Sometimes in life we struggled to understand events that caused upheavals in our lives. Sudden deaths/chronic illnesses in the family, disappointment in exam results, unexpected loss of job/income, negative doctor's report and so on. If you're the religious type, you'll question why God allow bad things to happen to good people like yourself. We need to find a reason to justify our sufferings, and the truth is, more often than not, we won't find any. Do you deserve it? Well, maybe. Do you need it? Absolutely.
Man's Search for Meaning (was written in 9 successive days and first published anonymously in 1959; now has more than 12million copies in print) has riveted generations of readers and contain ideas that have the power to change a person's life, with its vivid descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its poignant lessons for spiritual survival.
This book insists that life is meaningful and has a purpose and we must learn to see life as meaningful despite our circumstances and hardship.
Between 1942 - 1945, Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl labored in 4 different camps including Auschwitz, while his parents, brother and pregnant wife perished. Based on his personal experience and stories of many of his patients and fellow comrades, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose.
Frankl's theory - logotherapy, from the Greek word logos ("meaning") holds that our primary drive in life is not pleasure, as Sigmund Freud proposed, or a quest for power as Alfred Adler taught, but the discovery and pursuit of what we personally find meaningful.
"What man actually needs," Frankl wrote,"is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task... the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him."
In his book, Frankl poignantly described those prisoners who gave up on life, who had lost all hope for a future, were inevitably the first to die. They died less from the lack of food or medicine than from lack of hope, lack of something to live for. By contrast, Frankl kept himself alive by summoning up constant thoughts of his wife and the prospect of seeing her again and by dreaming of giving public lectures after the war about psychological lessons from the Auschwitz experience. Appearently, many prisoners who desperately wanted to live did die from diseases, gas chambers, mass grave executions etc. But Frankl's concern is less with the question of why most died than it is with the question of why anyone at all survived.
The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his/her life. Frankl saw 3 possible sources for meaning:
1) in Work or Deed - doing something significant
2) in Love - experiencing something or encountering someone in his/her very own uniqueness
3) in Courage during hardship and pain
His most enduring insight: forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except for one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you feel and do about what happens to you. As observed by Frankl during the years he was imprisoned at the concentration camps, Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even under extreme, inhuman conditions of psychic and physical stress.
A scenario from Arthur Miller's Incident at Vichy in which a professional man appeared before an Nazi soldier and showed him his credentials: university degrees, lettters of reference and so on. Then the Nazi asked him,"Is that everything you have?" The man nodded. The Nazi threw it all in the wastebasket and retorted,"Good. Now you've nothing." The man, whose self-esteem had always depended on the respect of others, is emotionally destroyed. Frankl argued that we're never left with nothing as long as we retain the freedom to choose how we will respond. The truth of Frankl's insights can be witnessed in our society today. Successful, wealthy businessmen who upon retirement, lost all zest for life. Their work had given their lives meaning. Often it was the only thing that had given their lives meaning and without it, they spent day after day sitting at home, depressed "with nothing to do".
Pursuit of Success
Frankl said,"Don't aim at success - the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you're going to miss it. For success, like happiness cannot be pursued; it must follow, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect. In other words, as a by-product and not the end of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself. Happiness must happen, same goes for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run - in the long-run I say! - success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it."
Choices
There were always choices to be made. Every single day, every hour offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner values which determined whether or not you would become a plaything of circumstances, renouncing freedom and dignity.
In concentration camps, even though conditions such as lack of sleep, tiredness, insufficient food and various mental stresses may suggest that the inamtes are bound to react in certain ways, it becomes clear and conclusive that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences. Fundamentally, any man, even under such terrible circumstances, can decide what shall become of him -mentally and spiritually.
