Man's search for meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

In general, there was also a cultural hibernation in the camp. There were two exceptions to this, politics and religion. Politics were talked about everywhere in camp almost continuously. The discussions were based chiefly on rumors which were snapped up and passed around avidly. The rumors about the military situation were usually contradictory. They followed one another rapidly and succeeded only in making a contribution to the war of nerves that was waged in the minds of all the prisoners. Many times hopes for a speedy end to the war which had been found by optimistic rumors were disappointed. Some men lost all hope, but it was the encouraable optimists who were the most irritating companions.

The religious interest of the prisoners as far and as soon as it developed was the most sincere imaginable. The depth and vigor of religious belief often surprised and moved a new arrival. Most impressive in this connection were improvised prayers or services in the corner of a hut or in the darkness of the locked cattle truck in which we were brought back from a distant work site, tired, hungry, and frozen in our ragged clothing.

In the winter and spring of 1945, there was an outbreak of typhus which infected nearly all the prisoners. The mortality was great among the weak, who had to keep on with their hard work as long as they possibly could. The quarters for the sick were most inadequate. There were practically no medicines or attendance. Some of the symptoms of the disease were extremely disagreeable, an irrepressible aversion to even a scrap of food, which was an additional danger to life, and terrible attacks of delirium. The worst case of delirium was suffered by a friend of mine who thought that he was dying and wanted to pray. In his delirium, he could not find the words to do so. To avoid these attacks of delirium, I tried, as did many of the others, to keep awake for most of the night. For hours I composed speeches in my mind. Eventually, I began to reconstruct the manuscript, which I had lost in the disinfection chamber of Awitz, and scribbled the key words in shortorthhand on tiny scraps of paper.

Occasionally a scientific debate developed in camp. Once I witnessed something I had never seen, even in my normal life, although it lay somewhat near my own professional interests, a spiritualistic seance. I had been invited to attend by the camp's chief doctor, also a prisoner, who knew that I was a specialist in psychiatry. The meeting took place in his small private room in the sick quarters. A small circle had gathered, among them quite illegally, the warrant officer from the sanitation squad. One man began to invoke the spirits with a kind of prayer. The camp's cler sat in front of a blank sheet of paper without any conscious intention of writing. During the next 10 minutes, after which time the seance was terminated because of the medium's failure to conjure the spirits to appear, his pencil slowly drew lines across the paper, forming quite legibly, v. It was asserted that the clark had never learned Latin, and that he had never before heard the words victis, woe to the vanquished. In my opinion, he must have heard them once in his life without recollecting them. And they must have been available to the spirit, the spirit of his subconscious mind at that time a few months before our liberation and the end of the war.

In spite of all the enforced physical and mental primitiveness of the life in a concentration camp, it was possible for spiritual life to deepen. Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain. They were often of a delicate constitution, but the damage to their inner selves was less. They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom. Only in this way can one explain the apparent paradox that some prisoners of a less hardy makeup often seem to survive camp life better than did those of a robust nature.

In order to make myself clear, I'm forced to fall back on personal experience. Let me tell what happened on those early mornings when we had to march to our work site. There were the shouted commands. Detachment forward march left 2 3 4 left 2 3 4 left 2 3 4 left 2 3 4. First man about left and left and left and left. Caps off. These words sound in my ears even now. At the order caps off, we passed the gate of the camp, and search lights were trained upon us. Whoever did not march smartly got a kick, and worse off was the man who, because of the cold, had pulled his cap back over his ears before permission was given. We stumbled on in the darkness over big stones and through large puddles along the one road leading from the camp. The accompanying guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles. Anyone with very sore feet supported himself on his neighbor's arm. Hardly a word was spoken. The icy wind did not encourage talk. Hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly, "If our wives could see us now, I do hope they are better off in their camps and don't know what is happening to us." That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind." And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said. But we both knew each of us was thinking of his wife.

Occasionally I looked at the sky where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise. A thought transfixed me. For the first time in my life, I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart. The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss be it only for a brief moment in the contemplation of his beloved in a position of utter desolation when man cannot express himself in positive action when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way an honorable way in such a position man can through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved achieve fulfillment for the First time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory."

