Man’s Search for Meaning – A Synopsis
Dr. Frankl’s idea of life is different from Freud who believed ‘Life is a primarily a quest for pleasure’ and also from Alfred Adler who said ‘Life is a quest for Power’. Frankl believed ‘Life is a quest for meaning’ & he saw three possible sources for meaning-- in Work, in Love & in Courage. Frankl’s says ‘forces beyond your control can take away everything except your freedom to choose how you respond. You cannot control what happens to you in life but you can always control how you feel & do about what happens to you.’ Frankl wrote the book as he wanted to tell that life holds a potential meaning under any circumstances, even in the most miserable ones and in order to convince, as example he selected his concentration camp experiences. More than 60 lakh people, mostly Jews, were put to death in Europe during the holocaust, one of the worst genocide in human history.
The book is not about the acts and sufferings of great heroes but is the story of sufferings of ordinary unknown victims. Frankl puts the psychological stages of the prisoners in the camp in three stages: Stage one of shock seeing the conditions in the camp, Stage two of apathy once the prisoner has spent a few days in the camp & stage three when the prisoners are liberated: “depersonalization” where there is no feeling of happiness & moral deformity in the form of feeling of bitterness and disillusionment.
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The train carrying 1500 people with eighty in each compartment travelled for many days and nights. The compartments were so full that the only light coming was from the top portion of the windows. The passengers (prisoners) were told that they are being transported to work in an ammunition factory but after days of travel when the station board was visible, it was Auschwitz. Auschwitz, where the biggest concentration camp in the world was located. As the coach doors were opened the outlines of the dreaded camp were visible, several rows of stretched barbed wire fences (electrified), watch towers, search lights & long columns of ragged human figures with shaved heads ,wearing striped uniforms . Like the condemned man getting the illusion that he might be reprieved- “Delusion of reprieve”, the author and his companions also clung to the shreds of hope & believed it will not be so bad! The luggage of all fifteen hundred passengers, now prisoners was taken over. The prisoners were lined up and filed past a doctor who directed the individuals either to left or right. Right meant fit to work and so to the camp & left meant sick or not fit to work, so to the gas chambers. Majority went to left! The people who were fit to work were made to run from the station to the camp and then asked to strip, strip to the last clothing within 2 minutes, if delayed the SS men lashed them with leather belts. The only thing that remained as a material link with the former life was the glasses and the belt. While shoes were allowed to be kept but if anyone had a good pair of shoes they were made to exchange them and were provided with other old shoes that may or may not fit!
Then their heads & body hair were shaved. Next all were asked to get in to a bath room with many showers and asked to take a bath. Even in conditions when all illusions were destroyed, most were overcome by a grim sense of humor and made fun of each other’s nakedness. Apart from humor the other sensation that seized the victims: curiosity. Curiosity to know what will happen next & what would be the consequence of standing stark naked, still wet from shower in the chilly late autumn cold, if they will be catching cold. Surprisingly none caught cold.
In the night the victims slept in tiered beds. On each bed meant for two, nine prisoners were to be accommodated without a mattress or a sheet. Two blankets were given for the nine persons. And yet the victims slept in these circumstances! Similarly no toothbrushes were given to clean the teeth but the gums remained fit! Same with the shirt which had to be worn for six months at a stretch with very little possibility of washing on a regular basis yet the skin was intact!! These situations show how much a human body can endure and survive!! But psychologically it was not the case. Many prisoners contemplated suicide, at least sometime during their stay in the camp. The conditions in the concentration camps were so terrible that it was a daily struggle for bread & for life itself. In the camp the victims/prisoners didn’t have a name, it was only a number which were often tattooed on their skin & also sewn to a certain spot in their jackets and trousers.
The prisoner of Auschwitz, in the first phase of shock did not fear death. Even the gas chambers lost their horrors for him after a few days—it spared him the act of committing suicide. In due course the prisoners passed from first phase to the second phase; the phase of relative apathy, in which he achieved a kind of emotional death. The newly arrived prisoners experienced the tortures of other most painful emotions: the boundless longing for his home & family. This was so acute that he felt himself consumed by the longing. Then it was disgust: disgust with all the ugliness which surrounded him. Between the huts in the camp lay pure filth and more one worked to clear it more one had to come in contact with it. The prisoners who had to clear it, if some filth splashed on their face could not clean it as it invited blows from the wardens!!And thus mortification of normal reactions was hastened. Initially the prisoner felt bad &looked away when another group of prisoners was being beaten up but those prisoners who had passed into the second stage of psychological reactions did not avert eyes any more. After a few weeks of camp life the sufferers, the dying & the dead became such commonplace sights to them that these things did not move him anymore.
