1-Page Summary

Part I: Frankl’s time in concentration camps

Viktor Frankl survived 4 different concentration camps. He observed that the prisoners went through 3 general psychological phases:

• When they were admitted into the camps, most of them suffered from shock.
  • Shock manifested as delusions of reprieve, and abnormal reactions to the circumstances, such as humor, morbid curiosity, and lack of fear.
• Once the prisoners became entrenched in camp life, they fell into a state of apathy.
  • Apathy is the deadening of our emotional responses. This created a protective shell and allowed the prisoners to suffer intensely horrific conditions without losing their minds.
• After the prisoners were liberated, they experienced depersonalization.
  • During depersonalization, you feel disconnected from your thoughts, your body, and yourself. You view yourself from the outside, or feel as if you’re dreaming and not truly present. The conditions of the camps forced the prisoners to detach from themselves, and it was difficult to repair this even after they were free.

Despite the horrifying environment, Frankl noticed that the prisoners who were more likely to survive the concentration camps had specific psychological methods of resistance: rich inner lives, future-oriented goals, and discovery of meaning in their suffering.

• Prisoners who were less likely to survive found their suffering meaningless, and eventually succumbed to hopelessness--they weren’t convinced they had any reason to try to survive, so they gave up mentally and physically.

We are all subject to external forces that can change our lives, whether they’re positive or negative forces. But the one thing we always possess, regardless of external circumstances, is our freedom to choose how we respond to our circumstances. We are in control of our perspective, our choices, and what we make of the situation we find ourselves in.

Part II: Logotherapy

Frankl survived the concentration camps, and what he witnessed in them inspired the invention of logotherapy, a school of psychology which asserts that meaning is the driving force in human life, rather than pleasure, as Sigmund Freud believed, or power, as Alfred Adler believed.

Logotherapy focuses on taking action that aligns with your meaning in life. One method of doing this is the idea of looking back on your deathbed at your choices--would you be happy with them, and would you feel they fulfilled a purpose that was important to you?

Logotherapy suggests 3 different paths to finding your meaning:

• Through achievements and accomplishments, creating works of value or doing deeds.
• Through experiencing positive things like love or the beauty of nature.
• Through suffering, which can be a major human accomplishment if we can find meaning in it.
  • For instance, parents who work hard jobs to give their children a better life have found a meaning in their suffering.

We can do 3 things to find meaning in our suffering.

• Change personal suffering into personal triumphs through changing the view we take of our suffering.
• Use guilt from past decisions to help us change our future decisions for the better.
• Use the fact that we’ll die one day to inspire us to act responsibly and make good decisions.

People often get frustrated with existence, and the search for meaning can cause us some anxiety. Logotherapy addresses 2 forms of anxiety:

• Hyper-intention on something you want, which usually prevents you from achieving your desired goal precisely because you’re trying to force it to happen.
  • For instance, when you wake up in the middle of the night and try to force yourself to go back to sleep, very often the hyper-intention to sleep causes you to stay up longer.
• Anticipatory anxiety, where your fear of something happening usually causes it to happen.
  • For instance, someone who’s self-conscious about sweating too much when they’re nervous will get nervous, start to sweat, then get anxious about sweating too much, which increases their stress level and causes them to sweat more.

Logotherapy has 2 techniques to deal with those forms of anxiety:

• For hyper-intention, try dereflection, where by focusing on something bigger than or outside of yourself, you inadvertently achieve your goals.
• For anticipatory anxiety, try paradoxical intention, where you try to do the thing you’re scared of doing, which usually short circuits the issue and frees you from it.

Shortform Introduction

What does it say about us that this book is so popular?

Well, we might be existentially aimless--apparently millions of people are so preoccupied with the question “what is the meaning of life?” that they seek out this book.

This book has existed in many forms. The first part, “Experiences in a Concentration Camp,” was first published as a standalone narrative about Viktor Frankl’s experiences in 4 different concentration camps during World War II. Other books have covered the horrors, indiginities, and abuse that concentration camp prisoners suffered during WWII from an emotional standpoint. But what about the psychology of those prisoners? Frankl set out to write a book that analyzed the mindset of the average concentration camp prisoner and how it reflected, adapted to, and either succumbed to or transcended beyond the torments of the camps. He wanted the book to serve as concrete proof that humans can find meaning under any conditions, even the most horrific.

In the narrative, Frankl briefly touches on some principles from his own school of psychology, logotherapy. After its publication, two things happened: the narrative was a big success, and people wanted to know more about logotherapy after reading it. First, Frankl added a very short section on logotherapy, but people still wrote to him for more information. So this edition, published in 1992, had a much more extended section on the therapeutic doctrine.

However, in his career Frankl wrote twenty full volumes in German on logotherapy. Therefore, this summary and even the original book are just a high-level overview of logotherapy, its philosophy and its practices.

The original book is split up into parts I and II, without any further organization. For clarity, we’ve reorganized the content by theme and broken the book down into smaller chapters.

