Frankl’s ‘Man’s search for meaning’

This Holy Week, I’m reading an old classic bestseller, Viktor E. Frankl’s “Man’s search for meaning .”

Thanks to Juggernaut for introducing me to Frankl’s masterpiece.

Frankl was Europe’s leading psychiatrist. “Man’s search for meaning” is about finding humanity in the most inhuman environment which was the Nazi concentration camp.

Philosophy professor and writer, Gerald F. Kreyche, describes”Man search for meaning” as “The story of a man who became a number who became a person.”

From the horrors of Auschwitz and Dachau, Frankl developed logotheraphy, a revolutionary approach to psychotherapy.

The book’s cover says at the core of his theory is the belief that man’s primary motivational force is his search for meaning.

I still have to finish the book but here are some of the Frankl’s insights which can be applicable in adversities we face today.

As they witnessed daily unspeakable cruelty and inhumanity, Frankl said, “An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.”

He said beatings occurred on the slightest provocation, sometimes for no reason at all. He related one incident when the man in front of him stepped out of the line. Before he knew it, he was also hit by the guard in the head. He related: “At such moment, it is not the physical pain which hurts the most..; it is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all.”

There was also one time, he related, when the guard playfully picked up a stone and threw it at him.”That, to me, seemed the way to attract the attention of the beast, to call a domestic animal back to its job, a creature with which you have so little in common that you do not even punish it.”

Frankl said one of the prisoners’ defense mechanism was apathy, which he describes as “the blunting of emotions and the feeling that one could not care anymore.”

“By means of this insensibility the prisoner soon surrounded himself with a very necessary protective shell,” he said.

He narrated one incident while he was sipping greedily a bowl of soup amidst the winter cold. Not far from the hut where he was, he saw a prison “nurse” drag corpse. ” He happened to look at the dead man who glaze eyes and he recognized it as the person he was just talking with two hours earlier. “I continued sipping my soup,” he said.

“If my my lack of emotion had not surprise from the professional point of interest, I would not rememver this incident he now, because there was so little feeling involved in it,” he shared the dehumanization that they were subjected to.

Frankl said for every one of the liberated prisoners, the day comes when looking at his camp experiences, he can no longer understand how he endured it all.

“As the day of his liberation eventually came, when everything seemed to him like a beautiful dream, so also the day comes when all his camp experiences seem to him nothing but a nightmare.

“The crowning experience of all, for the homecoming man, is the wonderful feeling that after all he has suffered, there is nothing ne need not fear any more – except his God.”