In front of me, a man stumbled, and those following him fell on top of him. The guard rushed over and used his whip on them all. Thus, my thoughts were interrupted for a few minutes, but soon my soul found its way back from the prisoner's existence to another world, and I resumed talk with my loved one. I asked her questions, and she answered. She questioned me in return, and I answered. Stop. We had arrived at our work site. Everybody rushed into the dark hut in the hope of getting a fairly decent tool. Each prisoner got a spade or a pickaxe. Can't you hurry up, you pigs? Soon we had resumed the previous day's positions in the ditch. The frozen ground cracked under the point of the pickaxes, and sparks flew. The men were silent, their brains numb. My mind still clung to the image of my wife. A thought crossed my mind. I didn't even know if she was still alive. I knew only one thing, which I have learned well by now. Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance. I did not know whether my wife was alive, and I had no means of finding out. During all my prison life, there was no outgoing or incoming male, but at that moment it ceased to matter. There was no need for me to know. Nothing could touch the strength of my love, my thoughts, and the image of my beloved. Had I known then that my wife was dead, I think that I would still have given myself undisturbed by that knowledge to the contemplation of her image, and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying. Set me like a seal upon thy heart. Love is as strong as death.

This intensification of inner life helped the prisoner find a refuge from the emptiness, desolation, and spiritual poverty of his existence by letting him escape into the past. When given free reign, his imagination played with past events, often not important ones, but minor happenings and trifling things. His nostalgic memory glorified them, and they assumed a strange character. Their world and their existence seemed very distant, and the spirit reached out for them longingly. In my mind, I took bus rides, unlocked the front door of my apartment, answered my telephone, switched on the electric lights. Our thoughts often centered on such details, and these memories could move one to tears.

As the inner life of the prisoner tended to become more intense, he also experienced the beauty of art and nature as never before. Under their influence, he sometimes even forgot his own frightful circumstances. If someone had seen our faces on the journey from Ashvitz to a Bavarian camp, as we beheld the mountains of Saltsburg, with their summit glowing in the sunset, through the little barred windows of the prison carriage, he would never have believed that those were the faces of men who had given up all hope of life and liberty. Despite that factor, or maybe because of it, we were carried away by nature's beauty which we had missed for so long. In camp two, a man might draw the attention of a comrade working next to him to a nice view of the setting sun shining through the tall trees of the Bavarian woods, as in the famous watercolor by Dura, the same woods in which we had built an enormous hidden munitions plant. One evening, when we were already resting on the floor of our hut, dead tired, soup bowls in hand, a fellow prisoner rushed in and asked us to run out to the assembly grounds and see the wonderful sunset. Standing outside, we saw sinister clouds glowing in the west, and the whole sky alive with clouds of everchanging shapes and colors from steel blue to blood red. The desolate gray mud huts provided a sharp contrast, while the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky. Then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another, "How beautiful the world could be."

Another time we were at work in a trench. The dawn was gray around us. Gray was the sky above. Gray the snow in the pale light of dawn. gray the rags in which my fellow prisoners were clad and gray their faces. I was again conversing silently with my wife, or perhaps I was struggling to find the reason for my sufferings, my slow dying. In a last violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious yes in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose. At that moment a light was lit in a distant farmhouse which stood on the horizon as if painted there in the midst of the miserable gray of a dawning morning in Bavaria at lux inbris lucet and the light shineth in the darkness. For hours I stood hacking at the icy ground. The guard passed by insulting me and once again I communed with my beloved. More and more I felt that she was present, that she was with me. I had the feeling that I was able to touch her, able to stretch out my hand and grasp hers. The feeling was very strong. She was there. Then, at that very moment, a bird flew down silently and perched just in front of me on the heap of soil which I had dug up from the ditch, and looked steadily at me.

Earlier I mentioned art. Is there such a thing in a concentration camp? It rather depends on what one chooses to call art. A kind of cabaret was improvised from time to time. A hut was cleared temporarily. A few wooden benches were pushed or nailed together and a program was drawn up. In the evening those who had fairly good positions in camp, the capos and the workers who did not have to leave camp on distant marches assembled there. They came to have a few laughs, or perhaps to cry a little, anyway, to forget. There were songs, poems, jokes, some with underlying satire regarding the camp. All were meant to help us forget, and they did help. The gatherings were so effective that a few ordinary prisoners went to see the cabaret in spite of their fatigue, even though they missed their daily portion of food by going.

