Viktor Frankl's Search for Meaning

An Emblematic 20th-Century Life

Timothy Pytell

• Éditeur: Berghahn Books
• Année: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781782388319
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Sozialwissenschaften
• Sous-sujet: Sozialwissenschaftliche Biographien

?"[T]his is a scholarly, commendable biography and intellectual history. Lay readers will be challenged; psychologists and historians will be grateful."— Library Journal, starred review

First published in 1946, Viktor Frankl's memoir Man's Search for Meaning remains one of the most influential books of the last century, selling over ten million copies worldwide and having been embraced by successive generations of readers captivated by its author's philosophical journey in the wake of the Holocaust.

This long-overdue reappraisal examines Frankl's life and intellectual evolution anew, from his early immersion in Freudian and Adlerian theory to his development of the "third Viennese school" amid the National Socialist domination of professional psychotherapy. It teases out the fascinating contradictions and ambiguities surrounding his years in Nazi Europe, including the experimental medical procedures he oversaw in occupied Austria and a stopover at the Auschwitz concentration camp far briefer than has commonly been assumed.

Throughout, author Timothy Pytell gives a penetrating but fair-minded account of a man whose paradoxical embodiment of asceticism, celebrity, tradition, and self-reinvention drew together the complex strands of twentieth-century intellectual life.

From the introduction:
At the same time, Frankl's testimony, second only to the Diary of Anne Frank in popularity, has raised the ire of experts on the Holocaust. For example, in the 1990s the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington purportedly refused to sell Man's Search for Meaning in the gift shop…. During the late 1960s and early 1970s Frankl became very popular in America. Frankl's survival of the Holocaust, his reassurance that life is meaningful, and his personal conviction that God exists served to make him a forerunner of the self-help genre.

CHAPTER ONE

The First Attempt to Find Meaning

But in those days no one knew what it was moving towards. Nor could anyone quite distinguish between what was above and what below, between what was moving forwards and what backwards.

—Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

Viktor Frankl was an assimilated Viennese Jew.¹ As we shall see, he might be best described as “hyper-acculturated” because, like many Austrian Jews, he strove to be included in mainstream culture. This sentiment is captured with the quip, Austrian “Jews are just like everybody else. Only more so.”² His father, Gabriel, was born on 28 March 1861 in the village of Porolitz in southern Moravia. Gabriel’s father was a book binder and he had moved his family to Vienna when Gabriel was in high school. Gabriel originally wanted to study medicine but gave it up for financial reasons. In lieu of medicine he took a civil service job in the ministry for social administration. He worked for ten years as a stenographer in the Parliament, and for twenty-five years as a private secretary to the state minister Joseph Maria von Bärnreither. The minister, with Gabriel’s help, founded and developed the central office of youth welfare and child protection. Gabriel had a religious upbringing but became an assimilated liberal Jew, a common occurrence among Jews in the civil service.³ Frankl’s mother, Elsa Lion, was born 8 February 1879 in Prague and was eighteen years younger than Gabriel. The Frankls had three children—two sons and a daughter. Viktor was the middle child, with an elder brother, Walter, and younger sister, Stella. In his biography, Klingberg describes a rather idyllic family setting, describing how Viktor emerged from a “good stable.”⁴

Viktor Frankl reconstructed his own life in a 1973 autobiographical sketch⁵ that was updated and expanded in 1995 into the short book, Was nicht in meinen Büchern steht.⁶ The book was published to coincide with Frankl’s ninetieth birthday celebration, and contained elements appropriate to the genre of confessional literature. Stylistically his autobiography was flippant and anecdotal, and presented an impressive “Viktor Frankl.”

Apparently Viktor was a rather precocious child. For example, by the time he was three, Frankl claimed he already knew he wanted to be a doctor, and he also recalled telling his mother that the cure for those who were suicidal or sick was to “give them all they wanted to eat and to drink, like shoe polish and gasoline. If they perish, then they have wanted it so. If they live, then we have discovered the medicine for those diseased.”⁷ It is not clear why Frankl chose to document this early memory, but the remembrance seems to reflect his lifelong desire to resolve human suffering. On the other hand, it also seems to be an example of a somewhat callous therapeutic approach.

Frankl’s next significant memory, which he jokingly claimed was the founding moment of logotherapy, concerned the formation of his attitude toward death. When he was four years old, Frankl recalled “being scared awake by the revelation” that he must one day die. He then added that “at no point in his life” was he afraid of dying. Instead, he was troubled by the “question of whether or not the transitoriness of life denies its meaning.” After much intellectual struggle, he came to the conclusion that “in most cases death makes life meaningful.”⁸ It seems the intellectual dilemma that occupied Frankl as an adult began when he was only four years old. And, after much despair and intellectual struggle, the mature Frankl felt he had triumphed over the nihilistic implications of human mortality.

On the surface Frankl’s struggle with human meaning appears as not much more than the process of maturation for any sensitive soul. What made Frankl’s awareness significant is that he first turned to Freud, and then Adler, before relying on existentialism and developing logotherapy for his solution. Then he elevated his answer into a universal cure for nihilism. But the key point is that the fear that he would one day die drove Frankl to come to terms with human meaning. It is this confrontation with fear that became the paradigm for Frankl’s counterphobic response and solution to the problem of death: the assertion of the will to meaning.

In his autobiography Frankl appears as a bright child, already directed toward becoming a doctor, and fueled by a central intellectual preoccupation. Under normal circumstances a person of Frankl’s caliber, asking important but nevertheless rather youthful questions about nihilism and meaning, probably would not have amounted to much beyond his bourgeois upbringing. But beginning with the Great War, Western culture faced a radical confrontation with violence, mass death, and the meaning of human existence.⁹ Frankl’s questions therefore took on a profound resonance, and by persistently asking them he was able to fashion himself into a figure of worldwide repute and popular influence. In order to fully understand Frankl we must first diverge to reconstruct the social context within which the young Frankl’s consciousness was formed.

