Frankl: "Man's Search For Meaning"

Victor Frankl’s seminal work “Man’s Search for Meaning” has sold over 12 millions of copies since its original publication in 1959, and I would say deservedly so. Frankl writes about his experiences in various Nazi death camps, and later became a psychological theorist, outlining what he calls logotherapy, maintaining that our primary drive in life is not for pleasure (alla Freud) or power (alla Adler), but finds the “striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man” (p. 99). Frankl handles the difficult task of outlining how meaning must also be found in suffering. He writes: “In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning such as the meaning of a sacrifice” (p. 113). Although Frankl was a Jew, I can’t read that last sentence without thinking of Jesus, a man certainly familiar with sorrow and suffering. A few pages later, I find resonance with Frankl again: “What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms” (p. 118). I find it tremendously powerful that it was during, through, and after experiencing the death camps that Frankl writes about this meaningfulness, and I believe it’s impossible to live a life devoid of any sense of meaning. Even for those existential philosophers waxing eloquent about life’s meaninglessness, one must wonder how they live with such a worldview and why they spend so much effort in stating that life has no meaning. If that really is the case, what is the meaning in explaining life’s meaninglessness?

Frankl also writes that “when we are no longer able to change a situation…we are challenged to change ourselves” (p. 112, italics mine). Now there’s a bite worth swallowing. This has ramifications for me as a counselor (it’s ironic how the client wants you to change everyone around them but themselves), but I can’t neglect what it means for me personally. We all want things in the world to change. At least I hope we all do. And I don’t actually think that’s a problem (what if we thought everything was just as it should be and nothing should be changed?), but I have to recognize that I might just be part of the problem too. I’ve been painting this summer, and overall, I enjoy the work. I’m not the fastest painter, and I’m certainly not the best painter, but I think I work hard and try my best. But I keep getting paint all over myself: my clothes, my hair, my legs, my arms. The other day I came home to take a shower, and when I took of my shirt, there was paint on my chest, and I was thoroughly confused as to how it found its way under my shirt. Well, here’s the deal: I can keep getting confused, can keep changing my clothes and taking a shower, or I can do something truly remarkable--I can change the way I paint. It’s only in becoming better as a painter (refined, if you will) that I’ll ever find myself with a little less paint on my body. You may roll your eyes at my little analogy, but you try getting all that oil paint off of your chest and then come back and tell me you don’t want to bother to just change yourself and the way you paint.