Victor Frankl’s Man
… with Fraser Hibbit
Victor Frankl wrote From Death Camp to Existentialism in a hasty nine-day stint, 1946. It is an unusual read for it is part memoir and part psychological case-study. Frankl’s interest is not, he tells us, to write of the ‘the great horrors [of the concentration camps], which have already been described often enough, but with the multitude of small torments.’. Torments that not only shaped the psychological attitude of the prisoner but, in Frankl’s view, influenced the prisoner’s chance of survival.
The book has been hailed as an extraordinary symbol of hope; a necessary combative to the darkest period in the 20th century; translated widely, and millions of copies sold. The years since 1946 produced successive re-prints, additional written material, and a title change: Man’s Search For Meaning.
Victor Frankl believes wholly in the will-to-meaning. That is the essential point of his so-called Logotherapy. Before the Second World War, he was kicked out of Alfred Adler’s Second Viennese Circle of Psychotherapy over this contention. The Circles of psychotherapy run, generally, so: the 1st circle, Sigmund Freud, will-to-pleasure; the 2nd circle, Alfred Adler, will-to-power; the unofficial 3rd, Victor Frankl, will-to-meaning. Frankl’s book has aged very well on this account, given our contemporary penchant for ‘positive’ psychology.
Frankl has been criticized by one commentator for his tone of ‘self-aggrandizement’ and an ‘inhumane sense of studying-detachment towards victims of the Holocaust’. Whether the book, or Frankl’s sustained analysis, is humane can be argued back and forth, but on the other hand, whether how or why he wrote the book is very human — this needn’t be argued but purely accepted. Here comes a necessary thought: the fact that Frankl did what he did proves something of the human tendency, both damning, according to some critics, and redemptive, as professed by his millions of readers. His attempt at a case-study of the camp never escapes the part which is a memoir.
He is sent to the camps, suffers horribly but survives by chance and his own will. The camps provide him with an ultimate correlative to his psychoanalytical theories. This leads him to remark, along these lines: “The spirit is connected to the Logos, if the logos dies, the spirit dies, and so the human dies — those that were not strong enough to believe in a future, a goal, or to have a rich spiritual life, died; those that could not see the concentration camp as a ‘test’ of their spirit, died.
One commentator on the book, Richard Middleton-Kaplan, writes: ‘whether intentionally or unintentionally… this paved the way for the idea of the Jews going ‘like sheep to the slaughter’. Victor Frankl also made it ambiguous how his brand of psychotherapy was influenced by the death-camps. He writes that Logotherapy ‘was not concocted in the philosopher’s armchair… it took shape in the hard school of air-raid shelters and bomb craters; in concentration camps and POW camps.’. This statement was edited out of later editions of the book and replaced with: ‘People think I came out of Auschwitz with a brand-new psychotherapy. This is not the case’. Perhaps the vague: ‘logotherapy is of its time’ would have sufficed. Why, then, is Logotherapy discussed in part two of the book? And seen in contrast to the experience of the concentration camp? Because they shored up his theories. Because it was partly his hopes, he writes several times in the book, of completing his work that got him through the camp alive, his reliance on his own will-to-meaning; all this, and a multitude of small instances of luck. Logotherapy, helpful as it may be, is not the be-all for survival in the concentration camps; the situation is too extreme — the connection implicitly forced between the two is absurd, and strikes one as the lowest form of advertising.
