chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) ♡'s Reviews > Man's Search for Meaning

There’s a joy at once fierce and quiet in feeling profoundly rearranged by your encounter with a book. In understanding, with certainty, in the deep core of your heart, that the you who first entered this book exists at a distance of several hundred pages: you’re not the same person, you’ve changed—been changed—in ways you cannot explain but which you will always carry with you. I might have finished this book but I feel like it’s only just begun me.

Man’s Search for Meaning weaves together compelling personal narrative and profound scientific inquiry into a short volume that is luminous, insightful, and deeply empowering. Frankl provides us with an extraordinary investigation into his doctrine of Logotherapy, a branch of therapy that believes that “the primary motivational force” of a human being is the striving to find a meaning in his life.

From the outset, Frankl makes it clear that he does not bring to this inquiry solely the tools of a scientist, but even more importantly, the weight of first-hand lived experience. The first part of this book recounts, intimately and horribly, Frankl’s experiences as a Jewish detainee in several Nazi concentration camps, illuminating in the process the key concepts of Frankl’s theory of Logotherapy.

It is impossible to hide one’s wince reading this section. Frankl’s account is unsparing, giving an unflinching testimonial of humanity’s violence against itself, of “the hard fight for existence which raged among the prisoners,” of what it means to survive through unimaginable horror in places where one’s definition of suffering is deranged, every second, into entirely new meanings. (In a particularly haunting instance, Frankl remembers how he abruptly stopped himself from shaking a fellow inmate out of a fearful nightmare he was having because “no dream, no matter how horrible, could be as bad as the reality of the camp which surrounded us, and to which I was about to recall him.”) To cushion himself against the shock and constant oppression of terror, Frankl remembers his wife’s face and the stolen manuscript containing his life’s work and feels empowered to survive long enough to fulfill his twin needs of seeing his wife and re-writing his manuscript. Frankl’s beloved and unwritten manuscript become, in other words, the marginal references for the survival of his self.

Frankl survives to speak the full agenda and unequivocal goal of his therapeutic doctrine— Logotherapy—which is explained and explored in the second part of this book. Frankl’s theory of Logotherapy, when reduced to its simplest form, is clear, precise, and easy to both grasp and appreciate: that “life holds meaning under any condition,” therefore the purpose of Logotherapy is for one to be “confronted with, reoriented towards the meaning of his life.” From this deceptive simplicity, however, arises a practice of meaning-making that is complex, challenging, unresolved, and ongoing.

Throughout the book, Frankl insists upon the plural, specific, and shifting nature of the meaning of one’s life—as opposed to a unified, abstract, and generalized understanding of meaning-making. In other words, it is not so much a man’s search for a meaning, but for a multitude of meanings: a constantly changing constellation of potentialities, as opposed to a fixed quantity of traits. In this book, Frankl invites us to work out the vocabularies of our unwieldy selves, to make our own meaning(s) and walk through them. For him, this exercise is fraught with tension—the tension “between what one has already achieved and what one should become”—because tension is not only inevitable in the process of meaning-making—it is also “normal and healthy.” Frankl refuses to see this contradiction as conflicting: in his rendering, it is precisely this tension that prevents us from being embedded in misery and a freezing boredom. It is an amulet that protects us against the void that threatens to devour our selves, what Frankl calls the “existential vacuum.”

Frankl identifies this void as a primary aspect of the atrophy of the imagination that precludes us from finding meaning in life and stresses how important it is to resist this void and to struggle openly and fiercely against it. To this end, Frankl delineates three broad avenues through which one might find meaning(s) “at any given moment”. The first is through personal achievement or a good deed. The second is through the embrace of beauty, culture, and nature and/or personal encounters with one another, in which we grapple for each other’s depths and love each other. The last one is through personal suffering.

Let me immediately admit that I was very resistant, for several pages, to this last point: to the idea that suffering enobles us, that our life and the meaning of it is enlivened by it somehow. But Frankl, as it turns out, has anticipated this objection and hastens to explain that he isn’t making a case for suffering as something indispensable for or dissociable from the practice of meaning-making—that suffering is, to put it differently, a requisite for leading a meaningful life—but that meaning can come, not from suffering, but despite the abundance of it. It is difficult not to feel persuaded, and even liberated by this: the idea that not only can we survive through our suffering, but that we can live thoroughly within it. That even in the worst types of circumstances, through a rigorous and indefatigable striving for meaning, one can be transformed.

Here, Frankl brings us directly and inevitably against the question of how. How does one give meaning to one’s suffering when one’s subject, in their everyday life, to larger systemic forces that feel impossible to overcome? Frankl’s theory of Logotherapy does not deny that there are circumstances beyond our control, but it insists that there is one thing that we are able to control, which is “the way(s) in which we respond to (them).” What is available in the search for meaning, in other words, is the deepest kind of freedom. “It is not freedom from conditions,” to borrow Frankl’s words, “but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions.” The freedom one is born with, which is as inextricable from one’s self as a strand of DNA. The freedom to imagine an elsewhere and an otherwise, or as Frankl puts it, to imagine a present that is both past and future: “Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!” The principle of responsibleness is therefore integral to Frankl’s vision of freedom: the pursuit of meaning has the immense power to heal the fissures that suffering makes on the imagination—but only if we can first extend our imagination to articulate what we are responsible for.

In its most radical moments, Man’ Search for Meaning speaks deeply to the human desire to mediate rupture and powerlessness and create ourselves through annihilation. It’s a testament to how humans have always evolved creative responses to rupture, crisis, and fissure, and how we manage to endure at the center of even the most unendurable atrocities. This is not a book one comes to for answers—Logotherapy is, in Frankl’s own words, “neither preaching nor teaching”—but rather, a book that one can approach as a way of being and thinking, as a way of conceiving of one’s self and the world, as something to hold consciously at the center of one’s practice. Ultimately, what Man’s Search for Meaning does best is posit a set of questions that become a ferocious call to action: to always strive for meaning—and to hunt for it when it’s necessary—even in a world that seems to perpetually corrode our freedom.