TM

Man's Search for Meaning

Rating

8/10

Frankl divides the prisoner’s mental states into three distinct phases: camp admission (disbelief and incomprehension), camp routine (apathy), and liberation (guilt, confusion and apprehension). I cannot help but see the parallels to other life’s unfortunate events like for example my own cancer diagnosis or any other illness or accident. I would venture to say that this is the reason for why the book became so popular. It resonated with people, they found parallels for their own life, and hopefully, applied Frankl’s own strategy for dealing with their misfortunes - by extracting meaning from the way they handle the situation, instead of giving into despair.

Precisely for this I enjoyed the book. Although, of course, nearly no personal suffering is as big as that of being a prisoner in a concentration camp, Franco offers a philosophy for extracting meaning from any degree of personal misfortune. Be it big or small, what counts is your attitude. If you can own your feelings and own your reactions, you can survive anything with dignity and a sense of ownership; even if you didn’t choose to be in the situation at all. On top of this sense of meaning, life’s meaning can be found in two other ways; by doing fulfilling work and by experiencing love, be it for another person or for an activity. These three ways to extract meaning give man a plenty of opportunity to find his or hers north star no matter what the circumstances are. The key thing to remember is that in Franco’s theory, the meaning for one’s life constantly changes and fluctuates between its three sources.

Synopsis

A personal story of a psychotherapist who survived a concentration camp and developed a theory of meaning based on his experience.

Notes

  • “… I do not at all see in the bestseller status of my book so much an achievement and accomplishment on my part as an expression of the misery of our time: if hundreds of thousands of people reach out for a book whose very title promises to deal with the question of a meaning of life, it must be a question that burns under their fingernails.” (p.15)
    • The reflection of “our” times, written in 1984…
    • But maybe it’s not at all like that. Maybe people have been searching for “the meaning” all along - which is most likely the case. And so the bestseller status of this book just shows that people are still not happy with the answers they have been given in the past, and the ideas in this book bring something fresh, something that many can relate to.
  • “Thus the illusions some of us still held were destroyed one by one, and then, quite unexpectedly, most of us were overcome by a grim sense of humor.” (p. 34)
  • “The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living. Yet it is possible to practice the art of living even in a concentration camp, although suffering is omnipresent.” (p. 64)
    • This is exactly how I and my family dealt with my cancer diagnosis. Once the dust settled and it was clear I have cancer, we simply joked about it. We tried to laugh, we took funny videos, we took funny pictures. Of course not all the time, but there was this weird latent tendency to ease the weight of the situation by cracking an inappropriate joke whenever possible.
  • “Apart from that strange kind of humor, another sensation seized us: curiosity.” (p. 35)
    • Human mind is both beautiful and borderline psychotic :) But again, I relate here. When I figured out I have cancer, I tried to lighten the situation with a joke - maybe not immediately, but eventually, after a few days have passed. And then, I was curious, I was curious about all the what ifs. What if I die, how will it be? What if I survive, how will my life change then? What if I never walk again? What if…
  • “An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is a normal behavior.” (p. 38)
  • “If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. (p. 64)”
  • “Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his suffering or not.” (p. 88)
  • “When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. […] His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.” (p. 99)
    • it’s not about what happens to us, it’s about how we approach the things that happen. We always have the opportunity to control our reaction and thus shape our perception of the situation.
  • “It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future - sub specie aeterninatis. (p. 94)”
    • hence why provisional existence, like that of a concentration camp or an uncertain medical diagnosis, is hard to live through. The future is uncertain, so the man has trouble living the present.
  • “What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. (p. 127)”
    • emphasis on the freely chosen task
  • “The existential vacuum is a widespread phenomenon of the twentieth century… it may be due to a twofold loss which man has had to undergo since he became truly human being. At the beginning of human history, man lost some of the basic animal instincts in which an animal’s behavior is imbedded and by which it is secured. Such security, like Paradise, is closed to man forever; man has to make choices. In addition to this, however, man has suffered another loss in his more recent development inasmuch as the traditions which buttressed his behavior are now rapidly diminishing. No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism).” (p. 128)
  • “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.” (p. 133)
    • there are three types of meaning and one’s meaning changes within and between these types all the time. The two mentioned here are meaning due to something that someone does, like a job, and the other is due to love, the true kind of unconditional love for a child or your partner or even an experience. The last one is the meaning derived from one’s attitude to unavoidable suffering.
  • “Today’s society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness.” (p. 176)
    • I am guilty of this, especially with my grandparents, who at times, seem really past their prime. But that’s actually fine. They are valued for raising my parents and then helping raise me, my brother, and my cousins; and for everything else they’ve done in their lives and extracted meaning from.