Victor Frankl - Finding Meaning and Purpose

When I was eighteen years old in the spring of 1968, in a book store on the square in Racine, Wisconsin, I found a little book titled Man’s Search for Meaning, by philosopher and psychotherapist Victor Frankl. The author survived Auschwitz during the Second World War. He emerged from the death camp having lost everything that mattered to him. His beloved wife was dead, his family was dead, almost all of his friends or acquaintances were dead or dying. He himself was nothing more than a bag of bones, barely clinging to life. In addition he had lost the manuscript of the book he had been writing, the work of his life. He saw no future for himself, and his past contained only suffering and death.

In the days after the end of the war when his camp had been liberated by the Allied armies, Frankl said, he

“…walked through the country past flowering meadows, for miles and miles, toward the market town near the camp. Larks rose to the sky and I could hear their joyous song. There was no one to be seen for miles around; there was nothing but the wide earth and sky and the lark’s jubilation and the freedom of space. I stopped, looked around, and up to the sky – and then I went down on my knees. At that moment there was very little I knew of myself or of the world – I had but one sentence in mind – always the same: ‘I called to the Lord from my narrow prison and he answered me in the freedom of space.’ How long I knelt there and repeated the sentence memory can no longer recall. But I know that on that day, in that hour, my new life started. Step by step I progressed, until I again became a human being.”

He had felt, for the first time, a spark of hope. That was all he needed to begin living again. He had found a subtle meaning in the beauty of the world and he could use his new consciousness and connection to that beauty as a reason to go on living.

Frankl’s little book was one of the most important books I’ve read in my life. When I was eighteen I understood only a bit of what he was trying to say, but it was enough to provide a frame that allowed me to continue my life and to continue learning.

We all make meaning from the fragments of our lives, said Frankl, from the beauty of the world around us, from the fragile connections we have with each other. We construct a narrative that allows us to survive because it tells us who we are and what it is we love.

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The late Dr. Viktor Frankl, psychoanalyst, Holocaust survivor, and author of the seminal book, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” speaks with passion and humor to a group of students on the meaning and purpose of life.