PDF Summary:Man's Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl

...

The original book is split up into parts I and II, without any further organization. For clarity, we’ve reorganized the content by theme and broken the book down into smaller chapters.

• Part I in the book corresponds to our chapters 1 and 2. First, we’ll go through the psychological phases a concentration camp prisoner went through and the psychological symptoms they suffered in those phases. Then, we’ll discuss how prisoners overcame or resisted those phases.
• Part II in the book corresponds to our chapters 3-6. We’ll learn about meaning, how to find it, some philosophical challenges in seeking meaning, and some concrete tips from logotherapy to combat anxiety.

...

• Humor: There was obviously nothing funny about the concentration camps and their reputations, and yet prisoners could be found making jokes about the situation, like how there was at least real water in the showers at the concentration camp.
• Curiosity: Being admitted into a concentration camp forced prisoners to confront their mortality, but instead of feeling anxiety over this, many prisoners found themselves wondering if they’d survive with a detached, almost clinical curiosity.
  • Example: Frankl was in a climbing accident, and at the moment he fell, he wondered if he’d fracture his skull or suffer other injuries, but he didn’t feel fear about the outcome.
• Lack of fear: Despite the fact that many prisoners already knew the high rate of death in concentration camps, in this first phase they weren’t really afraid of death yet, because the reality that they truly might die hadn’t set in.

(Shortform note: Scientists think that our brains use these abnormal reactions to relieve stress, which is why they’re really normal reactions. Stress harms our bodies and our brains, so naturally they fight back.)

This was just an initial reaction. As the days went by, the...

...

Future Goals

The ability to conceive of future goals helped get many prisoners through their time in the concentration camps.

Nietzsche said, “He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.” When we set goals for our future, we give ourselves things to work towards. In other words, we give ourselves the why. And if these goals have an important meaning for us, we are far more likely to see them through, because the importance motivates us to weather the hard stages to reach our goal.

• Suicide was rampant in the concentration camps, as most prisoners felt they had nothing to live for. Frankl helped two suicidal men set future goals. One of the men had a son who was waiting for him in a foreign country; the second man was a scientist and had a series of books in progress that only he could finish. These future-oriented goals--things to do or people to see that required them to survive--dispelled the men’s ideas of suicide and helped motivate them.

In contrast, prisoners who lost faith in their own future had nothing to keep them going in extremely difficult circumstances.

• Some prisoners admitted that when they arrived at the camps, it felt...

...

Of course, we can toss the word “meaning” around, but it’s a heady concept. What is meaning, and more importantly, how do we find it in our lives? To that end, a lot of us find ourselves asking the same question:

What Is The Meaning of Life?

Frankl says we can’t ask the question this way, as though there were one universal answer that should be satisfying to all of us. We can’t generalize what life is. The tasks of life, and consequently the meaning of life, differs for every individual--no two people experience the same life.

• Trying to ask it generally would be like trying to ask a chessmaster what’s the best chess move in the world. Any chessmaster would tell you that it depends on the particular game and the situation in that particular game--there’s no one way to win a chess game, and it depends on your choices and how your opponent reacts to them.

The meaning of life differs from person to person. More than that, every situation in your own life is unique and different from the last situation you encountered, and may require different decisions on your part to shape your fate. So **we have to ask this question specific to ourselves at this specific...

...

This idea applies to more abstract, less practical jobs or positions as well. For example, the most renowned artists--a less practical job than teaching, perhaps--are the ones who created things that worked towards a purpose, whatever theirs might have been.

• Some people might view Andy Warhol’s pop art as exercises in meaningless recreation--but Warhol was deeply interested in the idea of commercial success, and it’s obvious from his work he was driven to fulfill his purpose of questioning art and artistry in relation to everyday objects or activities, or celebrities.

The Second Path - Love

You can derive just as much meaning from an experience as you can from an achievement. This is comforting because it places as much weight on our inner world of personal experience as it does on the outer world of achievement, which is sometimes out of your control.

Positive experiences can help us discover the meaning of our lives, whether it’s through the experiences of beauty, truth, goodness, nature, or culture, or even experiencing other humans in their individuality. These experiences rely on a feeling of love. Romance and sex are forms of love, but **love in this...

...

• This was a significant phenomenon of the 20th century: a survey at the time of the 1992 edition showed that 25% of Frankl’s European students felt frustrated by existence and questioned their life’s meaning. Among Frankl’s American students, the percentage was an overwhelming 60%. And it’s not like it’s decreased in the 21st century.

Our frustrations with existence primarily surface when we’re bored. “Sunday Neurosis” is a depression that affects people who get through a very busy week only to reach Sunday and, in their boredom, realize how discontent they are with their lives, that there’s some inner void that isn’t filled. And, of course, with the continuing rise of automation, many of our day-to-day purposes will be stripped from us--robots will do our jobs. That plus extended life expectancies mean that we might hopefully have many years of old age when we don’t have a larger societal purpose like a job.

Prolonged existential frustration can lead to depression, aggression, addiction, or neuroses, which are mental fixations that result in different symptoms of stress.

• Depression and even suicide are tied to a feeling of meaninglessness, and get worse the...

...

• Dereflection helps you focus on something bigger than or outside of yourself, which inadvertently helps you achieve your goals. This is one way to respond to hyper-intention.
  • The book gives an example of a woman who was having difficulty orgasming during sex with her partner. She’d been sexually abused as a child and had read research about all the sexual problems she was going to have as a survivor, so during sex she kept fixating on herself and waiting for those problems to arise.
  • Frankl helped the woman move the attention from herself to an external object--her partner. By focusing on her partner, she took the pressure and hyper-intention off herself and was able to orgasm.
• Paradoxical intention has you consciously intend to do the thing you’re afraid of. This is one way to respond to anticipatory anxiety.
  • A doctor was anxious about how much he sweated. If he thought he was going to sweat, he got so anxious about it that he sweated profusely anyway.
  • To break the patient of this cycle, Frankl told the doctor to aim for a paradoxical intention: to sweat as much as possible when he was anxious about sweating. Whenever...