overcoat, only to have it confiscated almost immediately. Next, he resolved to survive to be reunited with his wife, only to soon
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realize that she, also a prisoner, was not robust enough to survive. Soon after, he dedicated himself to helping keep prisoners alive; if you could work, the SS wouldn’t execute you outright-at least not till the end. But then, as the Nazis began to panic at the advance of the Allied forces, they began to compound their horrendous crime by executing, right and left, every prisoner that they thought they could dispose of. At this point, a series of circumstances offered the opportunity for what Frankl hoped might turn out to be at least a slim chance of escape. But instead he hesitated, electing to stay with his fellow prisoners. It turned out that those who accepted the offer to be trucked away to a “rest camp” to await liberation were really being taken out for their execution. Frankl survived when his camp was overrun by the liberating forces before the SS could dispose of the rest of them. Ironically, Frankl lived because he was willing to die with the rest.
Why did Frankl decide to stay? Of course, he suspected a ruse in the offer to leave. But at least it offered a possible avenue of escape, whereas to stay in the camp seemed to offer only certain death. Frankl said that he estimated his chances of survival at that point as less than one in twenty. Yet, stay he did. Why? Frankl put it in these terms: he had already reached a point where he began to see a meaning in what was the apparent certainty of his own death. When he had accepted the offer to work in the prison camp hospital, despite others warning him that this might only hasten his death, he decided that it was better to die in the effort to keep others alive than to die simply as a victim of a passively accepted fate.
Although Frankl did not claim to have been a particularly religious man at this point in his life, his story reveals him as a man of deep faith and that he was even able to convey this faith to others. In reading his account of these last days of his ordeal, it is almost as if he was subconsciously drawing on the biblical tradition of the mysterious “suffering
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servant” in the later chapters of the book of Isaiah, whose ordeal and death proves redemptive not only for his own people, but also for the whole world (see Is 52:13-53:12). And although Frankl preferred not to advertise what his own beliefs might be, it is evident from his own story as well as in his later writings, that religion — or, more exactly, faith centered around religious hopes — provides the final and ultimately unassailable guarantee of meaning.
How essential to human life, then, is faith in some transcendental purpose? Frankl relates how some of his fellow prisoners managed to survive by living for less ultimate, even though worthy, goals. One, for example, lived to be reunited with his family, but only to return to his town to be told that they had all perished in the war; he killed himself. Others survived for other reasons, some of them undoubtedly lesser ones. But the point is that only a reason or a meaning that will survive all eventualities, even one’s own death, is fully adequate. The other purposes, no matter how effective they may be under limited conditions, are not enough in the face of death.
But is it necessary to believe explicitly in “life everlasting” to face death with composure? Perhaps not. For some, it is enough to have “lived well,” whatever that may mean. But whatever that great beyond may be — joy, fulfillment or even punishment, or simply nothingness or oblivion — somehow our purpose or reason for existence has to measure up to the demand for meaning. That this meaning remains somewhat ambiguous or enshrouded in mystery is what touches on the essence of faith. For the minute that I set out to know, beyond all doubt, the happiness or security of being absolutely sure, for myself, of this meaning or purpose of my life, it is most apt to escape me.
Thus, again, the paradox, but in another way — the knowledge or consciousness of this meaning or purpose cannot be generally proved or demonstrated logically beyond all doubt. Indeed, in his new preface to his earliest
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book, Frankl defines religion as “man’s search for ultimate meaning” and “belief and faith as trust in ultimate meaning.” There can be no question, then, that for Frankl the search for happiness or meaning is ultimately the quest of faith (The Unconscious God: Psychotherapy and Theology, page 13). To live without meaning, as Frankl contends in his many books, is to court the danger of being in the grip of an “existential neurosis,” to exist under a pervasive cloud of purposelessness that reveals itself in frenzied activity, superficial living, inane pursuits, and, not infrequently, phobias of one sort or another.
Yet we must ask ourselves what kind of meaning suffices. Must it always be an “ultimate meaning”? No doubt, as Frankl admitted, under the normal conditions of life, purposes or goals that in some way supply a meaning are often found in forms that fall far short of religious convictions or profound philosophies of life. Many, if not almost all, people invest meaning in having raised a family or in having a circle of friends. Many others concentrate on their business or profession. Some simply claim nothing more but to live for the sake of living, while others deepen the richness of life through love of nature, music, literature, or other cultural expressions. But on the other hand, some even seem to find their life’s meaning in merely collecting things, be it old magazines, postage stamps, rocks, beer cans, matchbooks, or just plain junk. So the test of meaning is whether such purposes or goals truly contribute to the quality or depth of life. While the best of them may seem like worthy goals, too often some of these become mere diversions that prevent us from really having lived. We may get our names in The Guiness Book of Records and even take a certain satisfaction in that. But to the degree that these goals or purposes fail to pass the test of ultimacy they are bound to disappoint. Yet the prevalence of these “existential neuroses”, particularly in affluent societies, indicates that there
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is a crisis of meaning in modern life. The question arises: How has this come about?
The Quest for Self-Fulfillment
Frankl’s ideas, with their appeal to lived experience, definitely imply a particular philosophical view of human existence. Much of modern thought on the subject of happiness is a popularization of the thought of two of Frankl’s forerunners in Vienna, Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler. If Freud and Adler eventually agreed to disagree, hence founding two differing schools of psychiatry, then we can say that Frankl’s approach differed in a way that is unique in modern philosophy. We should make no bones about it: these differing approaches to psychiatry and psychology are in the end, radically different philosophies of life.
The weakness in Freud’s system, according to Frankl, is that it is focused primarily on the “pleasure principle” as the central motive of human conduct. In this line of thinking, human happiness consists in a balance between felt needs and their fulfillment as measured in terms of pleasurable satisfaction in our lives. For Freud the will-to-pleasure constitutes the primary life-force, and the satisfaction of our pleasure needs, symbolized primarily in sexual terms, is the major motivation of life.
Adler, on the other hand, focused not so much on pleasurable motivations and results as on the development of the human potential understood as a drive for self-determination. Instead of pleasurable satisfaction of biological needs, for Adler the expression of human will or the will-to-power is much more important. Adler’s views, much more than Freud’s, have led to the present-day concentration on the subject of “self-actualization” and the great profusion of books and techniques promising “self-fulfillment.”
In Frankl’s estimation, neither Freud nor Adler is entirely
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wrong. But people who gear their lives to the pursuit of pleasure make a