Beatings occurred on slightest provocation & sometime for no reason at all. When it is for no reason, it is not the physical pain which hurts the most; it is the mental agony caused by the injustice that becomes unbearable. Strangely even a blow which misses its mark under some circumstances, hurts more than the one that finds its mark due to the insult associated with it. There were instances that even the hardened prisoners who had passed into second stage of his psychological reactions at times stood up against the insult, just shows how much the insult hurts.
Apathy, the main symptom of the second phase, was a necessary mechanism of self defence. Reality dimmed and all efforts and all emotions were centered on only task: preserving one’s life and if possible that of his friend’s. This forced the prisoner’s inner life down to a primitive level, a retreat to a more primitive form of mental life; his wishes and desires became obvious in his dreams. Because of the high degree of undernourishment the prisoners suffered, the desire for food was the major primitive instinct around which mental life centered. When the last layers of subcutaneous fat had vanished & the prisoners looked like skeletons disguised with skins and rags, they could watch their bodies beginning to devour themselves. With fairly correct accuracy they could predict who among them is going to die next.
The religious interest of the prisoners, as far and as soon as it developed, was the most sincere imaginable. The depth and vigor of religious belief was surprising. There were improvised prayers or services in the corner of a hut ,or in the darkness of the locked cattle trucks in which the prisoners were brought back from a distant work site, tired, hungry & frozen!. In spite of all the physical hardships & mental primitiveness of the camp life, it was possible for spiritual life to deepen. Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain often due to their delicate constitution but the damage to their inner selves was less. They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom. Only this way the paradox of some delicate people surviving the camp life better than the hardy ones can be explained.
The author describes an incident where he had to walk for miles with torn shoes on the path laden with big stones and puddles and his feet were injured & he was finding it difficult to walk but the foreman was throwing blows on anyone slackening in his march, suddenly he remembered his wife. He could visualize her smile, could hear her answering him , he was so immersed in her thoughts that he didn’t realize the blisters on his feet & he could walk without difficulty. Then he could grasp the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. He could understand how a man who has nothing left in the world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way- in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of his beloved, achieve fulfilment. Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive it all, ceases to be of importance.
The intensification of the inner life helped the prisoner to find a refuge from emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty of his existence, by letting him escape into the past. The nostalgic memory glorified the past and events and they assumed a strange character. As the inner life of the prisoner tended to become more intense, he also experienced the beauty of art & nature as never before & under their influence he at times even forgot his own frightful circumstances.
An outsider may be surprised to know there was a semblance of art in a concentration camp but he may be more astonished to know that one could find even humor there. Of course only a faint trace and for a few seconds but humor was there. Humor was another of soul’s weapons in the fight for self preservation. Humor, more than anything else in human make up can afford aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.
A man’s suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped in to an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly no matter how big the chamber is. Similarly suffering completely fills human soul & conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little.
It follows that a very trifling thing can cause the greatest of joys. The author gave an example when he was transferred from Auschwitz to another camp near Vienna, he & other prisoners danced with joy having come to know that this new camp didn’t have any oven/gas chamber although other conditions were no different. Similarly, working under a foreman who was more sympathetic than other, brought a feeling of joy & happiness to the prisoners. The meagre pleasures of camp life provided a kind of negative happiness—“freedom from suffering”.
Apart from its role as defensive mechanism, the prisoner’s apathy was also the result of other factors. Hunger and lack of sleep contributed to it. The general irritability was another characteristic of the prisoners’ mental state. Besides these physical causes there were mental ones, in the form of some complexes. The majority of prisoners suffered from inferiority complex. They all had been ‘somebody’ before being a prisoner but now they were nobody. If the consciousness of one’s inner value is anchored in higher, more spiritual things then it cannot be shaken, but how many possess it? Without consciously thinking about it, the average prisoner felt himself utterly degraded!
Also, as the prisoners continually witnessed scenes of beatings, the impulse toward violence increased. Prisoners frequently got into violent fights which otherwise would not have been the case.
