And such books cannot be found; they find you. That is why deep thinkers, avid readers, and bibliophiles collect books by the dozen without thinking of when they shall be read. They know, someday, one of those books will speak to them in a voice that will answer a nagging question, an emotional conundrum, an existential enigma, or sometimes simply transform one's world view. The young man beside me was holding in his hand was one such slim volume - Viktor Frankl’s “ Man’s search for meaning”.

The role of Victor Frankl in the understanding of the Human mind, and in the field of psychotherapy is immense. I am not going to elaborate on it in this essay. But this little book “Man’s search for meaning” written in 1946, just after the war, describing Dr. Frankl’s experiences in the Nazi concentration camps for six winters between 1941 and 1946, remains one of the most moving accounts of survival, faith, hope, meaning and restitution during that tragic period in human history. The original title of the book published in German was “Say 'Yes' to Life: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp”. In its English translation, the title was changed to “Man’s search for meaning”. The concentration camps were not prisons, they were temporary holding places for mass murder. What happened to millions of people in those camps was not just physical torture, but complete annihilation of spirit, of dignity, respect, and identity. Those five years of horror proved that Man’s pride in progress — both industrial and social - were mere myths, and beneath the veneer of rationality, there ran strong, virulent currents of bestiality and perversion waiting to overrun the flimsy structure of progress we were so proud of. The Holocaust was a turning point in civilization and a humbling experience too. We have not yet completely recovered from the shock of what happened within those gas chambers and filthy barracks. That is the reason whenever we observe symptoms of a totalitarian regime beginning to take shape, we become nervous and paranoid. Memories of the Holocaust come back, and our psyches cringe in shame and fear.

Dr. Frankl was a famous doctor even before the Nazi’s decided to purge the Jews. He was a jew in Austria, and by the end of 1930 established a third school of psychology alongside Freud’s and Jung’s. He called it Logotherapy - or the ability to find meaning in human lives, not as an abstract ideal, but something concrete and personal to the human being concerned. When the threat of an imminent Nazi purge was becoming a reality in 1941, thousands fled Germany by any means available. The American consulate formally offered Dr. Frankl a visa to the US, assuring immunity and professional freedom. But Dr. Frankl refused. He refused the offer because he couldn’t leave his aged parents behind and seek liberty for himself. In his preface to the book in 1991, Dr. Frankl describes how he was toying with the idea of leaving Austria or not and how a “a hint from heaven”, as he calls it, came from a piece of marble that lay casually on the dining table at home. That piece was from a synagogue that the Nazi’s had torn down. His father had recovered it from the debris because it contained a portion of one of the ten commandments “ Honor thy Father and Mother that thy days be long upon the land”. When Victor read that fragment, his mind was made up. He remained in Austria, knowing fully well what was in store for him.

When Dr. Frankl was taken a prisoner, and sent from one concentration camp to another, he was able to witness his own ideas and beliefs tested, challenged and forged in new ways. His principal question was this: what happens to a man when he is stripped away of everything he possessed — education, dignity, family, wealth, self-respect and importantly with no hope at all for the future? What does a man do in such a case? Is there anything at all that can give his life meaning and will to survive. Dr. Frankl asked and thought about these questions in the midst of the humiliating lives the prisoners were leading. Anytime, Dr. Frankl himself could have been gassed. There was no certainty about anything. Lives were held together by the thinnest of threads. The only unassailable part of living was the inner sense of worth and meaning each one possessed. The social context of the individual before they were deported to the concentration camps had no value whatsoever. The Nazis had stripped it away to the last shred, so what remained was only their own inner core, which none could touch. Many prisoners, Frankl noticed, died quickly not because of ill health, but because they simply lost the will and meaning to life. The victims would one day refuse to get up from their soiled beds, or eat, talk or co-operate — the complete depersonalization of a man. When an inmate reached this state, they would die within a week, simply wither away like an unwatered plant.

Dr. Frankl observed that many who survived the camps did so mostly by finding something to live for. In other words, finding a meaning that is very personal and can only be applicable to the individual. Dr. Frankl was working on a book when he was taken to the concentration camps. During the five years there, He found meaning in the thought that someday he would return and complete his work. Whenever he found some breathing space in the crowded camps, he jotted down his thoughts on scraps of soiled paper, which he later used to complete the book. He remembered his wife often. Thoughts of reuniting with her, and resuming the intimacy they shared kept him buoyant. Imagination is a great tool if used positively. This sense of re-directing the complete hopelessness of a situation into an inner channel filled with personal meaning summons the necessary energy to keep the body pulsating, and the Self to hold itself together. In the book, Dr, Frankl often quotes Frederick Nietzsche’s insightful comment “He who has a why to live for, can bear almost any how”. The important thing is to figure out the “why"-the meaning in one's existence - and the means to achieve the “why” will unfailingly appear. No meaning is trivial as long as we have and believe in one.

Some detractors did critique Dr. Frankl’s work that he accepted suffering the Germans so inhumanely inflicted, and advocated a philosophy of fatalism. That is a wrong reading of the book, and far from what Dr. Frankl meant. He strongly points that conditions leading to atrocities and suffering of any kind should be stopped; but when that becomes impossible, and people are thrown into a choiceness predicament such as the Jews found themselves in, then the only way to keep hope alive is to find an inner meaning. Otherwise, all hope is lost. That is a profound message. It needs to be pondered over.

Midway during my flight, my neighbor put the book down and pressed his eyes. It was a little moist and tired. I asked him” Do you like the book you are reading?”

He looked at me for a moment, as if I had asked the wrong question, and then answered:

“This book has opened my eyes. I bought this yesterday after work, and since then I haven’t been able to keep myself away from it. I almost missed the boarding announcement. For a long time, I have wondered how anyone could have survived the Holocaust, and if they did - How? Dr. Frankl’s little memoir has given answers, and a possible opening to change my way of life. From now on, this book will be the gift I will share with people close to me..”

I understood his answer. I felt the same way when I read it for the first time nearly a decade ago.

God bless…

yours in mortality,

Bala