Introduction to the Psychology of Doing

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 119
Victor E. Frankl, Man's Search For Meaning

Austrian psychologist Victor Emil Frankl spent three years in German concentration camps, mostly Dachau. His survival sometimes depended, by his own admission, on blind luck and circumstance. But he also witnessed something perplexing: some people survived, while others surrendered, dying long before the Gestapo executed them. What made some people persevere, and others die before they died?

Frankl divides this volume into three sections. The first is his memoir of the labor camps, a single exhaustive narrative undivided into chapters or other smaller, more digestible segments. Like Frankl, we must consume the experience without guidance, an exercise in existential absurdity. Frankl quotes generously from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, emphasizing that survival comes from meaning, and meaning comes from one’s interior mental landscape, not from outside.

The second section provides a plain-language introduction to “logotherapy,” Frankl’s version of psychotherapy. Opposed to fellow Viennese psychologist Sigmund Freud, who believed healing came from resolving past conflicts, Frankl finds healing in the future, in giving patients something to live for, something to work toward. Frankl believes meaning doesn’t exist objectively, within either the world or the self, but is something people make, sometimes at great cost.

His third, and shortest, section is a lecture revising and updating his therapeutic approach with new discoveries made in the 1970s and early 1980s.

According to Frankl, humans find meaning, and therefore something to live for, when they see something to strive after in the world. For him, this means either work or relationships. (I say “relationships” where Frankl says “love,” but a century of pop songs has tainted that word.) Meaning comes not from some list of principles, but from the work we do and the people we care about. This, for Frankl, is highly existentialist, in the Kierkegaardian sense.

Thus Frankl’s philosophy harbors a contradiction. We create meaning internally, but we create it outside ourselves, in our actions and relationships. Viewed another way, meaning is necessary, but it doesn’t objectively exist; it dwells in the realm of Platonic ideals. Though Frankl isn’t hostile to religion (and was, by reports, an observant but private Jew), his philosophy doesn’t require subsuming oneself into an external God. Meaning is, and isn’t, in the material world..

Victor E. Frankl

Calling this “philosophy” isn’t accidental. Frankl utilizes the scope of Western philosophy, but through a medical scientist’s eyes. Though his autobiographical section describes how he tested and defined his philosophy in the violent laboratory of Dachau, his therapeutic section contains practical applications, mostly questions for patients to ponder. Frankl doesn’t demand a closed loop, but neither does he require every student to reinvent philosophy, as Plato does.

Perhaps most importantly, his philosophy steers us away from abstractions and buzzwords. We don’t find happiness by seeking happiness, Frankl writes, nor do we find healing by seeking healing. Rather, we find both by seeking something that gives our lives definition; happiness and healing are ancillary benefits of meaning. And again, meaning comes either from doing productive work, or pursuing nurturing relationships.

The points Frankl makes in technical terms in his second section, he demonstrates in practice in his first section. He survived the labor camps because he had a wife waiting and research to complete. (His wife died in another camp, but he didn’t know that for years.) Others survived because they had art to create, children to raise, or houses to build. Those who survived believed they had something waiting outside, and strove to remain connected with it.

Admittedly, Frankl’s narrative has garnered criticism. Historians dispute his labor camp memoir as somewhat fictionalized, as though no autobiographer ever streamlined events for clarity and readability. More fair are criticisms directed at specific details. Frankl repeatedly describes Auschwitz as though he faced extended internment there, though it was merely a layover; he mostly stayed at Dachau. This is slovenly and misleading, but doesn’t undo his message.

More important is the contrast between internal psychological meaning, and external nihilism. From King Solomon to Jean-Paul Sartre, thinkers have agreed that this world is chaotic, violent, and antithetical to human wellbeing. Yet like those thinkers, Frankl agrees we have control over only our own responses. We must at accordingly.

Victor Frankl wrote multiple volumes on the process of finding and making meaning. But this brief, plain-language book contains probably the most accessible and most widely read introduction for non-psychologists. He proffers a useful guide for finding meaning in a world suffused with despair. Only in seeking meaning through work or relationship, he contends, do we find happiness and healing within ourselves.