Key Takeaways from Viktor Frankl’s “A Man’s Search for Meaning”

There are books. And then there are books that change your life for good. Some of them are so great that they change the lives of countless people at once. One such book is Viktor Frankl’s “A Man’s Search for Meaning”. A classic autobiography that touches on the most vulnerable aspects of being a human.

Background of the Book and the Author

Viktor was a psychiatrist, best known for introducing logotherapy to the world. He was also a neurologist, author, and above all, a holocaust survivor. He is the author of some 39 books and ‘A Man’s Search for Meaning’ is his all-time bestseller for a good reason. The book teaches us more about the human brain than anything else. In the article, I will try to amalgamate all the wisdom (as it is) to help you understand more about life from Frankl’s eyes.

In the book, he talks about what he called the “the will to meaning”. We as humans have the will to live as long as we find meaning in it. In essence, as long as we see or imagine a future, we have the desire to live and hold onto life.

The first half of the book describes in detail the life of an average Jew in the concentration camps and the lessons as well as thoughts that surround all of them. The second half is more scientific and takes ‘logotherapy’ into account. With all the turmoil and escaping death continuously for 4 years, Viktor came out alive but just as broken. He lost everything- his parents and the love of his life. Imagine yourself in that situation and try to feel the agony for once (if you aren’t a stoic).

Lessons from the Book

From losing his manuscripts to finding ways to retrieve his ideas in mind and jotting them down when possible, Viktor was able to finish the whole book in 9 days. If you haven’t read this book, I recommend it strongly. Here are a few lines from the book, and a little explanation in the brackets that made me a different person (It will change you too, trust me!)

“All we possessed literally was our naked existence”

(Inside a truck, all men were made to lose all their belongings and they stood naked, they had nothing to cover themselves and no option left but to accept their naked realities. At the concentration camps, there was no individuality. Every prisoner was treated like a herd of sheep to be sacrificed for meat or a group of maggots to be squished as per their will by the Nazis.)

“Success is a side effect and it has no medicine. For success like happiness, can’t be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s dedication to cause greater than oneself or as the byproduct of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.”

“Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: You have to let it happen by not caring about it.”

“A hint from the heaven”

(We look for omens and little signs that guide our paths. Similarly, still in excruciating pain, Viktor and many others like him were all looking for omens to give them a ray of hope)

“Delusion of reprieve- The condemned man even before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute.”

(Hope is probably the best of things, according to The Shawshank Redemption, and millions of other people. We have this habit of thinking something might change at the very last moment and the forecasted disaster won’t happen.)

“They were nice to us as long as they saw watches on our wrists and could persuade us in well-meaning tones to hand them over” & “Prisoners approached the warm body and took off things from it”

(These two, along with many other incidents show how everyone is playing their part in that eco-system. From the SS Guards and Kapos to the Jews, everyone was playing their role, no matter how submissive or dominant. To sustain their lives, each one of them had to fight which also included robbing a dead body among other treacherous things.)

If someone now asked us the truth of Dostoevsky’s statement that flatly defines man as a being who can get used to anything, we would reply, “yes a man can get used to anything, but don’t ask us how”

(We are far more flexible and adjusting than we imagine. Right now it must be hard for you to imagine your life without an air conditioner or the safety of your home, but the truth is humans change the definition of what’s ‘OK’ or ‘comfortable’ or ‘normal’ from time to time, depending upon the situation or stimuli)

“And I smiled. I am now convinced that anyone in my place on that day would have done the same.”

“An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior”

(In the concentration camps, there was no mercy for the seemingly weak or unhealthy folks. They were simply left to die or were killed. Viktor was feeble too. Someone around him looked at him and told him that they were going to kill him next. What was he supposed to do? He chose to defeat its destiny by smiling at it)

“At that moment I became intently conscious of the fact that no dream, no matter how horrible, could be as bad as the reality of the camp which surrounded us, to which I was about to recall him”

(Have you ever noticed how you suddenly dream of a person, place, or a thing that is no more with you? The prisoners dreamed of minimal things like bread, cigarettes, beds, and everything that made them escape a little from the harsh reality. Viktor stops himself from waking up a fellow prisoner because he was so sure of whatever he was dreaming of, it couldn’t be worse than the concentration camps.)

“Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meanings in his spiritual being- his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance”

(Here Viktor is being hopeful and telling us that love can’t be destructed and is not subjective to the physical being of the beloved. Love goes beyond the horizons of explanation and one can only feel it while being in love. Keep in mind that Viktor was separated from his family and the love of his life, With no whereabouts, he has all the reasons to be hopeless but he chose the opposite.)

“The men who offered their last piece of bread to other people during the concentration camps is a sufficient proof that everything can be taken away 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”

“If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in the suffering”

“He who has a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost anyhow”

(Viktor, like the others, was filled with negative emotions at times. He could have tried running into the wire (euphemism for suicide), like thousands of others. But he didn’t because of a promise he made to himself.)

“Whatever one may choose to call them- we know the best of us didn’t return”

Conclusion

The book is a great lesson for all kinds of humans. The lines are just fragments of the book and don’t represent it wholly. To get a better experience, you should read it yourself and extract your own meaning. To end this article, it would be a sane idea to use another line from the book-

“ I know without the suffering, the growth that I have achieved would have been impossible”