Resilience through Meaning

As a medical student Victor Frankl organised a free counselling service at high schools that paid special attention to students at the time when they received their report cards. In the years that he ran the program not a single Viennese student committed suicide, so Frankl’s interest in wellbeing was well established at an early age. He then went on to establish a Selbstm?rderpavillon, or “suicide pavilion”, where he treated more than 30,000 women who had suicidal tendencies.

The second world war put paid to Frankl’s work and in 1942 the Nazis sent him and his family to Theresienstadt Ghetto in the Czech Republic where his father died of pneumonia. On 19 October 1944, Frankl and his wife Tilly were transported to Auschwitz concentration camp, and from there Frankl was moved on to another camp, Kaufering, where he spent five months working as a slave labourer, before being moved to Türkheim, where he worked as a physician until the camp was liberated by American soldiers. Frankl’s mother Elsa and brother Walter died at Auschwitz and his wife Tilly was moved to Bergen-Belsen, where she also died.

Once Frankl had been liberated he returned to Vienna and developed his own approach to psychological healing, based on his idea that people are driven by a “striving to find meaning in one’s life,” and that it is this sense of meaning that enables people to overcome painful experiences. Frankl went on to write ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’, which was published in 1959. In this book, he described the life of an ordinary concentration camp inmate from the objective perspective of a psychiatrist.

Frankl’s assertion was that even in the most absurd, extreme, and dehumanising situation, life has potential meaning and that, therefore, even suffering is meaningful. He is quoted as saying, “What is to give light must endure burning.”

He wrote of a time when suffering hardship at the hands of the Nazis, he brought to mind his wife Tilly, ‘Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of Man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when Man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way, an honourable way, in such a position Man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfilment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, “The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.”

In 1946, Frankl returned to Vienna to run the Polyclinic of Neurology, which he ran until 1971.In 1948, Frankl gained a Ph.D. in philosophy and in 1955, he was awarded a professorship of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Vienna. He lectured and taught seminars all over the world and received twenty-nine honorary doctoral degrees as well as publishing thirty-nine books.

Frankl lived to the age of 92 and was survived by his second wife Eleonore, his daughter Dr. Gabriele Frankl-Vesely, his grandchildren Katharina and Alexander, and his great-granddaughter Anna Viktoria.

Few of us can have any understanding of the trauma that was inflicted on Frankl and his family during the war, and we have to be thankful that that is the case. What they experienced is beyond our comprehension, living in the relative safety, comfort and prosperity that we enjoy in the western world.

We will all suffer loss in our lives; we will all experience difficult times; we will all have times when we struggle to understand what it's all about. That is one of the difficult aspects of the human condition and, whilst we're in the middle of potentially traumatic life events, it can all seem meaningless.

The fact that Frankl was able to find meaning both in and beyond his suffering offers us some hope that if we have meaning, or purpose in our own lives that this will contribute towards our resilience when faced with adversity in whatever shape it comes.

If you'd like to connect to your own sense of meaning and purpose as you face your own struggles, get in touch and let's start a conversation. tom@tomdilloncoaching.co.uk