Existentialist Psychiatrist, Auschwitz Survivor Viktor Frankl Explains How to Find Meaning in Life, No Matter What Challenges You Face

Free will often seems like noth­ing more than a cru­el illu­sion. We don’t get to choose the times, places, and cir­cum­stances of our birth, nor do we have much con­trol over the state of our states, regions, or nations. Even the few who can design con­di­tions such that they are always secure and com­fort­able find them­selves unavoid­ably sub­ject to what Bud­dhists call the “divine mes­sen­gers” of sick­ness, aging, and death. Biol­o­gy may not be des­tiny, but it is a force more pow­er­ful than many of our best inten­tions. And though most of us in the West have the priv­i­lege of liv­ing far away from war zones, mil­lions across the world face extrem­i­ties we can only imag­ine, and to which we are not immune by any stretch.

Among all of the psy­chi­a­trists, philoso­phers, and reli­gious fig­ures who have wres­tled with these uni­ver­sal truths about the human con­di­tion, per­haps none has been put to the test quite like neu­rol­o­gist and psy­chother­a­pist Vik­tor Fran­kl, who sur­vived Auschwitz, but lost his moth­er, father, broth­er, and first wife to the camps.

While impris­oned, he faced what he described as “an unre­lent­ing strug­gle for dai­ly bread and for life itself.” After his camp was lib­er­at­ed in 1945, Fran­kl pub­lished an extra­or­di­nary book about his expe­ri­ences: Man’s Search for Mean­ing, “a strange­ly hope­ful book,” writes Matthew Scul­ly at First Things, “still a sta­ple on the self-help shelves” though it is “inescapably a book about death.” The book has seen dozens of edi­tions in dozens of lan­guages and ranks 9th on a list of most influ­en­tial books.

Fran­kl’s the­sis echoes those of many sages, from Bud­dhists to Sto­ics to his 20th cen­tu­ry Exis­ten­tial­ist con­tem­po­raries: “Every­thing can be tak­en from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s atti­tude in any giv­en set of cir­cum­stances, to choose one’s own way.” Not only did he find hope and mean­ing in the midst of ter­ri­ble suf­fer­ing, but after his unimag­in­able loss, he “remar­ried, wrote anoth­er twen­ty-five books, found­ed a school of psy­chother­a­py, built an insti­tute bear­ing his name in Vien­na,” and gen­er­al­ly lived a long, hap­py life. How? The inter­view above will give you some idea. Fran­kl main­tains that we always have some free­dom of choice, “in spite of the worst con­di­tions,” and there­fore always have the abil­i­ty to seek for mean­ing. “Peo­ple are free,” says Fran­kl, no mat­ter their lev­el of oppres­sion, and are respon­si­ble “for mak­ing some­one or some­thing out of them­selves.”

Fran­kl’s pri­ma­ry achieve­ment as a psy­chother­a­pist was to found the school of “logother­a­py,” a suc­ces­sor to Freudi­an psy­cho­analy­sis and Adler­ian indi­vid­ual psy­chol­o­gy. Draw­ing on Exis­ten­tial­ist phi­los­o­phy (Fran­kl’s book was pub­lished in Ger­many with the alter­nate title From Con­cen­tra­tion Camp to Exis­ten­tial­ism)—but turn­ing away from an obses­sion with the Absurd—his approach, writes his insti­tute, “is based on three philo­soph­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal con­cepts… Free­dom of Will, Will to Mean­ing, and Mean­ing in Life.”

You can hear how Fran­kl works these prin­ci­ples into his phi­los­o­phy in the fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view, as well as in the short clip above from an ear­li­er lec­ture, in which he rails against a crude and ulti­mate­ly unful­fill­ing form of mean­ing-mak­ing: the pur­suit of wealth. Even us mate­ri­al­is­tic Amer­i­cans, renowned for our greed, Fran­kl notes with good humor, respond to sur­veys in over­whelm­ing num­bers say­ing our great­est desire is to find mean­ing and pur­pose in life. Like no oth­er sec­u­lar voice, Fran­kl was con­fi­dent that we could do so, in spite of life’s seem­ing chaos, through—as he explains above—a kind of ide­al­ism that brings us clos­er to real­i­ty.

Note: You can down­load Fran­kl’s major book, “Man’s Search for Mean­ing,” as a free audio book if you join Audi­ble’s 30-Day Free Tri­al pro­gram. Find details on that here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cre­ativ­i­ty, Not Mon­ey, is the Key to Hap­pi­ness: Dis­cov­er Psy­chol­o­gist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s The­o­ry of “Flow”

Albert Ein­stein Tells His Son The Key to Learn­ing & Hap­pi­ness is Los­ing Your­self in Cre­ativ­i­ty (or “Find­ing Flow”)

The Phi­los­o­phy of Kierkegaard, the First Exis­ten­tial­ist Philoso­pher, Revis­it­ed in 1984 Doc­u­men­tary

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness