The impetus for this book comes from a story told by the psychiatrist, neurologist, and existential philosopher Viktor Emil Frankl (1905â1997) in his riveting Holocaust narrative, Manâs Search for Meaning. 1 A prisoner for three years in the Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and two Dachau-affiliated concentration camps , he wrote about his own suffering from two, typically incommensurable, perspectivesâthe scientist and the subject of study. In the following passage, he describes the genesis of this work:
Almost in tears from pain (I had terrible sores on my feet from wearing torn shoes), I limped a few kilometers with our long column of men from the camp to our work site. Very cold, bitter winds struck us. I kept thinking of the endless little problems of our miserable life. What would there be to eat tonight? If a piece of sausage came as extra ration, should I exchange it for a piece of bread? âŚ.How could I get a piece of wire to replace the fragment which served as one of my shoelaces? Would I get to our work site in time to join my usual working party or would I have to join another, which might have a brutal foreman?âŚI became disgusted with the state of affairs which compelled me, daily and hourly, to think of only such trivial things. I forced my thoughts to turn to another subject. Suddenly I saw myself standing on the platform of a well-lit , warm and pleasant lecture room. In front of me sat an attentive audience on comfortable upholstered seats. I was giving a lecture on the psychology of the concentration camp ! All that oppressed me at that moment became objective , seen and described from the remote viewpoint of science. By this method I succeeded somehow in rising ⌠above the sufferings of the moment, and I observed them as if they were already of the past. Both I and my troubles became the object of an interesting psychoscientific study undertaken by myself. What does Spinoza say in his Ethics?⌠âEmotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of itâ. (Frankl 1946/2014, pp. 68â69)
When he entered the camps, Frankl was already an expert on human suffering. By dint of years of education and practice, most psychiatrists are. A precocious scholar, he began a regular correspondence with Sigmund Freud while he was still in high school. His first academic journal article was published shortly thereafter. He developed his own existential approach to psychotherapy, which by 1926 had come to be called âlogotherapy .â When he arrived in Auschwitz in 1944, he was carrying the only manuscript for a book on this topic sewn into the lining of his overcoat. Frankl was forced to abandon the coat and its secret cargo as he entered the camp (Frankl 1995/2000).
Devastated by the loss of his magnum opus, he set a goal of reconstructing the manuscript. He began by scribbling notes on some pilfered SS forms. Sick with typhus and near death, he believed that the meaning he discovered in this undertaking helped to keep him from succumbing to despair. He finished reconstructing the book after liberation, and in English, it is called The Doctor and the Soul (1955/1986). It is, however, a different book than the original. In light of his recent experiences, it had to be.
Franklâs imprisonment gave him an insiderâs perspective on suffering that his pre-war academic and clinical training could never have manifested. Psychiatrists writing from the outside might meaningfully capture the substance of the concentration camp experience, but they could never truly enter its depths. Former prisoners who were not also psychiatrists would know the depths, but they could not interpret and communicate their experiences in the language and conventions of the field. As an insider with academic training, Frankl could do both. And for the next half-century he did. He came closer than I have ever seen anyone in describing the ineffable for other experts who havenât âbeen there.â His research, writing, and teaching revealed a courageous intersectionality of his dual identities of âobjective â scientist and âsubjective â sufferer. He truly gave his scholarship all of himself, and it saved his life (Frankl 1995/2000).
In this respect, Frankl is not alone. There are faculty members writing and teaching in well-lit, warm rooms in universities across the globe who are manifesting Franklâs vision . They are using the tools of rigorous scholarly inquiry to form âclear and precise picturesâ of issues intimately related to their own experiences of suffering or loss, or to confront big existential questions surrounding other complicated personal experiences. Done well, their publications offer exceptionally nuanced, multidimensional perspectives that educate other scholars who havenât âbeen there.â They are models of scholarly erudition that pay careful attention to issues of epistemology and ethics. Done poorly, their publications may serve as warnings that push other scholars with unusually personal motivations for their scholarly agendas underground.
Part I of this book will introduce several individuals who have unusually personal connections to their areas of study. In Chapter 2, we will meet Gillian , a young bereaved mother who studied other bereaved parents for her doctoral dissertation research. Now an associate research scientist at an Ivy League university, she no longer studies bereavement. But the opportunity to do so for four years during graduate school honed her research skills (to the degree that she landed an Ivy League job!), and yielded generalizable insights that have been used to help others who work with bereaved parents. Just as important, reading and interpreting various perspectives on grief played an integral part in moving her forward in her own grief process. For Gillian , graduate school was profoundly therapeutic, but also an experience she was eager to leave behind after graduation.
In Chapter 3, we will meet Jesse , a transgender social scientist whose Ph.D. dissertation involved studying issues related to âatypically-gendered â peopleâhis preferred term for individuals like himself. In addition to teaching statistics at an R12 university, he is now an award-winning LGBT+ advocate who travels the country speaking about sex and gender. While aspects of graduate school were painful for Jesse (such as having to scrap his original dissertation topic very late in the game because his Chair would not support some of his premises), his academic work contributed meaningfully to his self-understanding . Moreover, his many opportunities to give class presentations and speak on campus facilitated his coming-out process.
