Second, what, precisely, gives us meaning and purpose? Here, Frankl gives us three answers that have been impressively confirmed by current research on happiness, as well as in our own laboratory. A person finds meaning when they have work or a task to carry out; when they love or are loved; or when, through suffering, they are tested by life and experience growth as a result of the crisis. With this explanation, Frankl rejects the idea that true meaning and deep happiness can only be experienced through suffering. Under no circumstances should one seek out suffering in order to find meaning. But the very fact that a person can turn “a tragedy into a triumph” makes us profoundly human.

  Here, Frankl employs his idea of “self-transcendence”: by taking responsibility not only for ourselves but also for our impact on the planet, and by becoming stronger through our difficulties and growing as human beings, we are able to feel the “we” more powerfully than the “I” or ego—and can experience a deep sense of connectedness, as well as feeling truly responsible, across not only physical but also generational boundaries. However, the premise is that the self would be transcended and would not stand in the way as an inflated “ego.” In our own research with people who have experienced severe life-changing events, we find striking parallels with Frankl’s more observational assumptions. For example, subjects who now use a wheelchair and who are suddenly no longer able to follow the path in life they had originally planned sometimes experience “post-traumatic growth,” i.e., they become more mature and may even feel happiness, freedom, gratitude and a deep contentment.

  Third, people are suffering from a “sickness of our times.” As early as seventy years ago, Frankl had diagnosed a “sickness of our times” or “manager’s disease.” This is similar to what we would now call “burnout” (in the past, we would have also described it as a “nervous breakdown”). He points to the zeitgeist as an essential source of this sickness (including what we would today call stress or simply overwork), as well as an inner feeling of not fitting in—a lack of internal coherence, resonance and meaning. Therefore, there are both external and internal factors interacting negatively here.

  Our own research tallies with this idea. In it, we add the dimension of significance as a central entity into the relevant definition of health—to add a subjective, semiotic category. In our case, we divide these dimensions into two subcategories, one based on external factors (culture and homeland), the other on internal factors (meaning and spirituality). However, the central feature is a feeling of connectedness that is related either to a higher, transcendent state of being, or of living anchored within everyday life. In other words, we find our home within ourselves and/or in our physical environment (and also, within that, a feeling of connectedness with something “higher”—the “ultimate truth,” as Frankl puts it). If that is not the case, if this important health resource is not present, then burnout or even “boreout” (a state of pathological boredom)—certainly a neurosis, according to Frankl—develops. This happens especially when a crisis occurs, when fateful life events hit us hard.

  BE INSPIRED!

  Viktor Frankl teaches us always to remain broad and open, not narrow and pinched. And we should remain open even in hopeless situations, even when we have been subjected to appalling injustice, or when we fail as a collective, such as in the Third Reich, or in the face of the current environmental crisis. He rigorously rejects collective guilt, instead stressing individual and collective responsibility. And he underlines the possibility of altruism and transcending the self. He certainly does not preach passivity, quite the opposite.

  According to Frankl, people are free. Every person can, and indeed must, constantly make decisions. And the decision to find meaning is one of those decisions. It can be made at any time, without worrying about the pros and cons. Someone who thinks and behaves like this will always retain their dignity and self-respect. And they demonstrate steadfastness and free will. This free will, as the psychologist and thinker William James wrote, is an intention, not so much an action. According to Frankl, it is a will to meaning.

  This is not so much about an active search as it is about having meaning, about taking responsibility, even for meaning itself.

  The contemporary science agrees with this: it’s not the person who searches for meaning but the person who has experienced meaning and “has” it, who is happiest (and, incidentally, is also healthier).

  Similarly, Frankl clarifies what he calls “psychologism”: he doesn’t think much of pathologizing the psyche; psychoanalysis and depth psychology do not come off well. He wants to inspire us, in the truest sense of the word. Indeed, it may be helpful to talk about the soul and even to have faith or be religious (Frankl himself believed in the “absolute”), but these are not in any way prerequisites for finding purpose and experiencing meaning in life. In addition, a therapy that is too intrusive may actually misjudge the person’s spiritual capabilities—the wonderful “defiant power of the human spirit.”

  The century in which these texts were written, Frankl’s century, encompassed the whole kaleidoscope of our human existence. And it seems that its significance endures. Then, as now, freedom and powerlessness, the collective and the individual, the external and the internal, stood in direct and sometimes irreconcilable opposition to one another. The crises of our time are immense. Even so, it seems important that we keep our dignity. And that we remain defiant and stubborn, that we say yes in spite of everything—and take responsibility.

  In this sense, may the great Viktor E. Frankl be an inspirational role model for us all!

  —DR. TOBIAS ESCH

  Spring 2023

  NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

  “Every work of art is a child of its age.”

  —WASSILY KANDINSKY

  The lectures, interviews and texts by Viktor E. Frankl printed in this book come from the four decades between 1946 and 1984. This book is a child of the time and may contain language or depictions in common usage at the time that some readers may find offensive today. The publisher has also made some adjustments to punctuation, spelling, and in correcting obvious errors.

