Finding meaning through suffering
View(s):“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” Viktor E. Frankl – Man’s Search for Meaning. It is more than 70 years after the Holocaust, the genocide where six million Jews were killed by Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime. I was reminded of this when I read in the Sunday Times two weeks ago that Anne Ranasinghe has published her 19th book. Titled Who Can Guess the Moment it begins on August 2, 1934,the day German President Hindenburg died, the day Adolf Hitler took over as Chancellor of Germany. It was, she says, “The beginning of a period of such horror the dimensions of which no one could possibly have imagined. It was the end of freedom, the beginning of terror.”
Victor Emil Frankl :'Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.’
Victor Emil Frankl was born in 1905 to a Jewish family in Vienna and qualified as a psychiatrist in 1937. When the Nazis took over Austria in 1938 he was banned from treating ‘Aryan’ patients. He continued to work in Vienna even though he had the opportunity to flee to the US like his sister Stella. But he wanted to continue to see his patients, in the only hospital that he was allowed to see Jewish patients.
In 1942 Frankl, his new bride, parents and brother were deported to the Nazi Theresienstadt Ghetto. His father died there and later the others were moved to various concentration camps ending in Auschwitz. Only Victor Frankl and his sister survived. From his horrific experiences Frankl wrote his bestseller Man’s Search for Meaning. After enduring much suffering in the camps he concluded that what is important for man to endure even the most extreme suffering is to find meaning. He later devised a system of psychotherapy called logotherapy which aims to help patients find meaning in their lives.
As a psychiatrist in a concentration camp he was in a unique position to observe how men behave under conditions of extreme deprivation with the threat of death hanging over them. Do all humans in such conditions lose their humanity, social norms and behave like animals? The perhaps surprising answer was that they do not. Here is what Frankl says in one of his most profound passages in his book, “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything 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.”
For Frankl meaning is an essential part of life. It is necessary for survival in a concentration camp as well as day-to-day life. In his book he cites the results of a survey done at Johns Hopkins University where 7948 students were asked what was ‘very important’ to them. Sixteen percent said it was ‘making a lot of money’ but 78 percent said it was ‘finding a meaning and purpose to life.’ Frankl stresses that each person has to find his own meaning in life. This unique meaning he divides into three categories. The first is what one accomplishes and gives to the world in terms of one’s own creations. The second is what one takes from the world in the form of encounters and experiences. The third is one’s stand toward suffering, toward a fate that one cannot change.
The third category may sound rather strange but Frankl considered this the most important to find meaning in life. Does he mean that suffering is essential to find meaning in life? ‘In no way,’ says Frankl. ‘I only insist that meaning is available in spite of – nay, even through – suffering, provided suffering is unavoidable.’ He goes on to point out that if avoidable the first step is to try and remove the cause of suffering.
Unnecessary suffering is masochistic rather than heroic. Frankl cites the case of Jerry Long who was paralysed from the neck down after a diving accident at the age of 17. Long learned to type with a pencil in his mouth and went on to complete two college courses. In a letter to Frankl, Long writes, “I view my life as being abundant with meaning and purpose. … I broke my neck, it did not break me.” Long did not choose to break his neck but once it happened he choose not to let it break him.
In Sri Lanka too I can think of two such individuals. Ajith Perera, a chemist and cricketer became a paraplegic for life when a tree fell on his car. He was due to umpire his first cricket Test match in Colombo. In spite of being confined to a wheelchair he has gone on to become a pioneer in fighting for the rights of the disabled in Sri Lanka. The other, Dr. Samitha Samanmali, a student of my own faculty, was paralysed from the waist down when she was hit by a falling metal pole. She has gone on to qualify as a doctor and is now hoping to become a specialist in rehabilitation medicine, a neglected specialty in Sri Lanka.
For Victor Frankl ‘suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.’ He goes on to write, “The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails… gives him ample opportunity – even under the most difficult circumstances – to add a deeper meaning to his life.” Few psychiatrists have suffered as much as Victor Frankl but he showed not only by his words but by example how a person can transcend the deepest of suffering to find contentment and meaning in life. In the concentration camp in the midst of despair Frankl tried to find meaning to his life. Initially he found it in his desire to see his wife again and later his determination that somehow he would survive so that he could communicate to others how meaning could be found in the direst of circumstances and also complete and give to the public a valuable psychotherapeutic approach.
Victor Frankl was liberated in 1945 after spending three years in concentration camps. He never saw his young wife again. She had died in Bergen-Belsen. His mother had been gassed and his brother worked to death. Only his sister, who escaped to the United States, remained. But he was remarkably free of bitterness and writes, ‘no one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them.’
Victor Frankl remarried and continued to work in Vienna until 1971 when he moved to the United States. He died in 1997. His book, Man’s Search for Meaning has now sold over 10 million copies. I would urge you to read this book. It will definitely enrich you. “So live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!”