• Part I in the book corresponds to our chapters 1 and 2. First, we’ll go through the psychological phases a concentration camp prisoner went through and the psychological symptoms they suffered in those phases. Then, we’ll discuss how prisoners overcame or resisted those phases.
• Part II in the book corresponds to our chapters 3-6. We’ll learn about meaning, how to find it, some philosophical challenges in seeking meaning, and some concrete tips from logotherapy to combat anxiety.

Chapter 1: The Psychological Journey of a Concentration Camp Prisoner

Frankl observed that the psychological journey of a concentration camp prisoner went through 3 basic phases and 3 accompanying symptoms:

• Following their admission into the camp, the primary symptom was shock.
• When they became well entrenched in camp routine, the primary symptom was apathy.
• Following their release and liberation, the primary symptom was depersonalization.

Phase 1: Admission + Shock

Emotional or psychological shock occurs when we encounter situations that are too stressful for us to process immediately. Shock can manifest in a variety of ways, but the main category Frankl discussed is abnormal reactions.

Humans react abnormally to abnormal situations. In other words, when we encounter a stressful situation, we have reactions that often contradict the situation, like laughing at a funeral. Abnormal reactions to abnormal circumstances are actually normal and expected reactions. In fact, the more normal you are, the more abnormal your reactions to abnormal circumstances are.

Frankl refers to four abnormal reactions: delusions of reprieve, humor, curiosity, and lack of fear.

• Delusions of reprieve: We hope for a good outcome in situations, even when there’s lots of evidence to the contrary.
  • Example: Frankl was sent to the concentration camps with 1500 other people by train. When their train arrived at Auschwitz, a small group of current prisoners boarded the train. They were all shaved and in typical prison uniform--but looked healthy, ruddy complexioned, well-fed, and seemed to have good attitudes.
    • These prisoners were a “specially chosen elite,” kept in good health deliberately to greet the new prisoners and prey on their tendency toward delusions of reprieve. “Everything’s going to be fine here! We’re happy and well-fed, and you will be too!”
• Humor: There was obviously nothing funny about the concentration camps and their reputations, and yet prisoners could be found making jokes about the situation, like how there was at least real water in the showers at the concentration camp.
• Curiosity: Being admitted into a concentration camp forced prisoners to confront their mortality, but instead of feeling anxiety over this, many prisoners found themselves wondering if they’d survive with a detached, almost clinical curiosity.
  • Example: Frankl was in a climbing accident, and at the moment he fell, he wondered if he’d fracture his skull or suffer other injuries, but he didn’t feel fear about the outcome.
• Lack of fear: Despite the fact that many prisoners already knew the high rate of death in concentration camps, in this first phase they weren’t really afraid of death yet, because the reality that they truly might die hadn’t set in.

(Shortform note: Scientists think that our brains use these abnormal reactions to relieve stress, which is why they’re really normal reactions. Stress harms our bodies and our brains, so naturally they fight back.)

This was just an initial reaction. As the days went by, the shock eventually wore off and prisoners ceased their abnormal reactions. Life in the concentration camp became a grim new reality.

Phase 2: Routine + Apathy

Over time, the prisoners began to settle into a kind of routine in the camps--but the routines in this case were merciless and cruel. The prisoners had little choice but to fall into a state of apathy.

Apathy is a protective shell, a defense mechanism that allowed prisoners to reserve their emotional strength for the most important task: preserving their own lives and the lives of others. It’s something like an emotional death, where humans direct our energy towards surviving instead of feeling things.

Prisoners didn’t have the energy to support a stressful emotional inner life--survival mode reduces humans down to a “primitive level,” a regression to the most basic needs in life. Apathy allowed the prisoner to survive regular beatings, malnutrition, death of those around them, and agonizing injustice without losing their minds.

• Example: Frankl worked in a hut for typhus patients in camp, and a patient had just died. First, the other prisoners stripped the body of clothes, food, possessions. Then, a fellow prisoner came to remove the body by dragging it by its feet up two small stairs, the corpse’s head bumping with “an uncanny rattling noise.” Frankl responded to this situation by eating his lunch apathetically.

We find this image disturbing, but Frankl couldn’t afford to be disturbed by it, or he’d miss one of his few small meals of the day. His instinct to survive took priority over any complex emotional response he might have, and left him in a state of apathy.

Phase 3: Liberation + Depersonalization

The first two phases in the concentration camps claimed many lives, through executions or through injury, disease, or suicide. But some prisoners survived the camps and lived to return to life outside the barbed wire fences.

The prisoners weren’t granted a slow return to life--they were freed and immediately let back into the world--and many found it to be a world that was completely different than the one they left behind so many years ago.

• Think of scuba divers and the bends. When a diver has been in the high-pressure deep ocean, she has to swim to the surface very slowly to ensure that air bubbles from the pressure don’t escape into her bloodstream and, at worst, kill her.
• In contrast, the prisoners were released immediately from a situation full of pressure and stress.

We might assume the survivors would be overjoyed to get out of camp and grateful to return to normal life. But the first two phases had taken their toll on the prisoners’ psyches, and they confronted the last psychological symptoms. Moreover, very few prisoners received psychological cafe after their liberation, and they had to contend with the issues themselves.

