Searching for Meaning

Religion, Viktr Frankl, and Science today

Perhaps nobody is as closely associated with the idea that human beings need a sense of meaning to thrive than Viktr Frankl. Frankl was a relatively young Austrian psychoanalyst (or, more accurately for his time, neurologist) when he was rounded up by the Nazis and sent to the concentration camps. He was immediately separated from his wife, but did manage to keep with him for a time an incomplete manuscript of his book on a therapeutic practice he called “logotherapy.” The manuscript was soon lost. Liberated after three years in the camps (he credits his survival largely on a series of miraculous coincidences), he wrote a brief memoir of his experience. Called Man’s Search for Meaning, the book, which also summarizes his theory of logotherapy, ultimately became a phenomenal bestseller. Frankl himself lived a long life. You can see him give a lecture here.

Frankl did not develop his theoretical outlook in the camps, but his experience in them gave him the most indescribably perverse opportunity to test it. The general thesis is quite simple: people who live for meaning and who find meaning in even the most challenging situations are psychologically healthier and more resilient than those who don’t. He developed a therapy he termed “logotherapy,” a treatment that helps patients (or we may call them clients today) reframe their experiences so that they see more good, and particularly their own agency in creating good. Frankl noticed in the camps that those who gave up hope and who felt they no longer had anything to live for were far less likely to survive. Hope could not overcome the brutal conditions of the camps, of course, but it did provide a slight edge. And if one could have hope in the extermination camps, all the more so might that approach be applicable to our own, almost always significantly cushier, lives.

In the camps, Frankl tells us, he found personal meaning in two things, his wife and his manuscript. He had married shortly before his deportation and he tells us that reflecting on his love for her helped him get through the experience. In his discussion of logotherapy, he returns repeatedly to the notion that love and relationships are key components on which to build personal meaning. In one story, he recounts that a man was having great difficulty coping with the loss of his wife. He had the man imagine that he had died first, and the pain that that would have caused his wife. Now, Frankl advised, shift that perspective and think about his own pain as being a sacrifice for his wife. His suffering has a purpose.

This story is especially arresting because we know that Frankl wrote the memoir shortly after his liberation. He already had learned that his wife died shortly after they had separated. Frankly himself never reveals this. Unlike his devotion to reconstructing his lost manuscript, which he succeeded in actually completing after the war, his hope that he would see his wife was, in at least a literal sense, false. Did he actually learn about his wife’s death while he was still in the camps? He must have suspected it. We are left wondering whether it matters: should we adopt a frame of mind because we find it helpful, despite the fact that we suspect its foundation are false? Or should we remain “realists,” even if it causes us to suffer but offers no benefit?

Frankl was not above criticism. His approach heavily shifts agency to the patient; ultimately, it is up to you (with the help of a psychoanalyst) to reframe suffering into meaning and purpose. Not everyone is capable of this kind of psychological work, and it is not always clear how to identify a specific meaning or purpose. His general orientation to individuals led him also to a more forgiving attitude toward the Germans after the war and a general reluctance to assign communal blame. This, in turn, caused tension between him and the (very tiny) post-war Jewish community in Vienna.

Yet Frankl’s greatest contribution might not be his therapeutic approach, but simply the way that he articulated and made relevant for today’s more secular world an ancient truth: As individuals, we are wired to seek meaning in our lives and have difficulty thriving when we lose that sense. Nearly all religious traditions maintain some version (or, often, several different versions) of the message that we - as individuals - matter. A Hasidic tale expresses this well:

Before his death, Rabbi Zusya said, “In the coming world, they will not ask me: ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me, ‘Why were you not Zusya?’”

We are not called upon to emulate individuals who we admire and think of as great. We are called on instead to be our best selves and to fulfill our own, individual, unique missions. Modern Christian theologians, such as Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life: What am Earth Am I Here For?, echo this theme. Martin Seligman makes “meaning” one of the pillars of “flourishing” (the others are positive affect, engagement, relationships, and accomplishment - PERMA). Meaning becomes a key component of the happy life.

Religious thinkers assumed it was obvious that we have a purpose in life and that that purpose sets us apart as human beings. Modern science comes at the question from a different angle. While science cannot answer the question, “do we have a purpose and what is it?,” it can ask whether it really is true that a sense of purpose and meaning results in positive (or any differential) outcomes, and for whom and under what conditions. If so, it can also explore the causal mechanisms of that association.

Experimental scientists have been intrigued for many years by Frankl’s theory. One of the primary experimental tools in psychology is the survey. Already in the early 1960s psychologists devised a “purpose-in-life” assessment, which has been refined in subsequent years (you can take the test here). In general, this assessment has confirmed Frankl’s observational insights. Among those within a “normal” range of mental health, a lower score correlates with a sense of an “existential vacuum,” while in those who already have mental disorders it manifests in a particular kind of “neurosis.” Those in the “normal” category who have low purpose-in-life scores also show less resilience and higher rates of depression. Among college students, in recent years there seems to have been a marked decline in their “purpose-in-life” scores, and a corresponding increase in depression and anxiety rates.

The science is still incomplete. We do not yet know why American college students seem to be experiencing less of a sense of purpose and exactly how that relates to other forms of emotional suffering. I do not think that we have any sense of the actual neurological causal mechanisms. What happens in the brain when one can see one’s life as having a sense of purpose? Is this easier for some people rather than others, and is this a result of genetics or upbringing? What costs might accompany having a “false” sense of purpose?

Thinking about our individual purpose in life intersects with another question that science cannot answer: Do humans, as a species, have a purpose? The question is important because it opens into a series of other questions about collective meaning as opposed to individual meaning. Do nations, or ethnic and religious communities, have distinct purposes? Clearly, such communities have attributed such a natural calling to themselves and to others (e.g., “manifest destiny”). For an individual, it is cognitively easier to simply adopt an “off the shelf,” often ideological, answer to the question of one’s purpose than it is to do the much harder and less certain work of finding a personal sense of meaning. Purposeful ideologies usually also come with ready-made communities, which is a significant advantage. Purpose-driven communities, though, can also drift into unthinking, mob-like, behavior. Our drive for meaning is both a strength and, in the hands of some, can be exploited as a weakness.

In my next post I’ll explore further the quest for meaning at the intersection of the individual and the community.