DE Weekly: Frankl, Logotherapy, & Tragic Optimism
Below is an archived email originally sent on September 29, 2025.
Frankl, Logotherapy, & Tragic Optimism
Last week, I wrote about Viktor E. Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning, which he published in 1946. It details his experiences in a concentration camp during World War II and shares his psychological analysis of not only himself, but of other prisoners and of human beings faced with adversity in general.
This week, I want to expand on what I wrote previously by focusing specifically on the two sections of the book which follow the main narrative: “Logotherapy in a Nutshell” and Frankl’s 1984 postscript “The Case for a Tragic Optimism.”
Frankl was not only a holocaust survivor, but a neurologist, psychiatrist, and philosopher, as well. His most profound contribution to psychiatry and philosophy was his founding of logotherapy, what he called a “meaning-centered psychotherapy” to help people understand meaning as the foremost human motivational force.
The name comes from the Greek logos, which translates to meaning.
Logotherapy focuses on meanings to be fulfilled by a patient in his future; as patients of logotherapy, we are to focus on the meaning of human existence and our own search for that meaning.
Frankl wrote that meaning is not just a secondary rationalization in life, but the primary motivation, what he would call the “will to meaning.”
“Man’s will to meaning can also be frustrated,” Frankl explains, “in which case logotherapy speaks of ‘existential frustration.’ The term ‘existential’ may be used three ways: to refer to (1) existence itself, i.e., the specifically human mode of being; (2) the meaning of existence; and (3) the striving to find a concrete meaning in personal existence, that is to say, the will to meaning” (100–101).
The existentialists understood the same existential frustrations, especially the will to meaning. Frankl said these feelings are born of a desire for “self-transcendence of the human existence,” the same reason the existentialists provided for our search for purpose.
Thus, the original title of Frankl’s book was an apt name: From Death-Camp to Existentialism.
According to Frankl, self-transcendence is such an important thing for us because we have to transcend ourselves. The true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system.
All this is well and good, but what about when we don’t know what our meaning is, what our purpose is? What if we don’t feel like we’re living meaningful lives?
Frankl contends that if we feel this way, we would do well to remember that the meaning of life always changes, but it never ceases to be.
According to logotherapy, we can discover the meaning of life at any given moment in our lives by: creating a work or doing a deed; experiencing something or encountering someone; or, by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.
There’s that theme from last week again: there is meaning in suffering. Even if things are going bad right now––really bad, unbearable––your life still has meaning.
If Frankl couldn’t find meaning in the concentration camp whether he made it out alive or not, he explained, then there was no meaning at all. But he could, so there was.
“Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment” (131). Because Frankl could imagine a life outside the camps, one where he would be liberated and return to normal life, he could make it through each day.
This is why Frankl believed that one should always remain optimistic in spite of what he called the “tragic triad” of experiences: pain, guilt, and death.
For pain, he argued, we could turn suffering into achievement.
For guilt, we could use the opportunity to change ourselves for the better.
For death (transitoriness), we could take action. For example, if we were diagnosed with a terminal illness and knew the date of our death, we could quickly act on everything we wished to and make the most of it.
And as we know, Frankl saw death as just one part of life. Not something that defines it in totality, but something that we must learn to live with because it comes for all of us, naturally.
Plus, the surest sign of being is having been. So, we must not fret over growing old, but reflect on our days lived to the fullest.
Our calendar mounted on the wall getting thinner and thinner over time as we tear off another page is a good thing. It indicates your being by having been.
Things might not always make sense in the moment. Times get tough, and it’s hard to see the bigger picture.
It’s not always easy to see our purpose in life, to understand that there is a meaning that we can identify and hold on to.
But through understanding and adhering to logotherapy as Frankl taught us, we have at least a compass to help guide us in the right direction.
Our lives are like a movie, Frankl wrote. We must try our best to understand each and every frame as it happens, but ultimately, we cannot understand its meaning until the very last frame.
“Isn’t it the same with life? Doesn’t the final meaning of life, too, reveal itself, if at all, only at its end, on the verge of death? And doesn’t this final meaning, too, depend on whether or not the potential meaning of each single situation has been actualized to the best of the respective individual’s knowledge and belief?” –– Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
I can’t recommend this book enough. I feel like I was copying quotes and taking pictures of the pages every other minute. Also, I’d like to know what you think of these two-part newsletters I’ve been playing with. Let me know your thoughts on them.
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