Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Man's Search for Meaning, Victor E. Frankl.

I just read a book called "Man's Search for Meaning," by Dr. Victor E. Frankl. He was a prisoner of Nazi Germany's concentration camps for three years during WWII. He is a psychoanalyist, and the book is about the psychological process and experience of prisoners of the concentration camps. I find it so fascinating that he was able to draw meaning out of senseless suffering. The book is so full of insights that are worth the time to read. I have to share a few that stood out to me most.

[Author's note: I just finished writing this post and it is incredibly long... not for someone with a short attention span. However, if you get all the way through it, there are some awesome awesome quotes in there.]

This is toward the beginning of the book, where he is telling about his first arrival at Auschwitz, after being stripped of his family, posessions, clothes, and finally hair, and herded into the showers: "While we were waiting for the shower, our nakedness was brought home to us: we really had nothing now except our bare bodies - even minus hair; all we possessed, literally, was our naked existence." Throughout his experience, he learns that the one absolute he could have complete control over, was his attitude. He also made it through by finding something to have hope in. "Seen from this point of view, the mental reactions of the inmates of concentration camp must seem more to us than the mere expression of certain physical and sociological conditions. Even though conditions such as lack of sleep, insufficient food and various mental distresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone. Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him - mentally and spiritually."

He also talks about how when new prisoners arrived at camp: "On entering camp a change took place in the minds of the men. With the end of uncertainty there came the uncertainty of the end. It was impossible to foresee whether or when, if at all, this form of existence would end... The prisoner who lost faith in the future - his future - was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay. Usually this happened quite suddenly, in the form of a crisis, the symptoms of which were familiar to the experienced camp inmate. We all feared this moment - not for ourselves, which would have been pointless, but for our friends. Usually it began with the prisoner refusing one morning to get dressed and wash or go out on the parade grounds. No entreaties, no blows, no threats had any effect. He just lay there, hardly moving. If this crisis was brought about by an illness, he refused to be taken to the sick-bay or do anything to help himself. He simply gave up. There he remained, lying in his own excreta, and nothing bothered him anymore."

It is such a sad picture, and the following exerpts tell what he did to fight that hopelessness in himself.

"Any attempt at fighting the camp's psychopathological influence on the prisoner... had to aim at giving him inner strength by pointing out to him a future goal to which he could look forward."

(I love this...) "The latin word finis has two meanings: the end or the finish, and a goal to reach. A man who could not see the end of his "provisional existence" was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life. Therefore the whole structure of his inner life changed; signs of decay set in which we know from other areas of life.

One of the prisoners, who on his arrival marched with a long column of new inmates from the station to the camp, told me later that he had felt as though he were marching at his own funeral. His life had seemed to him absolutely without future. He regarded it as over and done, as if he had already died.

A man who let himself decline because he could not see any future goal found himself occupied with retrospective thoughts... But in robbing the present of its reality there lay a certain danger. It became easy to overlook the opportunities to make something positive of camp life, opportunities which really did exist... everything in a way became pointless. Such people forgot that often it is just such an exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself. Instead of taking the camp's difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised it as something of no consequence... Life for such people became meaningless."

Here he is saying how necessary it was to have a goal, something to look forward to, a reason to live. Thank God Himself that I can read these words from the comfort of my own home and not have to learn them by experience - because they are also applicable to my life. We talk so much about setting goals in our Monday meetings, but for a different reason. This one seems to mean so much more.

Also - something interesting for my Dad. We were talking the other day about the power of the mind, here's a story Dr. Frankl tells that demonstrates it.

"I once had a dramatic demonstration of the close link between the loss of faith in the future and this dangerous giving up. My senior block warden, a fairly well-known composer and librettist, confided in me one day: 'I would like to tell you something, Doctor. I have had a strange dream. A voice told me that I could wish for something, that I should only say what I wanted to know, and all my questions would be answered. What do you think I asked? That I would like to know when the war would be over for me. You know what I mean, Doctor - for me! I wanted to know when we, when our camp, would be liberated and our sufferings come to an end.'
'And when did you have this dream?' I asked.
'In February, 1945,' he answered. It was then the beginning of March.
'What did your dream voice answer?'
Furtively he whispered to me, 'March thirtieth.'
When he told me about his dream, he was still full of hope and convinced that the voice of his dream would be right. But as the promised day drew nearer, the war news which reached our camp made it appear very unlikely that we would be free on the promised date. On March twenty-ninth, he (my senior warden) suddenly became ill and ran a high temperature. On March thirtieth, the day his prophecy had told him that the war and suffering would be over for him, he became delirious and lost consciousness. on March thirty-first, he was dead. To all outward appearances, he had died of typhus.
Those who know how close the connection is between the state of mind of a man - his courage and hope, or lack of them - and the state of immunity of his body will understand that the sudden loss of hope and courage can have a deadly effect. The ultimate cause of my friend's death was that the expected liberation did not come and he was severely disappointed. This suddenly lowered his body's resistance against the latent typhus infection. His faith in the future and his will to live had become paralyzed and his body fell victim to illness - and thus the voice of his dream was right after all."

Okay, I realize how long this post is. But there are just two more exerpts I want to post because I thought they were profound.

About suffering:
"An active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity to realize values in creative work, while a passive life of enjoyment affords him the opportunity to obtain fulfillment in experiencing beauty, art, or nature. But there is also purpose in that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man's attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces. A creative life and a life of enjoyment are banned to him. But not only creativeness and enjoyment are meaningful. If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete... The way in which a man takes up his cross and all the suffering it entails, gives him ample opportunity - even under the most difficult circumstances - to add a deeper meaning to his life... It is this spiritual freedom - which cannot be taken away - that makes life meaningful and purposeful."

I changed around the last few sentences of that quote to condense it together a little bit.

And to finish up this long post on a positive note, here's a beautiful one about love:
"A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understand how a man who has nothing left in the world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the 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 - an honorable way - in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory."

I love the part, which he claims is truth, that the salvation of man is through love and in love. He is obviously not a mormon, but he comes closer to nailing down the basic fundamentals of our doctrine in that one sentence than in all the rest of the book.

Well, I know it seems as if you no longer have to read the book because I just posted it for you. But, there are hundreds of amazing things in it. I highly recommend it. The first half of the book tells mostly of experiences of the concentration camps, then he gets into analyzing it, then the last portion of the book is about Logotherapy, a form of psychotherapy that he invented. Even if you just read the first half of the book, it is well worth it.

1 comment:

kenna said...

I have been told to read this and I have been planning on it, but now I really am going to go buy it. Great post.