Man’s Search for Meaning

In the camps, prisoners were stripped of nearly everything: family, possessions, even their names, replaced by numbers. Frankl observed that one thing remained. Each person could still choose the attitude they took toward what was happening, and some used it to comfort others and share what little they had. He calls this the last of the human freedoms. It doesn’t make suffering acceptable or excuse those who caused it; it means circumstances don’t get the final word on who you are.

Try it When something hard happens that you can’t change, ask which attitude toward it you could stand behind.

Frankl returns often to Nietzsche’s idea that a reason to live makes almost any hardship bearable. In the camps he saw prisoners hold on because something was waiting for them, someone who needed them or a task only they could finish. For Frankl it was his wife, whom he talked to in his mind on forced marches, and the manuscript taken from him at Auschwitz, which he meant to rewrite. Prisoners who lost all hope in the future often gave up.

Try it Write down one person or task you want to be there for.

Logotherapy names three places where meaning can be found. The first is creating a work or doing a deed. The second is experiencing something, such as beauty or nature, or loving another person. The third is the attitude you take toward suffering you cannot avoid. That third path is easy to misread. Frankl doesn’t say suffering is necessary: if it can be avoided or its cause removed, that’s what you should do. Meaning in suffering applies only when nothing can be changed.

Try it Name one source of meaning in your life right now for each of the three ways.

Frankl turns the usual question around. Instead of asking what we can expect from life, he suggests that life is asking something of us, and that we answer through our actions and choices rather than by thinking about it. There is no single meaning of life that fits everyone; it differs from person to person and from one moment to the next. That’s why he paired freedom with responsibility, and even proposed a Statue of Responsibility to balance the Statue of Liberty.

Try it Instead of asking what you want from this week, ask what this week asks of you.

Frankl argues that happiness doesn’t work as a target. Make it your goal and it keeps its distance; commit to a cause or to another person, and it tends to show up on its own. Without it, people can fall into what he calls the existential vacuum, a sense of emptiness that often shows up as boredom, like the low mood some feel when a busy week ends. Pleasure, money or power often rush in to fill the gap, but in his view they are substitutes for meaning.

Try it Spend your next free afternoon on a person or cause beyond yourself.

Frankl called his approach logotherapy, from the Greek logos, meaning. Freud had stressed the will to pleasure and Adler the will to power; Frankl put the will to meaning first, and his school became known as the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy. Two of its techniques stand out. Paradoxical intention asks patients to deliberately wish for what they fear, which weakens the fear. Dereflection turns attention away from yourself and your symptoms toward something or someone else.

Try it When you’re caught up in worrying about yourself, spend an hour on someone else’s need.