  1

  Meaning and Responsibility in the Face of Transience

  In “Conquering Transience,” Viktor E. Frankl revisits the theme of transience. He talks about the significance of meaning and responsibility in the face of our mortality. This is one of Frankl’s later texts, given as a lecture at Dornbirn, Austria, October 23, 1984.*

  CONQUERING TRANSIENCE

  Dr. Köb, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your warm welcome. I would just like to begin by confirming that the topic of my lecture is not “conquering the past” but “conquering transience.” So I won’t be talking about conquering the past, or even conquering one’s own personal past, rather: how a person can manage the transience of human existence, the transience of life—i.e., how he can cope with this fact, and deal with the knowledge that human life is essentially impermanent. Or more specifically, how an individual can get to a place where he can say “yes” to life in spite of its transience, how he can affirm his life in spite of his own mortality.

  So, in the face of death, life needs to be managed. But we must never forget that life is a constant process of dying, the continuous withering away of something or someone that we love. You could say that the life of a human being is a constant farewell. And that’s not just in the sense of the two big goals in life that Freud defined in psychoanalysis, his own theory and therapy, which are the ability to work and the capacity for pleasure; but we must also get to grips with the human being’s capacity for suffering. Death is only the endpoint of the constant leave-taking, this continuous process of something akin to withering away. And the fundamental question is whether this transience, this mortality, works retroactively (thus long before we reach the endpoint) and makes life not worth living, devalues it or makes it meaningless, robbing it of all meaning. That is the first question that we must ask ourselves. And I would like to start with the assumption that death is not only unable to take away life’s meaning, it actually gives life meaning.

  Just imagine what would happen, what life would look like, if there were no death. Imagine what it would be like if you could postpone anything and everything, if you could put it off for eternity. You wouldn’t have to do anything today or tomorrow. Everything could just as easily be done next week, next month, next year, in a decade, in 100 or 1,000 years. Only in the face of death, only under pressure from the finiteness, the temporal limitation of human existence, is there any point in going about our business, and not only in going about our business, but in experiencing life, and not only in experiencing life but also in loving someone, and even in bravely enduring and surviving something that is inflicted on us.

  Perhaps you will now understand how logotherapy, this branch of psychotherapy, has put forward a categorical imperative, a maxim, a code of conduct from a philosophical standpoint, more or less in the tradition of Immanuel Kant. And this imperative, this warning, goes like this: “Live as if you were living for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!”

  Do you understand what that means? Think about what kind of appeal to our sense of responsibility fundamentally underpins our human existence, what kind of powerful appeal this signifies, allowing us to carefully extract the best possible meaning out of a given situation, trying to actualize the possibility of finding the meaning in a given situation out of this spirit of responsibility—and this also means that we may have to do an about-turn at the last minute, in the knowledge that there’s a danger that we might do something so badly that we will regret it and we will never be able to make up for it.

  You see, this applies right down to the most banal situations. I’m sorry if I’m getting personal, but I would like to show you what this looks like in practice, in everyday life. Many years ago, a friend sent his son to see me. “Now why don’t you talk to”—he called me Uncle Viktor—“why don’t you talk to Uncle Viktor?” My friend’s son was in danger of getting involved in the drugs scene, in danger of straying into a criminal gang. It really was a precarious situation. What am I going to do with this lad? I’m not some kind of instructor or God knows what. What am I going to say to him? And so, I improvised and simply said the following: “You know why you have come here. What do you want me to tell you? The only thing I can say to you is: Think about this: In five, ten, or twenty years, there are two possibilities for you. Either you will say to yourself, ‘Do you remember when you went to see Uncle Viktor and you thought a bit about your life? It’s a good thing that, at the very last moment, you pulled yourself back from this or that.’ Or, in ten or twenty years, you will say, ‘What an idiot I was back then, when I went to see Uncle Viktor. He showed me the various possibilities, the crossroads, the fork in the road—and I, like a fool, just kept going on my merry way.’ These two possibilities stand before you. I just want you to think about it, that’s all.”

  It’s difficult to say what is cause and what is effect. Whether or not it worked as a catalyst for him, like a chemical process that simply activates a reaction, or whether it went in one ear and out the other, it’s hard to tell.

  There’s a theological term that has always fascinated me, the notion of the mysterium iniquitatis, meaning the secret of sin, of guilt. You can never resolve a criminal act right down to the final ramifications of the complex web of causation. For that would rob the person concerned of the last remnants of human dignity. Do you follow me? By doing this, you make him into a machine, an instrument, a mechanism that, under the influence of these sociological and psychological or biological factors and facts, could not act or behave in any other way. That way, you negate the freedom of a human being to decide for himself. You take the responsibility off his shoulders to behave as meaningfully as possible, and to behave in a way that’s true to himself, in the best sense of the word. You rob him of that. You believe that you are doing him a humanitarian service. But you are dehumanizing and depersonalizing this person, this criminal.