During the halfhour lunch interval, when soup, which the contractors paid for, and for which they did not spend much, was ladled out at our work site, we were allowed to assemble in an unfinished engine room. On entering, everyone got a ladle full of the watery soup. While we sipped it greedily, a prisoner climbed onto a tub and sang Italian areas. We enjoyed the songs, and he was guaranteed a double helping of soup straight from the bottom. That meant with peas. Rewards were given in camp, not only for entertainment, but also for applause. I, for example, could have found protection, how lucky I was never in need of it, from the camp's most dreaded Kappo, who, for more than one good reason, was known as the murderous Kappo. This is how it happened. One evening I had the great honor of being invited again to the room where the spiritualistic seance had taken place. There were gathered the same intimate friends of the chief doctor, and most illegally, the warrant officer from the sanitation squad was again present. The murderous Kappo entered the room by chance, and he was asked to recite one of his poems, which had become famous or infamous in camp. He did not need to be asked twice, and quickly produced a kind of diary from which he began to read samples of his art. I bit my lips till they hurt in order to keep from laughing at one of his love poems, and very likely that saved my life. Since I was also generous with my applause, my life might have been saved even had I been detailed to his working party, to which I had previously been assigned for one day, a day that was quite enough for me. It was useful anyway to be known to the murderous Kappo from a favorable angle, so I applauded as hard as I could.

Generally speaking, of course, any pursuit of art in camp was somewhat grotesque. I would say that the real impression made by anything connected with art arose only from the ghostlike contrast between the performance and the background of desolate camp life. I shall never forget how I awoke from the deep sleep of exhaustion on my second night in Ashvitz, roused by music. The senior warden of the hut had some kind of celebration in his room, which was near the entrance of the hut. Tipsy voices bowled some hacknid tunes. Suddenly there was a silence, and into the night a violin sang a desperately sad tango, an unusual tune not spoiled by frequent playing. The violin wept, and a part of me wept with it, for on that same day someone had a 24th birthday. That someone lay in another part of the Ashvitz camp, possibly only a few hundred or a thousand yards away, and yet completely out of reach. That someone was my wife.

To discover that there was any semblance of art in a concentration camp must be surprised enough for an outsider, but he may be even more astonished to hear that one could find a sense of humor there as well. Of course, only the faint trace of one, and then only for a few seconds or minutes. Humor was another of the soul's weapons in the fight for self-preservation. It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human makeup, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds. I practically trained a friend of mine who worked next to me on the building site to develop a sense of humor. I suggested to him that we would promise each other to invent at least one amusing story daily about some incident that could happen one day after our liberation. He was a surgeon and had been an assistant on the staff of a large hospital. So I once tried to get him to smile by describing to him how he would be unable to lose the habits of camp life when he returned to his former work. On the building site, especially when the supervisor made his tour of inspection, the foreman encouraged us to work faster by shouting, "Action! Action!" I told my friend, "One day you will be back in the operating room performing a big abdominal operation. Suddenly an orderly will rush in announcing the arrival of the senior surgeon by shouting, "Action! Action!"

Sometimes the other men invented amusing dreams about the future, such as forecasting that during a future dinner engagement they might forget themselves when the soup was served and beg the hostess to ladle it from the bottom. The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living. Yet it is possible to practice the art of living even in a concentration camp. Although suffering is omnipresent. To draw an analogy, a man's suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly no matter how big the chamber. Thus, suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore, the size of human suffering is absolutely relative. It also follows that a very trifling thing can cause the greatest of joys.

Take as an example something that happened on our journey from Ashvitz to the camp affiliated with Dhau. We had all been afraid that our transport was heading for the Mouthousand camp. We became more and more tense as we approached a certain bridge over the Danube which the train would have to cross to reach Mouthausen. According to the statement of experienced traveling companions, those who have never seen anything similar cannot possibly imagine the dance of joy performed in the carriage by the prisoners when they saw that our transport was not crossing the bridge and was instead heading only for Dhau. And again, what happened on our arrival in that camp after a journey lasting 2 days and three nights? There had not been enough room for everybody to crouch on the floor of the carriage at the same time. The majority of us had to stand all the way, while a few took turns at squatting on the scanty straw which was soaked with human urine. When we arrived, the first important news that we heard from older prisoners was that this comparatively small camp, its population was 2 and a half thousand, had no oven, no crerematorium, no gas. That meant that a person who had become a Muslim could not be taken straight to the gas chamber, but would have to wait until a so-called sick convoy had been arranged to return to Ashvitz. This joyful surprise put us all in a good mood. The wish of the senior warden of our hut in Ashvitz had come true. We had come as quickly as possible to a camp which did not have a chimney unlike Ashvitz. We laughed and cracked jokes in spite of and during all we had to go through in the next few hours. When we knew arrivals were counted, one of us was missing, so we had to wait outside in the rain and cold wind until the missing man was found. He was at last discovered in a hut where he had fallen asleep from exhaustion. Then the roll call was turned into a punishment parade. All through the night and late into the next morning, we had to stand outside, frozen and soaked to the skin after the strain of our long journey. And yet we were all very pleased. There was no chimney in this camp, and Avitz was a long way off.