First, the prisoners felt depersonalization, a psychological state where you feel disconnected from your thoughts and your body. You view yourself from the outside, or feel as if you’re dreaming and not truly present.

The prisoners had been shut off from their emotions for so long that they had difficulty feeling things once they were released, and they had specifically lost the ability to feel positive things.They would gradually have to relearn how to feel positive emotions.

Second, the liberated prisoners felt 3 negative reactions: vengeance, bitterness, and disillusionment.

• Vengeance: the prisoners had suffered immensely, and now they wanted to make others suffer, or didn’t care if others suffered.
  • Frankl and another former prisoner were walking across a field when they came across a batch of fresh, green crops. Frankl wanted to walk around the young crops so they didn’t destroy them; his friend shouted, “Hasn’t enough been taken from us? My wife and child have been gassed--and you would forbid me to tread on a few stalks of oats!”
• Bitterness: People who hadn’t been in the camps claimed they didn’t know what was going on there, or that they too had suffered in their own way. The prisoners wondered why they had suffered through the camps just to be released into a world that didn’t acknowledge or care about their suffering, which led them to feel bitter.
• Disillusionment: Former prisoners often found that the world they’d been so eager to return to was nothing like what they imagined it would be.
  • For example, men and women who survived the concentration camps wanted to find their loved ones again or return to their old lives. But many former prisoners were released only to discover that no one waited for them, or their homes were gone, or their towns were different from what they remembered.

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So now we’ve defined the 3 psychological phases of the prisoners. The concentration camps of WWII were places of abject horror and suffering--and yet sometimes, prisoners resisted the external forces around them and found psychological relief or even joy. How did they do it?

Chapter 2: Methods of Psychological Resistance

In the last chapter, we reviewed the prisoners’ psychological phases. In this chapter, we’ll discuss 3 main methods of resisting psychologically difficult circumstances: inner lives, future goals, and the freedom to choose.

Inner Lives

Humans are one of the few creatures on earth who have inner lives--personal, private, intangible thoughts and feelings that make us individuals. Our inner lives are a psychological place we can retreat to when external circumstances become overwhelming.

Our inner lives are where we can find happiness, even in terrible external circumstances. Frankl offers a few examples of inner life categories:

• Humor: Though humor was one of the abnormal reactions prisoners experienced while in shock, humor could also lift a prisoner’s spirits by allowing them to distance themselves from and rise above the situation, even if only for a few minutes or seconds.
• Art: There were instances of art in the concentration camps. Prisoners hosted improvised cabarets from time to time, with music, poetry, and per our last point, comedy.
• Religion: Religious and spiritual interest of the prisoners deepened during their time in the concentration camps, and prisoners often had improvised religious services in stolen moments and tucked away places.
• Beauty: The beauty of nature intensified for prisoners, and the view of a glowing sunset through the barred windows of a train could remind prisoners of the world outside of the bleak camp.
• Imagination: The imagination can serve as an escape. Frankl would picture mundane scenes from his old life in great detail, which gave him mental respite from the camps.
• Love: Love is a huge facet of our inner lives. Frankl would often picture his wife in great detail to boost his spirits.

Frankl observed a marked difference in well-being between prisoners with rich inner lives and prisoners without: the prisoners who let go of their inner lives succumbed to their surroundings and had a harder time psychologically and less chance of surviving. In fact, physically weaker prisoners sometimes survived camp better than heartier prisoners precisely because these weaker prisoners had been more focused on their inner lives before they were put in camps.

Future Goals

The ability to conceive of future goals helped get many prisoners through their time in the concentration camps.

Nietzsche said, “He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.” When we set goals for our future, we give ourselves things to work towards. In other words, we give ourselves the why. And if these goals have an important meaning for us, we are far more likely to see them through, because the importance motivates us to weather the hard stages to reach our goal.

• Suicide was rampant in the concentration camps, as most prisoners felt they had nothing to live for. Frankl helped two suicidal men set future goals. One of the men had a son who was waiting for him in a foreign country; the second man was a scientist and had a series of books in progress that only he could finish. These future-oriented goals--things to do or people to see that required them to survive--dispelled the men’s ideas of suicide and helped motivate them.

In contrast, prisoners who lost faith in their own future had nothing to keep them going in extremely difficult circumstances.

• Some prisoners admitted that when they arrived at the camps, it felt like they’d already died and had no future. These prisoners would often get lost in retrospection, obsessing over the past. This prevented them from finding any opportunity in the present--as horrible as it was--to feel positive, thus making it harder to continue living.
• Death rates rose significantly around Christmas 1944 and New Year’s 1945--many prisoners had lived with hope that they’d be home by the holidays, and lost that hope as they reached the holidays.

The Freedom to Choose

It may sometimes feel like we’re completely at the mercy of our surroundings--especially in truly difficult circumstances--but that’s not the case. Humans have the freedom to make choices, no matter what the situation is.

Think about terminally ill people. It might seem like they have no choice, and this might be true medically--but they can still choose how to face their illness and what to do with the rest of their time. Sometimes, in circumstances like this, our freedom to choose how we approach something is the only freedom we have left.