  But it could be done so differently. I don’t want to go into that now, but I will say: a last fragment of inexplicably free choice is there, lies there, is available, even with the most serious crime. And if you don’t see that, or don’t want to see it, because of a particular ideology that prescribes determinism, then you will never reach the core of the personality of a criminal, and no jargon, such as “socialization processes,” will help you.

  The point is that you learn to see the humanity in the human being and that you don’t forget to see it. Until the last moment, right down to his last breath, and even in an insane person, and even in a person who is a hardened criminal, humanity remains.

  I spoke earlier about our opportunities to fulfil a meaning. They must be noticed, they must be actualized, achieved. And that is the task of every human being in every single situation in life. For when a possibility for meaning has been fulfilled, and once we have transformed such a potentiality into a reality—and I mean once—then we have done it once and for all. It remains, and no one can undo it, no one can cancel it out. We have rescued it into the past. There it is stored; there it is safeguarded precisely from transience.

  For only the possibilities need to be fulfilled, only they are transitory. But when we have actualized one of these possibilities, we have made it everlasting. We have not just actualized it; we have made it eternal. In the past, nothing is irretrievably lost (as people often believe), but rather the opposite: it is captured and saved, it is preserved there and is protected from—and this is our topic—the grasp of transience. Being past is still a form of being, and I would argue that it is the safest form of being. I would like to explain this with a parable: usually, people see only the harvested stubble fields of transience. And they overlook the full barns of what is past, into which they have long since collected and rescued the harvest of their lives. The experiences, the deeds, the work that they have completed, nothing and nobody can ever take that away or rob them of it, or undo it or reverse it—or, as it says in the vocal text of one of Gustav Mahler’s symphonies, “Nothing that you have fought for, that you have loved or that you have suffered is in vain.”* This means that life possesses and retains its meaning in spite of its transience.

  However, now you must scrutinize the question of whether it really is like this. You must ask yourselves, “Great, so life can be meaningful in spite of its transience. But why should it have any meaning whatsoever? Do we even need to have meaning in life?” In a word, you are asking about the meaning of having a meaning. A meta-meaning, that is what we are discussing here. Well, I can easily give you the answer: a, let’s say, phenomenological recollection of an original and fundamentally anthropological state of affairs (I will clarify that for you in a moment) shows us the following: fundamentally, man is a being who steadfastly strives for meaning, who searches for meaning.

  To put it more elegantly, a human being is a meaning-oriented being, and if he succeeds in finding meaning on his search, then he will be happy. But please note, only then. For if he pursues happiness, to the same degree that he does so, he simply cannot become happy, because he would have no reason to be happy. But, paradoxically and ironically, the person who has found meaning becomes not only happy but conversely also eminently capable of bearing suffering—in our psychological jargon, he develops “frustration tolerance.” He can bear hardships for the sake of a meaning. He can make sacrifices for the sake of a person, or for God’s sake. He can do without, for the sake of a cause. Thus, he will not only be happy if he can perceive a meaning, but conversely, he will also be able to cope with suffering to the same degree.

  At an advanced age, Cushing, the greatest surgeon of all times,* said to his former assistant, “The only way to endure life is always to have a task to complete.”

  Thus, when someone finds what they are looking for in their search for meaning in life, perhaps even in their death, then they become happy and also capable of bearing suffering. In fact, they don’t just become capable of suffering, but the other way around: if they cannot see any meaning, if they do not have a vision of a personal, freely chosen life task that appeals to them, then they are not only incapable of suffering, they are also incapable of living. That didn’t come from a psychiatrist, it came from a physicist, because it is actually a quote from Albert Einstein: “The man who regards his own life . . . as meaningless is not merely unhappy but hardly fit for life.”

  And this fact, this truth, is something we neurologists have to deal with on a daily and hourly basis in our consultations with patients!

  Just think about current social problems—for example, unemployment. Bear in mind that more than half a century ago, I described a so-called “unemployment neurosis,” and also gave it that name, in the journal Sozialärztliche Rundschau, and was able to prove something interesting. And believe me, all over the world, there are books being published about the phenomenon of unemployment from the psychological point of view—this is still the case, just as it was 50 years ago. We found out at the time that an unemployed man who lapses into a depression so serious that he becomes suicidal is not suffering so much because of the unemployment itself, but essentially, the depression is caused only by one thing: a dual realization. For he equates these two things: being unemployed means being useless and being useless means that life is meaningless. And so he becomes depressed. And at that point (but only when he falls victim to this dual realization—and only then) he is in danger of committing suicide. At that time, by hook or by crook, I managed to get these young people into youth organizations, public libraries and adult education colleges as “attendants,” as we called them back then. Voluntarily, without getting a penny for their work, they took on these duties that they felt were meaningful. Their stomachs rumbled, just as before, but their depression had vanished. If I had not seen it with my own eyes, I would not have believed it.