Revisiting Viktor Frank’s account of a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, a celebration of the human zeal to unveil the truth of inner light in the face of world’s horrendous episodes of savagery
Why read Austrian psychologist Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), an account of a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, as we celebrate the International Day of Commemoration and Dignity of the Victims of the Crime of Genocide on December 9? I asked myself as I picked up the slim volume from my bookshelf to re-read it. In retrospect, it was the unfolding progression of a transformative journey that touched me when I had first read the book during my college days. The beauty of the life-affirming proposition in this evocative document of human struggles stayed with me. The way mind-numbing suffering could be consigned to the fire of love to discover in one’s heart of hearts the unalloyed hope for the collective well-being of humanity stayed with me.
No wonder, the life-changing quality of this soulful book nourishes the inner being of a reader, and the quest for the unknown remains like an eternal spring. The process of knowing is not always effable. What is definable is the urge to revisit a work of singular merit and contextualise its relevance in the contemporary world. What I share here is a spectrum of thoughts and ideas Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning created in my mind while reading. I could not help calling to mind other works that foreground the invincible spirit of human endurance when the world, inside and outside, is plagued by the maladies of our times and fear rears its ugly head with a vengeance.
Catching the light
As I started reading the book afresh, I fell under the spell of Frankl. I had a lot to figure out in my mind to contain the upsurge of ideas and subtexts. Most significantly, Trump and trauma! By trauma, I am hinting at the recent validation of human suffering through awarding the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize to Nihon Hidankyo, recognising the plight of Hibakusha, the survivors of the atomic bombings. While Trumpism evokes the regime of highhanded control, the trauma narratives ensure the recovery of the past, forgotten and overlooked. If the former does not augur well for truth-seekers conjuring up the portentous image of an incorrigible despot in Margaret Atwood’s essay ‘What Art Under Trump?’(2017), the latter paves the way for a pluralistic representation of human ordeals and solidarity in envisioning a world of peace, harmony, and love. How does the reading of Frankl in the context of December 9 play out in the human mind? What does the work mean to me? I mulled over these questions.
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“Catching the light”! This could be a way to define my reading experience of Man’s Search for Meaning. I borrow this succinct phrase from the first Native American to be the Poet Laureate in the United States Joy Harjo’s work of personal reflections to register the transformative nature of personal experience in nurturing self-knowledge. As memories of the Nazi concentration camps unwind through a host of spine-chilling narratives in the book, readers venture into the traumatic experiences of Frankl with keen sensibilities to absorb and value the illuminating reality of the ‘unheard cry for meaning’, to quote Frankl. With its eyes-wide-open passages of revelation, the writer’s journey toward transformation in the face of the ubiquity of human suffering is an unprecedented act of resilience, equanimity, solace, and grace.
A harmonious whole
What makes suffering transformative? Is suffering a leap upward in transcendence? These were a couple of overarching questions while reading Frankl. I was thinking of another probing question: what is magical in maddening grief? I had in mind Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019). Haven’t these works redefined the language of grief? Grief, to Frankl, is the discovery of the inner self. It creates a transcendent purpose to commit humans to the ‘act of living’ pitted against ordeals. What does it mean to read Frankl in today’s world of mounting uncertainty? Is not suffering a meditation on the glorified humanity untapped within an individual? Frankl’s work is a luminous triumph of the existential self and its archetypal urge for sublimation.
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Though Frankl’s world is steeped in the unending nights of torment, it unravels the almost mystical reverence that the ‘world beyond the night remains a mystery,’ to borrow the symbolic phrase from Louise Glück. Frankl has the key to this mystery to unlock the virtue of man’s unassailable presence amidst the ominous fury of the night. The mystery identifies a purpose beyond individual well-being, aimed at the shared good of the human community, which imbues human lives with meaning. This aligns with what Eckhart Tolle calls “the joy of Being” and what Atul Gawande, in Being Mortal, describes as “the rewards of simply being.” It subverts Maslow’s hierarchy of needs by positioning “transcendence” above self-actualisation to justify the human longing for a harmonious whole.
Unveiling the truth of inner light
Frankl’s work is a glorious manifestation of reflective self-consciousness thriving on fulfilment. It is a celebration of the unwavering zeal to unveil the truth of inner light in the face of the world’s horrendous episodes of savagery. For all intents and purposes, Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning is emancipatory in embodying the timelessness of human grit to transcend the bounds of suffering and be blessed with the bliss of self-knowledge. Reading Frankl is to validate the glory of the human will to live. It not only calls forth echoes of Shakespeare’s well-wrought aphorism: ‘What a piece of work is a man! …in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!’ but it also voices the Indian spiritual giant Swami Vivekananda’s soul-bracing apotheosis of human integrity to herald a breakthrough in the enterprise of introspection: ‘We are the greatest God…Christs and Buddhas are but waves on the boundless Ocean which is I AM.’
With Frankl, we travel into an inner space of transformation that is woven into the symphony of human existence. Frankl’s inspired vision of enlightened inclusion feeds into the starving souls of humanity. Paradoxically, the ritual enactment of violence goes unabated that diminishes the essence of humaneness. The world we live in is short on empathy. I feel anguished looking at the amputated, maimed, and disfigured photographs of Gazans in Surviving Gaza by Samar Abu Elouf in The New York Times (November 25, 2024). At this critical juncture, should we not read the prophet of existential doom, Victor Frankl? Should we not return to Frankl, an advocate for human solidarity to redeem the tragedy of the bleeding humanity with his vision of wholeness?
