Man's Search for Meaning Reader's

Man's Search For Meaning Reader's Search For Clarity, Basis, Adequacy And Implications In Victor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning Surely, one of the most difficult issues all human beings grapple with is the issue of meaning, Often, the search for the meaning of life leads to conclusions for the individual thinker that make modern life less, rather than more clear. Still, human beings feel pressed, despite the confusion that such intellectual struggles entail, to ask what is the meaning of an individual human life and the larger human existence.

The psychiatrist Victor Frankl personally came to grips with this conflict by developing a new form of psychotherapy to rival Sigmund Freud's, after he was provoked to ask questions about the meaning of life during the Second World War. Victor Frankl was first provoked to question his life's meaning and impetus after he was imprisoned, first in Auschwitz and then in other concentration camps for the duration of over five years, during World War II.

Over and over again, in the face of tremendous suffering and guilt because his own continued survival when so many other people he had known before the war's beginning had died, he had to struggle within himself to find plausible reasons to live, to fight on against his persecutors in the face of overwhelming odds. The result of this struggle was the psychotherapeutic method Frankl eventually came to call logotherapy.

Although it was derived directly as a result of his experiences as a prisoner in the concentration camps, Frankl used it to treat almost all of his later patients. The theory behind logotherapy, a psychiatric technique devised to answer the question of humanity's search for meaning, initially seems more interested with answering questions posed by Western philosophy and Western religions than Freudian psychotherapy.

Freud's psychoanalysis of free association is based upon the belief that by understanding humanity's sexual instincts and urges, human beings can be freed of their inhibiting obsessions and mental complaints. As difficult as the questions Frankl attempts to answer, which are often social as well as personal (unlike Freud) his eviscerating experiences in the evils of the Holocaust give his thought an unsparing linearity and directness that other philosophers and psychotherapists occasionally lack in their analysis -- the author has met other human beings at their most evil and survived.

His experience is filled with a clarity and a wealth of anecdotal examples of great power, as well as case histories, to demonstrate what he means to the layperson or lay reader of the text. Some of Frankl's questions are so unanswerable, however, such as how can human beings be so terrible to other human beings, his thoughts lack the problem and solution postulation common to modern psychology or scientific analysis.

Still, his thoughts, lacking as they are in being over reliant upon preconceived ideals, either of his own religion or of Freud's assumptions about the cognitive structure of the mind, cause the reader to value the weight of Frankl's implications and his conclusions, as well as merely sympathize with his life experience.

Frankl's setting of the potential for good and evil in the human heart and psyche is always clear and stark, as he writes, that his generation is realistic, for it has come to know humanity in its truth, and that human beings in his experience are both angels and devils, both the inventors of the gas chambers of Auschwitz and also those who entered those gas chambers" upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips." Thus, the basis for Frankl's thought is both personal and experiential, as well logical in his later contentions with some of Freud's assumptions and postulates regarding basic human psychology and development.

Frankly believes that a human being's deepest desire is to search for meaning and purpose rather than to simply satisfy animal desires of sex. Frankl's logotherapy, therefore, is a theory of what he calls a will to meaning, based upon emotional as well as ideological conditions he has witnessed over the course of his own life. However, some readers may feel that, as powerful as the author's prose may be, his reliance upon his own life experience makes some of his assumptions difficult to justify for all of humanity.

How much does Frankl's assumption that all human beings are fundamentally driven to make meaning out of their existences come from the extremity of his own experiences? After all, most of his readers and his patients will neither administer the gas champers of Auschwitz, nor pass through them -- rather they exist somewhere betwixt and between the angels and devils of this situation -- what of those common Germans who turned their heads and refused to help victims, even when they saw the trains leaving for Auschwitz, and what of those who risked their lives to save Jews from the death camps but never saw the inside of those camps? The details of the book are powerful, as Frankl observes how some prisoners save their cigarettes to be smoked the next day, while others have lost faith in tomorrow and use them up, but often these details do not support such a wide-sweeping theory of the need for all human beings to find meaning.

The drive for meaning Frankl sees everywhere may also come from the fact that Frankl deals mainly with the angels and the devils of the extremities of the Holocaust experience, something which cannot be helped when one's clinical experience is drawn from the purely personal.

Furthermore, although the author refers to how the love he felt for his wife sustained him through the trials and tribulations of the camps, because he lived only with male prisoners, even while he attempts to compare the diversity of reactions of the men to their experiences, his account is inevitably one sided in terms of its gender breakdown -- even the title stresses man's, rather than a larger human search for meaning.

(And, incidentally, although women served the Reich, the Nazi officers of the camps were also all male in Frankl's encounters with them.) The communality of the suffering of the people whom he experienced the death camps with, and also of its particularly Jewish and genocidal (that is culturally destroying character) also influences the author's idea that the need for religious and philosophical meaning and fulfillment always outweighs the importance of the personal drives of the unconscious.

Frankl goes into great detail about modern society and the negative effects that the absence of meaning, or what he calls the existential vacuum, has on people. But is this urge for meaning true of all people, or simply of some people? Is it particular to Frankl and those of his generation who have suffered what he has suffered? Although there is no proof that Frankl is wrong, the limited basis of his argumentation makes it difficult to 'prove' that he is right.

Thus, the over personalization of the justifications logotherapy in the therapist's experiences makes this an interesting, but ultimately not fully persuasive book that holds up in terms of its 'adequacy' or basis in logical analysis. Even Frankl's desperation for meaning in an abstract sense may simply be one response of many to the Holocaust -- just as many may have shut down their search for meaning, in a way that Frankl could not observe at the time, given the focus upon his own personal survival.

And Freud might subsume Frankl's identified religious and philosophical zeal as just another, diverting perversion of the fundamental drive of human beings to survive and procreate. The book raises, however, interesting implications for a world such as ours that has seen so many of its initial meanings and belief systems stripped away or questioned in the recent year. Philosophy not as an intellectual exercise, but as a treatment for a patient's needs may indeed be necessary for some reflective patients, as it might be for one of Frankl's temperament. But.