Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor E. Frankl

Preface:

• Friedrich Nietzsche: “He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How”.
• Frankl’s doctrine of logotherapy involves curing the soul by leading it to find meaning in life. 
• Frankl tells his students, “Don’t aim at success - the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself”. Validated by the fact that this book, which was meant to be anonymous, became a success without trying to be. 

Part 1: Experiences in a Concentration Camp

• In psychiatry, there’s something called the delusion of reprieve where a man facing execution gets the illusion that he will be reprieved at the last minute.
• An abnormal reaction (e.g. smiling in the face of adversity) to an abnormal situation is normal behavior. In the face of regular hardship and suffering, this evolves to emotional apathy, which becomes a defence mechanism.
• Man always has choice of action - everything can be taken from a person except his/her ability to choose his/her attitude in a given set of circumstances. Suffer well, to be worthy of your sufferings - this spiritual freedom cannot be taken away.
• We know there is meaning in an active life of creativity and a passive life of enjoyment, but Frankl shows that there is also meaning in suffering (your attitude to your existence gives you the chance of achieving something through your own suffering).  
• Prisoners and unemployed people experience a deformed state of time known as “inner time” because they cannot see the end of their “provisional existence”. Small time periods appear endless whereas large time units pass by quickly. Everything became pointless despite having opportunities to make something positive of camp life (people preferred to close their eyes and live in the past).
• Give man inner strength by pointing to a future goal to which he could look forward - this is because man can peculiarly only live by looking to the future (sub specie aeternitatis). Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it. To rise above his sufferings, Frankl envisioned himself lecturing on the psychology of the concentration camp. 
• Man has the greatest courage - the courage to suffer.
• People need help even after being released from suffering. Liberated prisoners experience “depersonalisation”, where freedom seems unreal and they have to relearn feeling pleased. This sudden release of mental tension especially affects people of a more primitive kind - they become the oppressors instead of the oppressed, not understanding that nobody has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them. Bitterness and disillusionment (e.g. from finding that the reason for their willingness to suffer did not exist anymore) also threaten to destroy the liberated prisoner’s character.

Part 2: Logotherapy in a nutshell

• Search for meaning may arouse inner tension rather than equilibrium. Frankl argues that man doesn’t need a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. Increase the load on a person in order to reorient them. 
• Man’s will to meaning can be frustrated by “existential frustration” arising from existential problems (the person instead becomes a conformist, doing what other people do, or totalitarian, doing what others wish them to do). Possible reasons include:

1. difficulty complying with the policies demanded by one’s vocation, 
2. the “existential vacuum” created by boredom (note “Sunday neurosis” which afflicts people who become aware of the lack of content in their lives when the rush of the busy week is over and the void within them becomes manifest)
3. will to meaning vicariously compensated by will to power (i.e. will to money) or will to pleasure.

• What is the meaning of life? The meaning of life differs from man to man, day to day and hour to hour. There is specific meaning to a person’s life in a given moment. Since a man can only answer to life by answering for his own life, he can only respond by being responsible - logotherapy sees in responsibleness the very essence of human existence. Use responsibleness to realise the essential transitory possibilities of man - man must decide which potentialities he will fulfil and which will be condemned to non-being. Another example is that Frankl told prisoners, “you are also human beings and are free to commit crime and become guilty but must now be responsible for overcoming that guilt by rising above it, by growing beyond yourselves and changing for the better”.
• “Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now.” - invites man to first imagine that the present is the past and that the past may yet be changed and amended. No value judgment imposed.
• The more one forgets himself - by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love - the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. Hence self-actualisation is not an attainable aim at all - it’s only possible as a side effect of self-transcendence. We can discover this meaning in 3 ways:

1. creating a work or doing a deed;
2. experiencing something (e.g. goodness, truth, nature, culture), or encountering someone (e.g. by loving another human being, you see potential in him/her which is not actualized but yet ought to be actualised) - note the emphasis that the internal world of experience can be being as valuable as the external world of achievement; 
3. by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering (e.g. incurable disease). Frankl changed the attitude of a doctor depressed by the passing of his wife by helping him see that he spared his wife the suffering of mourning his loss by surviving longer to mourn her. Man is hence even ready to suffer, on the condition that his suffering has meaning. But note that if suffering is avoidable. The meaningful thing is to remove its cause because unnecessary suffering is masochistic rather than heroic.

• Logodrama: A mother who became suicidal upon the death of her crippled son whom she raised, was helped out of the situation with a “logodrama” where she was made to dramatically envision herself on a deathbed at 80 years old, having great wealth but no children of her own. Doing this, she find more meaning in being part of the short life of her dead boy.
• Logotherapy is activistic rather than pessimistic - such a person will not envy the young person but instead be proud of the reality of his sufferings, though sufferings are things which cannot inspire envy.
• Anticipatory anxiety is a fear that produces precisely that which the person fears (e.g. fear of blushing in front of a crowd causes you to blush) - your wish fathers the thought and your fear mothers the event. Conversely, forced intention makes impossible what one forcibly wishes. 
• To overcome hyper-intention or hyper-reflection, dereflect the person to refocus on the proper object (e.g. specific person, vocation or mission in life). 
• To overcome anticipatory anxiety, replace the fear with a paradoxical intent - ask a man with anticipatory anxiety that precipitates sweating to deliberately show people how much he could sweat. This works for many conditions including sleeplessness and OCD because of the self-detachment inherent in a sense of humour (ridiculing yourself cuts the vicious cycle of reinforcing the symptoms).
• Man is self-determining and every man has the freedom to change at any instant. But freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. 

Man has potentialities of being a swine or a saint and which one gets actualised depends on decisions, not on conditions. Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.