Man's Search For Meaning (Rough Draft)

"He who was a why to live for can bear with almost any how" - Friedrich Nietzsche

For the people suffering life in concentration camps in the 1940's, it would seem hard to find much meaning in life. Prisoners were daily rationed a few ounces of bread, perhaps with a bowl of watery soup. They were worked past exhaustion each and every day. They slept by cramming eight people together on to a plank barely 5 feet wide. They suffered freezing weather with rags, and if they were lucky, a pair of shoes. Most were not lucky.

Once in a concentration camp, the chance of survival was put at 1 in 28 (computed after the fact). From inside the camp, it would seem easy to lose hope. Victor Frankl was one of the survivors of this tragedy. As he described in his book, "Man's Search for Meaning", one of the most depressing influences was that the prisoner could not know how long his term of imprisonment would be. He could not picture the future and he could not form goals. Victor watched as prisoner after prisoner succumbed to this depressing influence. The saddest thing for him was to watch a prisoner who refused to get up for the morning's work; who would not budge even after repeated beatings by the SS gaurds. It was a certainty where the guards would send him next.

Yet despite the bleakest of outlooks, Victor, and the other survivors, generally clung on to something. Victor wanted to reunite with the woman he loved. He wanted to finish his thesis work. He wanted to use his experience in the camps to describe, from a psychological standpoint, what he had learned. And in that respect, there was plenty.

For example, veteran prisoners learned quickly that two things gained him favor from the otherwise merciless guards: entertainment and applause. They learned that the human body, which believes itself to be so fragile, is actually capable of withstanding the harshest of punishments. Yet perhaps his biggest realizations came from studying the character of men.

Victor observed people anticipate the date they would be set free. Some people clung on to these predictions as a basis of hope. And when the day came around and passed, and freedom was not attained, they had set themselves up for a deep misery. It was common for people to cling to hopes of being home before the new year. And it is a well-documented fact that a majority of illnesses sprang up in the month of January (and this was not due to any weather related factors).

Others would set themselves intent on gaining freedom. They approached everyday with a mindset of how they would achieve their freedom. The problem was they were facing an insurmountable challenge. It is as if I decided I was going to chip my way through a mountain using only a small pick-axe. I would be faced every day with the grim realization that my progress was muted. One can only go so long before this evidence would prove disheartening.

Victor believed the greatest lesson he learned dealt with suffering, which he described as a fate that could not be changed. Those who accepted their grim situation generally maintained a healthy attitude to life. Those who anticipated freedom or intended to control the situation were soon disappointed by the grim and overwhelmingly powerful situation they were in.

Spinoza once said "emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it." Victor returned home and championed a form of psychological help termed logotherapy. Logotherapy had the patient ask, "how will you approach the situations that life present's you?" "What was it that life expected of me?" Meanwhile, it strives to avoid the vicious cycles which led to the deepest rooted problems- things he labeled anticipatory anxiety and hyper-intention. His main conclusion was that many problems stem simply because people respond to suffering in every way other than accepting it. And when one does that, it is only a matter of time before reality catches up.