The Viennese Modern

A large body of work exists on Viennese modernism, but the most significant remains Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture.¹⁰ Schorske tied the vitality of Viennese modernism to the crisis and ultimate failure of liberalism in Austria. According to Schorske’s synthetic view of culture and politics, there were three generations of Viennese politicians, cultural theorists, and artists between 1848 and 1914, and each generation represented a unique, more radical, and more alienated form of cultural experience. Since Schorske equated rationalism with liberalism, and claimed this tradition was in a contest with the aristocratic Catholic culture of grace, the failure of liberalism in Austria subsequently became the advent of the irrational.

Schorske recounted how the liberals were defeated in 1848, but nevertheless managed to establish a constitutional government in 1867 after Bismarck’s defeat of Austria destroyed a “Grossdeutsch” solution to the German problem. But liberal failure in the areas of “national unity, social justice, economic prosperity and public morality … converged … to produce a deep crisis in liberalism before it had the chance to stabilize its new power.”¹¹ According to Schorske, the crisis of liberalism led to an outpouring of irrationality. In the political sphere the irrational was manifested in numerous ways. There was the pan-German student movement led by the anti-Semitic and conceivably proto-fascist Georg von Schönerer; there was also the Christian socialism of Vienna’s Mayor Karl Lüger, who was anti-Semitic but nevertheless successful from a municipal point of view; finally, there was the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl.¹² Thus, “as Schönerer’s first task was to break the German liberals, and Lüger’s to break the Catholic liberals, so Herzl fought the Jewish ones.”¹³

In the second generation, the emblematic figure of the irrational was Freud, who undermined the illusions of liberal rationalism through the charting of the instinctual mind.

The third and most radical generation of the Viennese modern comprised the Expressionists and their celebration of individual and subsequently psychological alienation. This generation was exemplified for Schorske by the painter Oskar Kokoschka, the architect Adolf Loos, and the composer Arnold Schönberg. Accordingly, the Expressionists were:

too free of specific loyalties to define themselves in relation to history, to cultural structure and function in a temporal sequence. Not even ‘modern’ had much utility as a concept for them, for the modern must derive its meaning in negative relation to that which, as history, precedes it. The Expressionists had taken up the task of overcoming history where the fin-desiècle explorers had left it, and pressed forward on the ‘voyage interieur’ to the realm of raw, existential anxiety or anger, where all previous structures seemed phenomenological sham. Not the past, not modern life was the object of their apocalyptic vision, but human existence as such.¹⁴

In the Expressionists’ flight from political and social reality, and the subsequent rejection of all that the nineteenth century represented, Schorske saw the culmination of the crisis and failure of Austrian liberalism. Schorske’s penetrating description of the crisis of liberalism provides an important cultural context to our intellectual biography. Since Frankl’s first intellectual production concerned the psychology of Freud, and he eventually rejected Freudianism, Schorske’s positioning and interpretation of Freud takes on prime interest for our story.

Schorske placed Freud in the second generation that was loosely equated with the discovery of the irrational. But for Schorske, Freud’s eternal oedipal conflict stopped short of the excessive cultural rebellion of the Expressionists for “unlike the others, he kept the face of his father—its self-conscious Judaism, its principled liberalism, and its rationalism.” Although Freud shared the cultural crisis with the Expressionists, he “subsumed the uniqueness of that experience under the eternal verity of father-son relations.”¹⁵

Freud therefore represented a transitional figure “who kept the face of his father” without becoming overrun by the irrational, but “where the fin-de-siècle recovered the sexual instinct, eros, the Expressionists recovered Thanatos.”¹⁶ Schorske’s historical description of Viennese modernism and his cultural configuration of Freud illuminates the context of Frankl’s initial intellectual quest and connection to Freudianism.

The Young Frankl

As the Great War ended, Frankl was only fourteen years old, but nevertheless was already reading the German physical chemist Wilhelm Ostwald and one of the founders of experimental psychology, Gustav Theodor Fechner. These studies suggest Frankl was struggling with life questions and, according to Klingberg, was already experiencing an “agnostic period.”¹⁷ In his struggles, he came to the conclusion that there must be a universal balancing principle both in the microcosm and macrocosm. Frankl describes experiencing this balancing principle while lying on the deck of a Danube steamer with the starry sky above him. This “aha” experience was portrayed as “nirvana” or “a warm death seen from within.”¹⁸

Frankl’s memories suggest that he had begun to intellectualize death as both part of a cosmic balance and as nirvana, or nothingness. This ambivalent and slightly contradictory attitude toward death reveals that Frankl had not yet come to his more “mature” existentialist attitude. That is, he had not taken the existential turn that “internalized” death as the source of authentic existence. Instead, based on his readings of Ostwald and Fechner he articulated an organic vision, where death remained “external” to life as part of a natural balance. Apparently, at this youthful stage Frankl was coming to terms with the naturalistic philosophy of the Enlightenment, while his reflection on death and nirvana was probably attributable to the violence and cultural upheaval of the war.

At this point, still a teenager, Frankl became interested in experimental and applied psychology and also attended lectures from two of Freud’s disciples, Paul Schilder and Eduard Hitschmann.¹⁹ Around this time Frankl discovered the works of both Freud and Max Scheler. He also gave his first public lecture at an adult education school, and the subject was the meaning of life. Frankl described his lecture as “pioneering existentialism” because he argued that the question is not what the meaning of life is, but rather how “we have to answer the questions life poses to us.”²⁰ From the subject of the lecture, and the conclusion, it seems the spiritual struggles that bes...