DE Weekly: Frankl, Suffering, & Man’s Search for Meaning
Below is an archived email originally sent on September 22, 2025.
Frankl, Suffering, & Man’s Search for Meaning
“He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.” I recently read Viktor E. Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning, and he cited this quote from Friedrich Nietzsche a few times throughout the narrative, reminding himself and the reader just how important a sense of meaning can be.
Frankl wrote Man’s Search for Meaning in 1946 as more of a therapeutic outlet than anything else. The book details his experiences in a concentration camp during the Second World War; above all, the book tries to answer the question: “How was everyday life in a concentration camp reflected in the mind of the average prisoner?”
What started out as Frankl’s own way of dealing with his personal experiences, however, turned out to be one of the most poignant philosophical narratives of the twentieth century.
This unnerved Frankl, who remarked that the fact his book became a bestseller didn’t content him, but worried him. If so many people reached for a book with this title, Frankl said, it meant there were many people out there who weren’t content with life.
Returning to the question, then, of how everyday life in a concentration camp was reflected in the mind of the average prisoner, we might ask ourselves: how is everyday life in general reflected in the mind of the average person?
How might we identify a Why to live for so that we can bear almost any How?
“It is easy for the outsider to get the wrong idea of camp life,” wrote Frankl. “. . . Little does he know of the hard fight for existence which raged among the prisoners” (4).
Frankl’s circumstances were extraordinary, as were those of his fellow prisoners in the camps.
Before the war, he was a normal citizen––a doctor working on a manuscript for a book he hoped to publish––and almost in an instant, everything was turned upside down.
He and most everyone he knew, including his wife and family, were separated from each other and shipped off to camps where, what fate awaited them, nobody knew yet.
Frankl walks through the psychological steps each prisoner follows from day one on. First upon arrival is shock. At first, you can’t believe your own situation. You might react abnormally, out of character.
But, as Frankl explains, an abnormal reaction is normal behavior in an abnormal situation.
“What did the prisoner dream about most frequently? Of bread, cake, cigarettes, and nice warm baths . . . Whether these dreams did any good is another matter; the dreamer had to wake from them to the reality of camp life, and to the terrible contrast between that and his dream illusions” (29).
The second psychological step for the prisoner was apathy. After a while, you didn’t even react to dead bodies and the other daily horrors.
Once they realized they had nothing to lose, Frankl wrote, they started to make fun of their situation; this “strange kind of humor” kept them going, as did curiosity––curiosity of what would happen to them next.
Everyone considered suicide, Frankl said, but he made a promise to himself not to commit suicide. He wanted to live.
Frankl understood that, no matter how dire his situation, how unlikely his chances of survival, or how utterly miserable his existence in its current state, he had something to live for.
For his unfinished manuscript, which he began rewriting in his head after it was confiscated from him upon arrival at the camp. For his parents, who he stayed in Europe to look after when he could have escaped the war. For his wife, of whom his constant daydreaming kept him going.
“. . . [E]verything can be taken 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” (66).
The third psychological step for the prisoner was depersonalization and disillusionment.
When liberation day came for Frankl and his fellow prisoners who remained and they were freed from the camps, they were presented with a different challenge altogether.
Slowly learning to become free again, slowly becoming a human again.
It was hard to readjust. It felt like a dream, Frankl explained. He learned his wife and his family had all been killed, and it was just he who remained.
He escaped the camps with his life, but for what? What was the meaning of it all?
Nietzsche’s words “He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How” rang between Frankl’s ears again.
Saying you can always choose your attitude no matter the circumstances may sound trite, but it’s true.
“If there is a meaning in life at all,” Frankl wrote, “then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete” (67).
In Frankl’s case––indeed, in the case of everyone who survived––the suffering was the meaning.
There is no nobility in suffering for suffering’s sake. But if suffering is all you have, if it’s the only thing you can hang your hat on, then you must overcome it. In overcoming suffering, there lies your meaning.
Why have so many people reached for Frankl’s book on the shelves of bookstores? Why does it continue to resonate to this day?
Simply put, it’s because we all suffer. It’s a part of all of our lives, and we must find meaning in it.
Frankl stressed that most important of all reminders: life is not a quest for pleasure, nor a quest for power, but a quest for meaning.
Meaning is found in many things. In work, in love, and in courage.
Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess, except one thing: how you choose to respond to the situation.
We must learn to see life as meaningful despite our circumstances. Life is meaningful. There is an ultimate purpose to life.
“I was struggling to find the reason for my sufferings, my slow dying. In a last violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious ‘Yes’ in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose.” –– Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
I’m not being hyperbolic when I say Man’s Search for Meaning is one of the best books I’ve ever read. For philosophy, for existentialism, it’s a must. Stay tuned for next week, where I’ll expand on Frankl’s “logotherapy” as a way of living.
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