• Frankl received a letter from a young invalid who had learned he had no medical options and would die soon--but he’d seen a movie where a man chose to face death with courage, and the invalid now saw his own chance to do the same.

In the concentration camps, prisoners had to continually choose whether to succumb to their horrible surroundings or preserve their inner selves, freedoms, and values.

• Frankl volunteered for medical duties at a concentration camp where there were typhus patients. Even though he risked getting typhus himself and dying, at least his death would have meaning in those circumstances: a doctor trying to save people.

At the very least, we have the freedom to choose how we view a situation, even one of hardship and suffering, and this freedom can’t be taken away from us by external forces

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All three of these methods center around an idea that was already important to Frankl and his psychotherapy career before he entered the concentration camps: the idea of a meaningful life. Our inner lives are built on things we find meaningful; our future goals are often built around what we find meaningful; and by making choices, we affirm what we find meaningful.

Exercise: Choosing in the Face of Powerlessness

Discover choices you can make in a situation that feels like it’s out of your control.

• Think of a situation in your life where you felt powerless, like there weren’t any choices you could make. Briefly summarize the situation, and write about how the powerlessness made you feel.

• Usually, there are concrete choices available to us - we just might not like them. In retrospect, were there any choices available to you, even extreme ones? What made it hard to see those choices, or to go through with them?

• Are you going through a difficult time in your life? If so, could you draw on inner lives, future goals, or freedom to choose to get you through it? Describe how it might help.

Chapter 3: Logotherapy and Meaning

We’ve covered Frankl’s time in the concentration camps and the observations he made about prisoners’ psychological phases and methods of resistance. This inspired him to create logotherapy, his own school of psychology.

Logotherapy has a few core principles:

• Humans are motivated by meaning. We want to know why we’re here, what we’re supposed to do, and if it has any value.
  • Social scientists at Johns Hopkins University asked what college students considered very important to them. In America, you might think money reigns--yet only 16% of the students selected “making a lot of money” as the most important thing to them. 78% selected “finding a purpose and meaning to my life.”
• You should find the true meaning of your life in the world, instead of in your own mind or psyche.
  • Humans, at their best, are capable of transcending their own wants and feelings to work for things outside themselves--a cause they believe in, or a person they love.
  • From a public opinion poll Frankl conducted in France and Vienna: 89% agreed that humans need a reason to live for, and 61% admitted that in their own lives there was a person or thing/belief that they’d be willing to die for.
• Make decisions that will benefit your future self.
  • Live as if you were actually living your second life, and in your first life you had made the choice you’re about to make. Would you choose that again?
  • Another way to think of this: “on my deathbed, will I be happy with the choice I’m about to make?”

We saw these principles in the first part. Prisoners who had a future goal had an easier time surviving than those who didn’t. These future goals were usually meaningful people or meaningful things outside themselves. It was hard to feel like the things happening in the camps had meaning--but working towards something outside themselves and the camps that had great personal meaning to the prisoners gave them more drive to survive.

Of course, we can toss the word “meaning” around, but it’s a heady concept. What is meaning, and more importantly, how do we find it in our lives? To that end, a lot of us find ourselves asking the same question:

What Is The Meaning of Life?

Frankl says we can’t ask the question this way, as though there were one universal answer that should be satisfying to all of us. We can’t generalize what life is. The tasks of life, and consequently the meaning of life, differs for every individual--no two people experience the same life.

• Trying to ask it generally would be like trying to ask a chessmaster what’s the best chess move in the world. Any chessmaster would tell you that it depends on the particular game and the situation in that particular game--there’s no one way to win a chess game, and it depends on your choices and how your opponent reacts to them.

The meaning of life differs from person to person. More than that, every situation in your own life is unique and different from the last situation you encountered, and may require different decisions on your part to shape your fate. So we have to ask this question specific to ourselves at this specific moment: “what is the meaning of my life right now?”

Of course, when we ask “what’s the meaning of life” or “what is the meaning of my life right now,” we want an answer. But life can’t answer you. Life asks you what its meaning is, and you have to answer. We’ll discuss a few paths that can help you find meaning in the next chapter, but Frankl offers a few big-picture truths about meaning that we should keep in mind.

