I won’t be spending too much time* on Viktor Frankl’s Livet måste ha mening (translated from German and English by Margareta Edgardh), and that will more be focused on how the book is discussed in a broader context than the content of the book itself. Bluntly put, I’m not diplomatic enough to feel confident leveraging criticism against a Holocaust memoir. It feels more appropriate to discuss the context around it.
I usually hear this book described as Frankl’s account of “psychological discoveries” that he made while in a concentration camp, usually given as Auschwitz, and the best historical evidence seems to suggest this was not the case. It’s more likely that he had already refined his idea about meaning and logotherapy as a civilian, and that it was a pre-established framework for dealing with the horrors rather than an inspired response to them.
While Frankl refers to Auschwitz several times, he was only held in depot there a few days before being sent to Dachau (he also spent time at Thereseinstadt). The bulk of the testimony he provides, therefore, comes from those two camps and not Auschwitz. It feels petty to name this, because it’s not like any of the concentration camps were luxury resorts, but neither Dachau nor Thereseinstadt were built to be the kind of murder factory that Auschwitz was designed to be. This isn’t to say that people didn’t die there, because they absolutely did—but Auschwitz was next level. Indeed, one of the few (perhaps only) times Frankl brings up Dachau, he specifically describes the relief of himself and his fellow prisoners at being sent there because they know their chances for survival will be much greater than at Auschwitz.
If you go into the book knowing this facet of Frankl’s biography (which I did), you can’t help but be struck by his presentation of things. He’s certainly honest about being sent away from Auschwitz, like I mentioned, but the timeline is quite muddied and Dachau itself can’t be mentioned by name more than once or twice; in a couple of other places he only makes oblique reference to “the camp where I was freed.” Auschwitz, on the other hand, comes up over and over again. A dozen, two dozen times at least.
(Timothy Pytell goes into this in detail on his blog as well as his biography of Frankl, Viktor Frankl’s Search for Meaning.)
Given that, I think the takeaway people have from this book is that the horrors of Auschwitz led Frankl to develop his theory. That’s the context I was referring to earlier, and I think it’s a misunderstanding of what the book is. I also think this misunderstanding is a driving factor behind Livet måste ha mening‘s perennial, perpetual success. A therapist recommended it to me, for crying out loud.
I also don’t think Frankl’s idea of logotherapy, with meaning as the underlying driver, is as universally applicable as he presents it. First of all, his biography seems to flatly contradict his main thesis. Frankl periodically comes back to his drive to recover his lost psychology treatise as the “meaning-maker” (my word, not his) that fueled his will to live, that allowed him to survive the camps. But in just as many places he mentions how the favor of the barracks capo had saved him from certain doom, or how sheer dumb luck kept him from ending up in the wrong shipment, wrong train car, wrong work detail, etc. Neither of those had anything to do with his meaning, or even anything under his control.
The tension between meaning and luck aside, meaning according to logotherapy rests on three pillars, or rather is derived from at least one of the following options: accomplishing a great feat, experiencing something sublime (it seems to be love for another person, but sometimes the language Frankl uses, at least in translation, makes it sound like “an experience” could count), or suffering. The first two seem harmless enough (though I wonder, does a stalker in the throes of obsession have a sound, morally acceptable meaning to their life, when the object of their focus might well be living in terror? hm), but telling my loved ones with chronic pain to find some vague, muddy “meaning” to their suffering would land somewhere between insulting, condescending, infuriating and ignorant. I would never dream of it. It doesn’t help, either, that Frankl is very vague on what “meaning” is. Fair enough that we all have to find it for ourselves, but it would be nice to have a definition or examples or guiding prompts or something.
He throws us a couple bones, at least, when it comes to suffering. One example is a young man who becomes paralyzed after a diving accident at 17 and decides to study psychology as a result, obtaining a degree and son. According to Frankl, the young man assured him that he would have never pursued psychology otherwise, and that he found his life so much more rewarding and enriching than it was before. To my mind, that doesn’t seem like meaning in suffering, but meaning from a great feat. The great feat just happened to be preceded (and perhaps caused?) by great suffering. The other example is a grieving rabbi who survived the Holocaust, while his wife and children did not. According to Frankl, the rabbi came to therapy distraught at the idea that he would be unable to be reunited with his loved ones in the afterlife because they died a martyr’s death, elevating them above whatever death he can hope to achieve.* Frankl then suggests that surely the suffering the rabbi is experiencing now on Earth is something that will purify him and make him worthy of seeing his loved ones again. The rabbi thanks him and leaves Frankl’s office with a new framework for his grief (so we are told). While I think this is a much better example of meaning in suffering, it’s still meaning predicated on particular religious ideas, including about the afterlife. It was the right answer to suffering for a religious Jewish man, and Frankl was wise to make that connection, but there’s no way pointing to the afterlife or God can be the right answer for everyone. Obviously it doesn’t work for atheists; it also doesn’t work for belief systems where memories and consciousness don’t survive death.
So in addition to being uncomfortable with the popular misunderstanding of Livet måste ha mening‘s factual origins, I also have to admit to being uncomfortable with the advice and life philosophy Frankl advocates for, since it seems to me they can easily be irrelevant, or even do as much harm as good. Indeed, a member of my philosophy study group found a study suggesting that meaning, even as Frankl describes it, might in some cases be a net negative:
The findings have demonstrated that search for meaning appears to be uniformly harmful with relation to overall burnout and its composite dimensions.
I’m glad I read it, I guess, because now I can say that I have. Now I know what one of the twentieth century’s most popular self-help books contains, for whatever that’s worth. Mostly it reminded me that we read Elie Wiesel’s Night in ninth grade, and that I don’t remember much about it except that I didn’t like it. I wonder if I might feel differently about it now.
*The final wordcount of this blog post determined that this statement was a lie.
**This is my memory of Frankl’s description. I’m not read up enough on Jewish theology to know exactly what I’m talking about or to know if Frankl’s getting it right, either.