From the above it appears that the theory that man is no more than product of many conditional & environmental factors be they of a biological, psychological or sociological nature is true. But is it? Does man have no choice of action?? The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action. The author remembers of the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread at the cost of themselves remaining hungry. Such examples may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms- to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances. While lack of sleep, lack of food and several mental stresses may suggest that the prisoners would behave in a certain way, the sort of person the prisoner became was a result of an inner decision & not the result of conditions alone. Dostoevsky said once: ‘There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings”. It is this spiritual freedom – that cannot be taken away – that makes life meaningful and purposeful.
Even among the guards of the camp some were kind and considerate in spite of living in such conditions where they had all the powers, authority to mistreat the prisoners & they were seeing brutality all around. It goes to show that human kindness can be found in any group, even those which as a whole are easy to condemn, so we must not simplify & say that this group people were angels and that group people were devils.
An active life provides a man opportunity to be creative and a passive life of enjoyment affords him the opportunity to obtain fulfilment in experiencing beauty, art & nature. But even a barren life where creativity and enjoyment are banned has purpose—of high moral behavior. It is not that only creativeness & enjoyment are meaningful, if there is meaning in life at all, then there is meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.
Most of the prisoners, instead of taking the camp’s difficulties as a test of their inner strength, did not take life seriously and despised it as something of no consequence. They preferred to close their eyes and to live in past. Life for such people became meaningless. But a few got the chance to attain human greatness even through their apparent worldly failure & death, an accomplishment which in ordinary circumstances they would never have achieved. To the rest of the prisoners, the mediocre and half hearted, the words of Bismark could be applied: “Life is like being at the dentist. You always think that the worst is still to come & yet it is over already”. Most in the concentration camp believed that real opportunities of life had passed, yet in reality there was an opportunity and a challenge.
It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future. & this is his salvation in most difficult moments of his existence, although sometimes he has to force his mind to the task. The prisoner who had lost faith in future his future was doomed. He also lost his spiritual hold, he let himself decline and became subject to physical & mental decay. A prisoner in the concentration camp didn’t know how long he will be living that ‘provisional existence’ and so unlike a normal person did not have a future goal in life. He ceases living for future in contrast to a normal man. The feeling of lifelessness apart from the other conditions was due to ‘Time’ – i.e. unknown time limit of imprisonment and the ‘Space’-- the bounded area of the camp.
Any attempt to restore a man’s inner strength had first to succeed in showing him some future goal. “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how”.
What was needed for a prisoner was a fundamental change in attitude towards life—‘it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us’. They needed to stop asking about the meaning of life and instead to think of ourselves as those who are being questioned by life. Our answer must contain in right action and right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and fulfil the tasks it assigns.
These tasks and therefore the meaning of life differ from individual to individual & also from moment to moment. No man and no destiny could be compared with any other man and any other destiny. Sometimes the situation in which a man finds himself may require him to take action, sometimes it may be more advantageous to make use of an opportunity for contemplation. Sometimes man may be required 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 & acknowledge that even in suffering he is unique & alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way he bears his burden.
The talk of future is not the only thing, even the thinking of past is helpful to a ‘hope less’ man. ‘What you have experienced, no power on earth can take it from you’. All we have done, whatever great thoughts we have had & all we have suffered , all this is not lost, though it is past, we have brought it in to being. Having been is also a kind of being and perhaps of the surest kind.
The war ultimately came to an end and the prisoners were freed. The author tells that the prisoners walked out of the camp free and came back in the evening to the camp but no one was happy. The third psychological phase was observed. They had literally lost the ability to feel pleased and had to relearn it slowly. The ex-prisoners could eat full meal for the first time since being a prisoner, they even over ate but the mind was not happy. The author observes that body has fewer inhibitions than mind. Body could make good use of freedom from first day but mind took time. People with natures of more primitive kind could not escape the brutality which had surrounded them and they tried to become oppressors from the oppressed. They justified their behavior by their own terrible experiences. Apart from the moral deformity resulting from sudden release of mental pressure, bitterness and disillusionment threatened to damage the character of the individual. Only slowly those could be guided back to the truth that no one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them.
It is not the man asking life what is its meaning but it is life which is asking what is man’s meaning & Man’s meaning is to live always with moral uprightness, whether in joy or in suffering.
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