• There is potential meaning in every individual situation that we face in our lives, and every situation is another opportunity to choose to do things or see things in a way that is meaningful.
  • A movie is made up of thousands of singular images that string together to form a whole. Each of the images has a meaning on its own, but you don’t know the meaning of the whole movie until you reach the end. But of course you can’t skip to the end and understand the movie without seeing all the thousands of images that lead up to it.
  • Life is the same way: we won’t understand the meaning of our lives until we’re on our deathbeds, so we need to make sure our choices leading up to that moment culminate in a life we can be proud of.
  • (Shortform example: for instance, sitting on the couch next to your partner watching TV might not seem that meaningful--but it might become super meaningful in hindsight if tomorrow you suddenly couldn’t do that anymore. Acknowledging that every moment has potential meaning for us can push us to make every moment meaningful. Maybe tonight you want to reflect on how meaningful it is just to get to relax in front of the TV with someone you care about.)
• There is meaning in our lives even when we are suffering, and we always have the freedom to choose how we handle our suffering.
  • A large number of captives in the Vietnam war reported viewing their captivity as a growth experience, despite it being similar to concentration camps in the high level of suffering.
• Finding the meaning in your life is no easy task--this book wouldn’t be so popular if it was. It takes some struggle and some conflict to discover your purpose. But conflict doesn’t have to be negative--conflict, or tension, can be healthy and normal.
  • Inner tension pushes us to discover answers, and is how we improve ourselves, reach goals, and accomplish things--in other words, not only is this tension inherent to our lives, but it’s actually necessary for good mental health.
  • Feel the tension between what you have already achieved, and what you are able to accomplish; between what you are, and what you should become. This is a healthy tension. The meaning calls to you and waits for you to fulfill it. You shouldn’t feel that there is a final answer that will put you to rest.
  • (Shortform note: Think of a pendulum--when the pendulum is in motion, two opposing points essentially pull it from one point to the other. There is tension between these two points, and the tension is necessary to keep the pendulum moving.)
  • In fact, it’s dangerous to equate good mental health with perfect balance or no tension, because that’s not an achievable state. Good mental health is about how you approach or handle the tension in your life, not about removing all tension forever.
  • Logotherapy refers to this constructive tension as noö-dynamics, from the Greek word noös, meaning “mind.”

Humans need to struggle to achieve worthy goals that we’ve set for ourselves and that mean something to us--this gives our life meaning. But if it were so easy to do, you’d have done it already. In the next chapter, we’ll give you some ways to start discovering what you find meaningful.

Exercise: Think On Your Deathbed

Start thinking about the meaning of your life right now.

• You’re on your deathbed and looking back on your life. What do you hope to see in your life? Cover all the major areas that are important to you.

• What choices are you currently making to create that life now? What changes could you make to start heading in that direction?

Chapter 4: Paths to Find Meaning

The last chapter covered the importance of meaning in our lives. But what are some ways we can start to discover our meaning? Logotherapy gives us 3 different paths.

• By performing a deed or creating something--taking action.
• By coming into contact with someone or experiencing something.
• By experiencing unavoidable suffering, and the attitude we take toward it.

The First Path - Actions

We can discover our life’s purpose through the deeds we perform or the things we create, depending on whether we find them to be meaningful.

(Shortform note: Frankl doesn’t spend much time talking about this path, so we’ll fill in the gaps. The rest of this section comes from our research into logotherapy.)

This path focuses on external situations and external realities. We can do things in the world or create things in the world that help us discover and reinforce our meaning.

For instance, usually the people who are happiest in their jobs are the ones who have connected their actions to a meaning that’s important to them, and they usually perform better in their jobs as well.

Let’s use teaching as an example. The best teachers are often the ones who truly believe that their deeds help shape future generations, and who work to fulfill that purpose. Teachers who find no meaning in educating young people are often not the best teachers, because they lack the drive to do it well, as it serves no purpose.

There are a lot of external rewards bound up in this category that can provide immediate gratification as well as deeper meaning. If you routinely win teaching awards at your school, it’s clear that other people consider your actions meaningful.

But it’s easy to get wrapped up in this external gratification, which you should avoid. You can’t make your purpose to win teaching awards, or what you seek becomes public opinion, not your own purpose. That’ll set you up for failure in terms of meaning--since every person has to decide their own meaning, we can’t let others and their praise decide what’s meaningful to us.

This idea applies to more abstract, less practical jobs or positions as well. For example, the most renowned artists--a less practical job than teaching, perhaps--are the ones who created things that worked towards a purpose, whatever theirs might have been.

• Some people might view Andy Warhol’s pop art as exercises in meaningless recreation--but Warhol was deeply interested in the idea of commercial success, and it’s obvious from his work he was driven to fulfill his purpose of questioning art and artistry in relation to everyday objects or activities, or celebrities.

The Second Path - Love

You can derive just as much meaning from an experience as you can from an achievement. This is comforting because it places as much weight on our inner world of personal experience as it does on the outer world of achievement, which is sometimes out of your control.

Positive experiences can help us discover the meaning of our lives, whether it’s through the experiences of beauty, truth, goodness, nature, or culture, or even experiencing other humans in their individuality. These experiences rely on a feeling of love. Romance and sex are forms of love, but love in this context is broader than romantic love--it’s the experience of togetherness, either with a romantic partner, friends and family, or even with nature and culture.

• Through love, we can see another person’s essential qualities and traits--but more than that, through love we can also see their potential--things they might be capable of that they just haven’t actualized yet.
• Love also lets us help our loved ones realize their potential, because we see what they’re capable of and can share it with them, increasing their options and then supporting them as they work to make those potentialities into realities.
• When we find true togetherness with a romantic partner, we feel like our lives are aligned: we feel seen and accepted, challenged and supported, taken care of and driven to take care of our partner.

The people we love can give us great meaning in our lives--it’s why so many parents work hard to give their kids a better life, why spouses are willing to sacrifice things to keep their partners happy.

But we can feel this togetherness with nature, too: on a beautiful hike, we feel connected to the world, we see it and appreciate it, we feel grateful for it and driven to take care of it. Loving things beyond people--the natural world, an art form, a subset of animals--can also help us decide the meaning of our life, because we feel that “ultimate togetherness” with another thing, and feel a responsibility to protect, improve, or contribute to that thing.

The Third Path - Suffering

As much as we can discover our life’s meaning through positive things, we can also find meaning in the negative, specifically through suffering.

Much suffering is unavoidable in human life--we’re going to lose loved ones, experience losses, and one day die ourselves--but if we view it as a challenge to overcome, something to do with dignity and bravery, then life can have meaning up until our last moments.

Suffering can be an achievement in the way we handle it (and remember, achievements are another path to discovering your meaning).

This is an especially important concept for Americans, who often feel pressure to be happy and avoid unhappiness and suffering. This pressure makes us ashamed of unhappiness and suffering, instead of supporting logotherapy’s view that suffering can be noble, something to be proud of--if it has meaning. Also, sometimes fixating on being happy makes it harder for us to achieve it.

Note we’re not saying that all suffering is unavoidable, and that you should suffer on purpose. Suffering is NOT necessary to find meaning in your life. If the suffering can be avoided, we should remove the cause of our suffering--otherwise it becomes masochistic.

It’s crucial that suffering should be unavoidable if we’re going to find meaning in it. Specifically, if the suffering is unavoidable, the situation seems hopeless, and our fate can’t be changed--this is when life challenges us to change ourselves.

If we can find meaning in suffering, then that means life has meaning unconditionally. No matter what situation you’re in, your life has meaning.

• A lot of concentration camp prisoners worried that if they didn’t survive the camps, then all their suffering would be meaningless--as if to continue living is the ultimate meaning.
• In contrast, Frankl hoped that their suffering had meaning regardless of something as “happenstance” as survival. Logically, if suffering has no meaning unless you survive, then that ultimately means that life has no meaning, since eventually we all die.

There are 3 main forms of suffering--pain, guilt, and death--and there are 3 corresponding ways to find meaning in suffering:

• Change personal suffering into personal triumphs. Once we find meaning in our suffering, it almost ceases to be suffering. This is closer to the idea of sacrifice.
  • An elderly man came to Frankl with severe depression. His wife had died two years earlier, and she had been his purpose, the person through whom he found meaning in his life. Frankl asked, “What would have happened...if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive with you?” The elderly man replied that it would have been terrible, she would have suffered just as much as he suffered now. So Frankl pointed out that the man’s suffering did indeed have a purpose--it saved his beloved from suffering herself. This changed the way the elderly man viewed his suffering, and he was able to move beyond his depression.
• Use guilt about past actions to help us improve future actions.
  • Logotherapy can help reform prisoners. Often, convicts blame other things for their crimes--society, other conditions, or even the victims of the crime. But logotherapy asserts that criminals had the freedom to commit a crime, and that they also then have the freedom to learn from the guilt, rise above it, and change for the better. In a small sample, logotherapy was able to reduce recidivism significantly.
• Let life’s transitoriness--the fact that we’ll die--inspire us to take action responsibly.
  • Our lives are irreversible, but making a decision delivers it safely to the past, where it is permanently stored. Our pasts become fields of harvest for our actions. The goal is to reach the end of your life and look back fondly on the fruits of your decisions: your deeds, the people you loved, and even the sufferings you’ve courageously endured.

Sometimes, we can experience suffering so great that it seems like there can’t be any purpose or meaning in it. Many concentration camp prisoners felt this way. But what if there were purposes beyond our ability to comprehend? This is the idea of a super-meaning: that there might be a purpose to our lives that we are totally unaware of and can never be aware of.

And perhaps we can find some comfort in the idea that it actually might be beyond our intellectual capacity to understand the purpose or the meaning of our suffering.

• Animals are often used in medical testing to help study diseases and find cures. Objectively, they suffer through repeated injections, physical discomfort, and sometimes death--but their suffering can have great meaning for us as humans. Would those animals be able to comprehend the meaning in their suffering?
• Likewise, is it not possible that our suffering could have meaning that we can’t even conceive of, even if it has meaning on a higher level we can’t comprehend?

Exercise: The 3 Paths to Meaning

Logotherapy lays out 3 paths that can help you discover meaning in your life. Instead of treating them as hypothetical paths, let’s examine them as concrete questions about where you find meaning.

• List 3 achievements, accomplishments, things you created, or deeds you’ve done in your life that you’re proud of. Write down why you’re proud to have done those things, and why you believe them to be meaningful.

• List 2 people or things in your life you love deeply. Would you be willing to make a large sacrifice for those 2 things? Why or why not?

• Write about 1 situation in your life that caused or causes you suffering. Were you able to find meaning in that suffering? If so, what was it? If not, look back at your previous responses--can you relate your suffering to a purpose that connects with one of those answers?

Chapter 5: Challenges in Finding Meaning

The last chapter reviewed a few ways to find meaning in your life. But if it sounds easy, it isn’t--many people get frustrated in their pursuit of meaning. It is, after all, a lot of responsibility to bear, and the responsibility rests solely on your shoulders.

