Viktor Frankl and the Search for Meaning in Life

Posted on by

“Striving to find meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man.”  ~ Viktor Frankl

As Viktor Frankl, an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, devoted his life to studying, understanding and promoting “meaning.”  He developed the psychological approach known as logotherapy (from the Greek logos, meaning “reason” or “principle”).

While observing the brutality and degradation within the Nazi concentration camps during WWII, he theorized that those Jewish concentration camp prisoners who tended to survive the experience, were not those who were physically strong, but those who retained a sense of control over their environment, and had some meaning and purpose in their lives.

These prisoners with meaning and who retained a ’sense of control’ were more likely to survive the dehumanizing experience; he himself tried to recreate the manuscript of a book he had been writing before his capture.

“Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except for one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.” ~ Viktor Frankl

According to Frankl, meaning can be found through:

  • “Experiencing reality by interacting authentically with the environment and with others,
  • Giving something back to the world through creativity and self-expression, and
  • Changing our attitude when faced with a situation or circumstance that we cannot change.”

He observed:

“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They 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 own attitude in any given set of circumstances—to choose one’s own way.”

For Frankl, joy was an important byproduct of finding meaning in life. He points to studies where there is marked difference in life spans between “trained, tasked animals,” i.e., animals with a purpose, than “taskless, jobless animals.”

In his famous book, Man’s Search for Meaning, he tells the story of how he survived the Holocaust by finding personal meaning in the experience, which gave him the will to live through it. He concludes that “without meaning, people fill the void with hedonistic pleasures, power, materialism, hatred, boredom, or neurotic obsessions and compulsions.”

“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.” ~ Viktor Frankl

In “Man’s Search For Meaning”, he says for a person to be happy they need 3 things:

1. Someone to love (relationship).
2. Something to do (meaning and purpose).
3. Something to look forward to (vision and hope).

References:

  1. https://www.pursuit-of-happiness.org/history-of-happiness/viktor-frankl/
  2. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201205/mans-search-meaning
Advertisements