Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

I finally understand hwy Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl is a classic read. Through his experience at Auschwitz, Frankl solidifies his psychoanalytic framework taken from Nietzche's "He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How" (p6). Frankl makes the distinction that suffering on its own is not meaningful, it is masochistic. However,  Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning in life: 1) work 2) love 3) courage during difficult times. This meaning making forms the basis of Frankl's philosophy and he uses his own experience as an extreme example of this. 

That said, meaning making was not only masochistic or moral. Frankl felt that those who had a rich inner life had a better rate of survival saying that memories of love, his writing work-in-progress, and philosophy kept those were less physically strong alive. In that way, those who thought only of the past inherently rendered their current lives as worthless: "Regarding our “provisional existence” as unreal was in itself an important factor in causing the prisoners to lose their hold on life; 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" (p76). All of this - the experience of the camps, meaning making, the cruelty, the resilience, the humor; all of it was so human. Frankl cites his experience of mercy at the hands of a certain officer because Frankl listened to his love stories (p35). We have come to know Man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips (Harold Kushner, p9). 

Frankl's telling of his experience is so important because it dignifies and demystifies the concentration camps in such an earnest way - "it is easy for the outsider to get the wrong conception...mingled with sentiment and pity. [There] was an unrelenting struggle for daily bread and for life itself, for one's own sake or for that of a good friend," (p16).

On a personal note, Frankl said that, sometimes, during their lunch hour, a prisoner would sing Italian arias. My grandfather used to sing Italian arias at our biweekly dinners as a child. I wonder if that was new or if he had experiences 

Anyway, this book was excellent!