Just as every individual is unique and has her own unique purpose, every generation has its own unique psychological obsession, and for us right now, it’s a form of nihilism, or the belief that life is meaningless.

• This could be because of determinism: we think our outcomes are already decided for us, so what meaning is there to find in something we can’t change?
• It could also be because life is transitory--we’re going to die anyway, so what meaning can there possibly be?

Let’s learn more about nihilism, how we suffer from it, and why.

Nihilism

Again, nihilism is the belief that life is meaningless. The nihilism we suffer from today is a personal, private one that each individual suffers alone. After all, there can be little camaraderie in the idea that everything’s meaningless.

Logotherapy calls our specific nihilism existential frustration. People generally get existentially frustrated in 3 different ways:

• They’re frustrated with existence in and of itself, specifically the human existence.
  • Frustration with everything it takes to exist as a human from moment to moment, i.e. “why do I have to do all this?”
• They’re frustrated with the meaning of existence.
  • Asking why humans exist at all and for what purpose, i.e. “why are we here at all?”
• They’re frustrated with the meaning of their personal existence.
  • Someone struggling to find the purpose and meaning of their own life, “i.e. what am I here for?”

Once you fall into one of those frustrations, you can start to feel empty, distant, and aimless, and it gets harder to pull yourself out of this emotional place. Logotherapy refers to this place as an existential vacuum.

• This was a significant phenomenon of the 20th century: a survey at the time of the 1992 edition showed that 25% of Frankl’s European students felt frustrated by existence and questioned their life’s meaning. Among Frankl’s American students, the percentage was an overwhelming 60%. And it’s not like it’s decreased in the 21st century.

Our frustrations with existence primarily surface when we’re bored. “Sunday Neurosis” is a depression that affects people who get through a very busy week only to reach Sunday and, in their boredom, realize how discontent they are with their lives, that there’s some inner void that isn’t filled. And, of course, with the continuing rise of automation, many of our day-to-day purposes will be stripped from us--robots will do our jobs. That plus extended life expectancies mean that we might hopefully have many years of old age when we don’t have a larger societal purpose like a job.

Prolonged existential frustration can lead to depression, aggression, addiction, or neuroses, which are mental fixations that result in different symptoms of stress.

• Depression and even suicide are tied to a feeling of meaninglessness, and get worse the longer someone remains in this existential vacuum.
• Abuses of power can be tied back to this existential frustration--someone who’s frustrated with their own life will often become numb to other people’s suffering, or, worse, want to cause others suffering to assuage their own.
• A study of alcoholics found that 90% suffered from a feeling of meaninglessness. Another studied drug addicts and found 100% of them agreed “things seem meaningless.”

You might be wondering how we got here--what could cause a generation-wide existential vacuum? Paradoxically, it could be the improvement of living conditions and freedom of choice.

• Early human ancestors had animal instincts - to survive, eat and drink, find shelter, and procreate. This innate behavior made a lot of automatic decisions, and there wasn’t much need (or ability) to think about a greater meaning.
• In early human history, as we developed intelligence and rational thinking, we broke ties with some of our most basic animal instincts. As society advanced, tradition took the place of biology as the driving factor behind our decisions.
  • For example, in many societies, it was tradition that men worked and women took care of the home--this tradition effectively decided what both men and women should do with their lives, preventing an aimless search for meaning.

But now, with modernization and greater freedom of choice, we’ve lost touch with a lot of old human traditions that guided our behavior. There is no more instinct or tradition telling us what to do. Now we have to decide for ourselves what to do, and often we don’t know what that is - which leads to a lack of meaning.

Logotherapy gives us a framework to help us resist nihilism: if we assume life has meaning and our primary drive is to find that meaning, then it becomes about how to find that meaning instead of questioning whether a meaning exists at all. In Frankl’s opinion, logotherapy is a better way of dealing with nihilism than the more traditional and well-known psychotherapy.

• Psychotherapy, Sigmund Freud’s school of thought that asserted humans are driven by pleasure, is a reflective therapy: it suggests that our current behaviors are determined by our past experiences, and by reflecting on our pasts we can figure out what we’re seeking in the present.
  • Because it’s reflective, it wouldn’t be able to effectively deal with this nihilism--if we found experiences in our past that made us believe life was meaningless, reflecting on those experiences would only reinforce that idea, it wouldn’t work to change it.
  • Worse, psychotherapy would attribute the nihilism to external factors, or things outside ourselves--this would reinforce most patients’ nihilistic views, that we’re merely pawns of our biological, psychological, and social conditioning. It assumes a kind of determinism--that everything is already determined for us by external factors.

Determinism

Determinism is the belief that humans aren’t free to make active choices because everything’s been determined for us by biology or other external factors. This idea is more dangerous when paired with nihilism, because it further reduces our power as individuals and makes it pointless to try to find a meaning to our lives.

Logotherapy believes that humans are a self-determining species. We are constantly deciding what our existence will be and what we’ll do next. And, as we saw in the first section, humans have shown time after time that they are capable of rising beyond their circumstances and conditioning to improve life and themselves for the better.

• Frankl’s experiences in the concentration camps reinforced that humans are free to make choices that help them survive even the worst of influences or conditions.

