You may still suf­fer from painful mem­o­ries of hav­ing had to read Jacques Lacan in school, but look past all that ver­biage about, say, desire’s “fren­zied mock­ing of the abyss of the infi­nite, the secret col­lu­sion with which it envelops the plea­sure of know­ing and of dom­i­nat­ing with jouis­sance,” and you can find real insights into human­i­ty. The ani­mat­ed primer from Alain de Bot­ton’s School of Life just above will give you a clear sense — a much clear­er sense than any you might get from Lacan’s own prose — of what “the great­est French psy­cho­an­a­lyst of the 20th cen­tu­ry” under­stood about us all.

This video, as well as Lacan’s entry in The Book of Life, breaks the man’s thought down into three parts. First, iden­ti­ty: fol­low­ing his fas­ci­na­tion with the dis­tinc­tive­ly human expe­ri­ence of rec­og­niz­ing one’s own image, Lacan ulti­mate­ly sug­gests that “we accept that oth­er peo­ple sim­ply won’t ever expe­ri­ence us the way we expe­ri­ence our­selves; that we will be almost entire­ly mis­un­der­stood – and will in turn deeply mis­un­der­stand.” Sec­ond, love: though giv­en to grand state­ments such as “Men and women don’t exist,” Lacan com­pre­hend­ed “the extent to which we don’t tru­ly com­pre­hend our lovers and sim­ply peg a range of fan­tasies drawn from child­hood expe­ri­ences to their phys­i­cal forms,” which sup­ports the emi­nent­ly prac­ti­cal advice “not to be upset when we don’t feel a per­fect rap­port with some­one who ini­tial­ly seemed a soul­mate.”

The third part deals with the are­na in which Lacan’s writ­ings remain most often con­sid­ered: pol­i­tics. He came into his own as an inter­na­tion­al “intel­lec­tu­al celebri­ty” in the 1960s, the time of “the sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion, great inter­est in com­mu­nism, and lots of protests.” But he actu­al­ly took a dim­mer view of all that agi­ta­tion than many, telling those stu­dent pro­test­ers chomp­ing at the bit to remake soci­ety that “What you aspire to as rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies is a new mas­ter. You will get one.” He saw ear­ly on what we still see in every elec­tion cycle: that “we desire to have some­one else in charge who can make every­thing OK, some­one who is, in a sense, an ide­al par­ent – and we bring this pecu­liar-sound­ing bit of our psy­cho­log­i­cal fan­tasies into the way we nav­i­gate pol­i­tics.”

You can watch Lacan engag­ing with one par­tic­u­lar­ly rebel­lious stu­dent in a 1972 video we fea­tured a few years ago, and you can see an hour­long lec­ture he deliv­ered at the Catholic Uni­ver­si­ty of Lou­vain that same year in this video we post­ed before that. Empow­ered by the kind of overview of Lacan’s ideas that the School of Life has put togeth­er, you can bet­ter con­front his famous­ly (or infa­mous­ly) elab­o­rate rhetoric and judge for your­self whether to con­sid­er him a thinker who “made some extreme­ly use­ful addi­tions to our under­stand­ing of our­selves” — or, in the judg­ment of Noam Chom­sky, a mere prac­ti­tion­er of emp­ty “pos­tur­ing.” But then, hav­ing lived a life that, as de Bot­ton puts it, mixed “intel­lec­tu­al truth with world­ly suc­cess,” can’t he be both?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Charis­mat­ic Psy­cho­an­a­lyst Jacques Lacan Gives Pub­lic Lec­ture (1972)

Jacques Lacan’s Con­fronta­tion with a Young Rebel: Clas­sic Moment, 1972

Jacques Lacan Talks About Psy­cho­analy­sis with Panache (1973)

Noam Chom­sky Slams Žižek and Lacan: Emp­ty ‘Pos­tur­ing’

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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