But what of researchers in the âhardâ sciences? They also may have unusually personal motivations for their research agendas. In Chapter 4, we will meet Ronald L. Mallett , a theoretical physicist who became fascinated by time travel at age 11 when he encountered a 1956 comic book rendering of H. G. Wells â novel, The Time Machine (Wells 1895/2017). Ronâs father had died unexpectedly a year earlier, and the concept of time travel seemed to offer a way back to him. Ron used radio tubes, television parts, and pieces of bicycles to build a time machine in his basement. Of course this first attempt did not workâbut building a time machine remained his unwavering goal when he began a Ph.D. program and joined the ranks of academe. Now a well-known expert on black holes and cosmology and an emeritus full professor of theoretical physics, he realizes that his goal will not be realized in his lifetime. But he still believes it will happen. His technical papers never mention the origin story of this work, but the complex equations filling the pages are implicit testimony to a lonely little boyâs 60-year quest to see his father again.
Sometimes the relationships between the personal and the scholarly evolve across the breadth of a distinguished academic career. In the final chapter of Part I, we will hear from Margaret Pabst âPeggyâ Battin , a renowned bioethicist and champion of self-determination in dying. One question drives her scholarship: âWhy should it be so hard to die?â It was Peggyâs mother who posed this question. Peggy was a junior in college, and her mother was at the tail end of a lingering and painful death from cancer . A key player in right-to-die legislation, Peggy has since helped make death easier for some people. However, the issue became acutely personal yet again when, about 50 years after she first pondered that formative question, Peggyâs husband was horrifically injured in a bicycle accident. She paraphrased Dostoevskyâs Ivan Ilych in a subsequent autoethnographic publication, âWhat if my whole life has been wrong?â Her straightforward answer is no. But bioethics issues related to autonomy in dying became far more nuanced and complicated when viewed from her husbandâs bedside.
In two of the four cases, I have used the participantsâ real names. The two senior scholars, Ron Mallett and Peggy Battin have achieved a level of prominence in their fields that makes it difficult to dis-identify them. The younger scholars, Jesse and Gillian , preferred that I create pseudonyms and obscure some minor details, and I have done this. These faculty members represent a range of disciplines: health behavior (Gillian), social sciences3 (Jesse), theoretical physics (Ron), and bioethics (Peggy). Two of the participants are female. One is male. One is a transgender male. Geographically, they live in the West, the Midwest, and New England. Three of the four stories revolve around the death of loved onesâGillianâs son, Ronâs father, Peggyâs mother and husband. Jesseâs story of scholarship with and for atypically gendered individuals provides contrast by highlighting a different impetus for an academic focus rooted in personal pain.
Reader, let me pause for a moment to address something, because I know some of you are starting to get worried. Despite the stories about loss and pain that follow, this is not a sad book. Take heart. Yes, there are some sad stories here. Tears were shed during some of the interviews, and it wasnât just my participants who cried. But there was also a lot of laughter. It is my aim that you finish Part I feeling inspired by the participantsâ dedication, and eager to discover more meaning in your own scholarship going forwardâeven if your research agenda is motivated purely by intellectual curiosity. In Part II, youâll learn a great deal about Franklâs existential framework for interpreting, evaluating, and executing unusually personal scholarship. This should be an intellectually and emotionally challenging experience, but not a distressing one. My goal is that you finish this book feeling a renewed sense of purpose and enthusiasm for your academic work.
Theoretical Framework Assumed in This Book
This book employs the lens of Viktor Franklâs existential psychologyâcalled âlogotherapyââas it is presented in Manâs Search for Meaning (Frankl 1946/2014), The Doctor and the Soul (Frankl 1955/1986), and The Will To Meaning (Frankl 1969/2014).
Part I relies on a specific image derived from Franklâs workâthat of the âwell-lit , warm and pleasant lecture roomâ as an interpretive metaphor. Part II provides a more in-depth exploration of Franklian thought as it relates to unusually personal scholarship. Briefly, logotherapy can be defined as âhealing through meaningâ (Frankl 1969/2014, p. xviii) or as âan existential type of psychotherapy which maintains that [a personâs] mental health depends on awareness of meaning in his lifeâ (Simpson and Weiner 1989). As for what âmeaningâ is, keep reading! For our purposes in the present book, I will take some liberties with Franklâs assertion and state my claim more narrowly:
A researcherâs mental health dependsâin partâon an awareness of meaning in her scholarship.
Personally, I believe this is true for Gillian , Jesse , Ron, and Peggy. I also believe it to be true for the rest of us.
A Brief Note on Methodology and Voice
The empirical portions of this book were derived from a critical ethnographic analysis of semi-structured cross-sectional and longitudinal interview data and artifacts. I used methods of data analysis and interpretation developed by Carspecken (1996), which in turn are based on JĂźrgen Habermas â Theory of Communicative Action (1981). This methodology provides a meticulous set of procedures for gathering evidence to support truth claims in qualitative inquiry, and I have attempted to be conscientious in following these guidelines. Sarah ...