The Passing of Time

Life is transitory, meaning it’s not permanent. We’re all going to die someday, and this knowledge can increase our frustration with existence, both because it can cause us to question the point of everything if we just die anyway, and because it can put the pressure of time on our search for meaning.

Life is also full of possibilities, and these are also transitory. They can’t all be permanent realities; we have to choose. This is another part of what makes it so hard to determine our meaning--there are so many options!

But just because life is transitory doesn’t make it meaningless--because life is transitory, it actually reinforces our responsibility to find meaning in the moments of our lives. Once we make a choice, we create a reality and do away with the other possibilities--so the choices we make are stored in the past. In this sense, our past choices are saved from the transitoriness of life. The choices we make will be immortalized in our past. Nothing can be undone or changed--we can only use the information to change our choices in the future.

Some might view this as pessimistic, the idea that we can’t change our past. But logotherapy is activistic, or centered around actions, and future-oriented, not past-dwelling.

• A pessimist might cross the days off her calendar with fear and sadness--time is passing, and she’ll die.
• An activist will mark the days and file it away with all the days before it, jotting notes down and reflecting on her past. Once she grows old, she won’t envy young people--who are full of possibilities and transitoriness--but instead she’ll be proud of the results in her past.

Chapter 6: Using Logotherapy to Combat Anxiety

Feeling like life is meaningless, thinking our choices have already been determined for us, and worrying about death can all cause feelings of anxiety over the meaning of our lives. Anxiety is a difficult feeling to break out of--by its very nature, anxiety is a feedback loop that keeps us fixated on the very thing that’s causing us anxiety. What can we do to face it down and help us break the cycle?

Frankl mentions two specific forms of anxiety, and logotherapy has two corresponding techniques to help you combat these forms.

Hyper-intention anxiety is intense fixation on either yourself or something you want, which usually prevents you from achieving your desired goal precisely because you’re trying to force it to happen.

• For instance, when you wake up in the middle of the night and try to force yourself to go back to sleep, very often the hyper-intention to sleep causes you to stay up longer.

Anticipatory anxiety is where you fear something bad happening, and the fear itself causes the very thing to happen.

• For instance, someone who’s self-conscious about sweating too much when they’re nervous will get nervous, start to sweat, then get anxious about sweating too much, which increases their stress level and causes them to sweat more.

Though these are 2 different types of anxiety, they usually result in the same outcome, and it’s rarely a good outcome.

• An example from the book: the more a person tries to orgasm during sex, the less likely they are to actually orgasm--but conversely, the more afraid someone is of not orgasming during sex, the more likely their fear will come true. Same result, but different anxieties.

Logotherapy values taking concrete action over philosophizing, and there are two concrete steps you can take to help break these anxiety cycles: dereflection and paradoxical intention.

• Dereflection helps you focus on something bigger than or outside of yourself, which inadvertently helps you achieve your goals. This is one way to respond to hyper-intention.
  • The book gives an example of a woman who was having difficulty orgasming during sex with her partner. She’d been sexually abused as a child and had read research about all the sexual problems she was going to have as a survivor, so during sex she kept fixating on herself and waiting for those problems to arise.
  • Frankl helped the woman move the attention from herself to an external object--her partner. By focusing on her partner, she took the pressure and hyper-intention off herself and was able to orgasm.
• Paradoxical intention has you consciously intend to do the thing you’re afraid of. This is one way to respond to anticipatory anxiety.
  • A doctor was anxious about how much he sweated. If he thought he was going to sweat, he got so anxious about it that he sweated profusely anyway.
  • To break the patient of this cycle, Frankl told the doctor to aim for a paradoxical intention: to sweat as much as possible when he was anxious about sweating. Whenever the doctor felt anxious about perspiring, he flipped the narrative and thought, “If they thought I was sweaty last week, I’m going to sweat at least ten quarts right now!” Of course, when he tried to sweat, he couldn’t do it.

Both dereflection and paradoxical intention require you to reorient your purpose and look outside yourself, which is directly in keeping with logotherapy’s principles.

Exercise: Combating Anxiety

Try to break out of hyper-intention or anticipatory anxiety.

• What’s something in your life that’s causing you anxiety? Describe how that anxiety feels--is it hyper-intention (focusing on yourself or something you want to do) or anticipatory anxiety (worrying that something bad will happen in the future)?

• If it’s hyper-intention, try looking at the bigger picture--is there a person you care about who’s involved, or a purpose that’s important that connects to the issue? Find something outside yourself or the thing you want that you could focus on. | If it’s anticipatory anxiety, form your own paradoxical intention and write it here.

Exercise: Integrate Your Takeaways

Now that you’ve finished the summary of Man’s Search for Meaning, reflect on what you've learned.

• What sticks with you the most from the book? What’s your biggest takeaway?

• Think of a time in your own life when you’d have benefitted from knowing this takeaway--what was the situation, and why would this takeaway have helped?

• What change could you make in your life right now to help you integrate this takeaway into your existence? (For example, if your biggest takeaway is that every situation has meaning, maybe you could start a journal where you write down one meaningful thing that happened per day.)