Provisional Existence
Life at a concentration camp could be termed "provisional existence of unknown limit". Prisoners testified that the most depressing influence of all was that one could not know how long his term of imprisonment would be. The Latin word finis has 2 meanings: the end or the finish and a goal to reach. A man who could not see the end of his "provisional existence" was not able to aim an an ultimate goal in life. So he ceased living for the future, in contrast to a man leading a normal life. Thus the whole structure of his inner life changes; signs of decay set in. Similarly an unemployed worker finds himself in the same predicament. His existence become provisional and in a certain sense he cannot live for the future or aim at a goal. Research done on unemployed miners discovered that they suffer from a peculiar sort of deformed time - inner time - which resulted from their unemployed status. Prisoners too, suffer from this strange "time-experience". A day filled with hourly tortures and labour, appeared endless while a larger time unit - a week seemed to pass very quickly. Seems paradoxical in their "time-experience".
A man who allow himself to decline because he could not see ant future goal occupy himself with retrospective thoughts. His "provisonal existence" caused him to lose his hold on life; everything in a way became pointless. Such people forgot that often it is just such an opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself. Instead of taking the camp's hardship as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their lives seriously and despised it as something of no consequence. They preferred to close their eyes and live in the past. The prisoner who had lost faith in the future - his future - was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay. He simply gave up and nothing bothered him anymore. Life for such people has indeed become meaningless.
Most men at concentration camps believed that the real opportunities of life had passed. Yet in reality, there was an opportunity and a challenge. One could make victory of those experiences, turning life into a personal triumph, or one could simply ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did a majority of the prisoners. Frankl forced his thoughts when the suffering became overbearing, to seeing himself lecturing in a pleasant lecture room on the psychology of the concentration camp. All that oppressed him at the moment became objective, seen and described from the viewpoint of science. By this method, Frankl succeeded somehow in rising above the situation, above the sufferings of the moment, and he obseved them as if they were already of the past.
Those who know about the fighting spirit of dying men/women on hospital beds will understand the link between the state of mind of a man - his courage and hope, or the lack of them - and the state of immunity and that a sudden loss of hope and courage can have a deadly effect.
Meaning of Suffering
Suffering by itself holds no meaning; we give our suffering meaning by the way we respond to it.
Dostoevski said once,"There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings."
Suffering is an ineradictable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death, human life cannot be complete. The way in which man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails gives him ample opportunity to add a deeper meaning to his life. He may remain courageous, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation, he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man to either make use of or forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.
We must never forget we may also find meaning in life even when confronted with a hopeless situation, facing a fate that cannot be changed. When we are no longer able to change a situation - like an incurable disease, we are challenged to change ourselves.
An example is cited of an elderly man consulted Frankl due to severe depression. He could not overcome the loss of his wife who had died 2 years ago. Frankl refrained from telling hm anything but instead confronted him with this question,"What would have happened if you've died first and your wife would have had to survive you?" "Oh,"he replied,"for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!" Whereupon Frankl said,"You see, such a suffering has been spared for her, and it was you who have spared her this suffering - at the price that you have to survive and mourn her." He said no word but shook Frankl's hand and calmly left his office.
In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.
Meaning of Life
"He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how." Nietzsche
Whenever there was a chance, one had to give them a why - an aim - for their lives, in order to strengthen them to bear the terrible how of their existence. Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and thus no point in carrying on. He was soon lost. A typical response to encouragment,"I've nothing to expect from life anymore." What sort of answer can one give to that?
What really needed was a fundamental change in out attitude toward life. It did not really mater what we expected from life, but rather what life expected of us. We need to stop asking abotu the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were questioned by life - daily. Our answer must consist, not in talk, but in right action and conduct. Life ultmately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfil tasks which it constantly sets for each person. These tasks, thus meaning of life, differ from man to man, from moment to moment. It's impossible to define meaning of life in a general way. These tasks form man's destiny, which is different and unique for each person. No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or destiny. Sometimes the situation warrants a man to shape his fate by taking a step of action. Other times, it's advantageous for him to accept fate, to bear his cross. 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. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is special and alone. No one can suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burdens.
Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfilment. Therein he cannot be replaces, nor can his life be repeated. Thus everyone's task is as unique as his opportunity to execute it. Ultimately man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather recognize it is he himself who is asked. In other words, each man is questioned by life, and he can only answer to life by answering for his life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.
The true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world, rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it was a closed system. The more one forgets himself - by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love - the more human he gets and the more he actualizes himself.
Excerpt from Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl - psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor
