Mind and feeling
Viktor Frankl
Meaning
Viktor Frankl (1905–1997 · Vienna) — Meaning.
What actually happened?
Entering the camp, his manuscript was taken from him — years of psychological work, gone in the first hour. Standing naked in the inspection line, he realised they could take everything and still not take how he chose to answer it. That realisation is what he lived on. He began observing systematically which prisoners came through and which gave up, and found that men with something unfinished waiting in the future — a book, a family, a task — outlasted men with nothing pulling at them. After the war he dictated the book in nine days.
Meaning is the last freedom
In any circumstances a person can choose their own attitude. This is not positive thinking; it is a regularity he observed in a camp. External conditions can strip away food, health, liberty and family. The interpretation of that stripping — this is destroying me, or this is tempering me — stays in your hands the whole way down.
Marcus Aurelius on the inner citadel and Frankl on the last freedom are the same proposition: a Roman emperor and a twentieth-century survivor, different vocabulary, one claim.
The meaning of suffering
What he found most dangerous in extreme suffering was not the pain but the verdict that the pain is pointless. Once a person concludes their suffering means nothing, the collapse follows. Conversely the smallest sense of purpose — I will live to tell the world what happened here — will carry someone through an amount of suffering that should not be survivable.
If there is a meaning in life at all, he wrote, then there must be a meaning in suffering. That sentence is not consolation, it is the load-bearing wall of the whole therapy.
Pull from the future
Prisoners with a strong future object — a reunion waiting after the war, unfinished work, a specific mission — survived at higher rates than those with nothing ahead of them. Why you are living matters more than how you are living, because the direction sets how much you are prepared to spend.
He kept picturing himself lecturing after the war on the psychology of the camps, which turned what he was enduring into material for work not yet done.
The existential vacuum
Modern people have unprecedented material conditions and an increasing sense of hollowness. He called it the existential vacuum, and said it shows up as boredom, as imitation — doing what others treat as important — and as conformity, doing what others ask. The prescription is not less pain. It is a meaning that is actually yours.
Don't aim at success, he wrote: the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. It arrives only as the side effect of dedication to a cause greater than oneself.
How do I use it today?
When the emptiness arrives, his question is not how do I become happy. It is what is life asking of me at this moment. Move the attention off what I want and onto what I can do for something outside myself, and the sense of meaning tends to arrive behind it rather than in front.
Deep read
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Further
Lines to keep
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms.
If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering.
He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.