Another time we saw a group of convicts pass our work site. How obvious the relativity of all suffering appeared to us then. We envied those prisoners, their relatively well- reggulated, secure, and happy life. They surely had regular opportunities to take baths, we thought sadly. They surely had toothbrushes and clothes brushes, mattresses, a separate one for each of them, and monthly mail bringing them news of the whereabouts of their relatives, or at least of whether they were still alive or not. We had lost all that a long time ago, and how we envied those of us who had the opportunity to get into a factory and work in a sheltered room. It was everyone's wish to have such a life-saving piece of luck. The scale of relative luck extends even further. Even among those detachments outside the camp, in one of which I was a member, there were some units which were considered worse than others. One could envy a man who did not have to wade in deep, muddy clay on a steep slope, emptying the tubs of a small field railway for 12 hours daily. Most of the daily accidents occurred on this job, and they were often fatal. In other work parties, the foremen maintained an apparently local tradition of dealing out numerous blows, which made us talk of the relative luck of not being under their command, or perhaps of being under it only temporarily. Once by an unlucky chance, I got into such a group. If an air raid alarm had not interrupted us after 2 hours, during which time the foreman had worked on me especially, making it necessary to regroup the workers afterwards, I think that I would have returned to camp on one of the sledges which carried those who had died or were dying from exhaustion. No one can imagine the relief that the siren can bring in such a situation. Not even a boxer who has heard the bell signifying the finish of a round and who is thus saved at the last minute from the danger of a knockout.

We were grateful for the smallest of mercies. We were glad when there was time to delouse before going to bed, although in itself this was no pleasure, as it meant standing naked in an unheated hut where icicles hung from the ceiling. But we were thankful if there was no air raid alarm during this operation and the lights were not switched off. If we could not do the job properly, we were kept awake half the night. The meager pleasures of camp life provided a kind of negative happiness, freedom from suffering, as Schopenhau put it, and even that in a relative way only. Real positive pleasures, even small ones, were very few. I remember drawing up a kind of balance sheet of pleasures one day and finding that in many many past weeks I had experienced only two pleasurable moments. One occurred when on returning from work I was admitted to the cook house after a long wait and was assigned to the line filing up to prisoner cook f. He stood behind one of the huge pans and ladled soup into the bowls which were held out to him by the prisoners who hurriedly filed past. He was the only cook who did not look at the men whose bowls he was filling. The only cook who dealt out the soup equally regardless of recipient and who did not make favorites of his personal friends or countrymen, picking out the potatoes for them while the others got watery soup skimmed from the top. But it is not for me to pass judgment on those prisoners who put their own people above everyone else. Who can throw a stone at a man who favors his friends under circumstances when sooner or later it is a question of life or death? No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.

Long after I had resumed normal life again, that means a long time after my release from camp, somebody showed me an illustrated weekly with photographs of prisoners lying crowded on their bunks, staring dullly at a visitor. Isn't this terrible? The dreadful staring faces, everything about it. Why? I asked, for I genuinely did not understand. For at that moment I saw it all again. At 5:00 a.m. it was still pitch dark outside. I was lying on the hard boards in an earththen hut where about 70 of us were taken care of. We were sick and did not have to leave camp for work. We did not have to go on parade. We could lie all day in our little corner in the hut and doze and wait for the daily distribution of bread which of course was reduced for the sick and for the daily helping of soup watered down and also decreased in quantity. But how content we were, happy in spite of everything. While we cowered against each other to avoid any unnecessary loss of warmth, and were too lazy and disinterested to move a finger unnecessarily, we heard shrill whistles and shouts from the square where the night shift had just returned, and was assembling for rule call. The door was flung open, and the snowstorm blew into our hut. An exhausted comrade, covered with snow, stumbled inside to sit down for a few minutes, but the senior warden turned him out again. It was strictly forbidden to admit a stranger to a hut while a checkup on the men was in progress. How sorry I was for that fellow, and how glad not to be in his skin at that moment, but instead to be sick and able to doze on in the sick quarters. What a lifesaver it was to have two days there and perhaps even two extra days after those. All this came to my mind when I saw the photographs in the magazine. When I explained, my listeners understood why I did not find the photograph so terrible. The people shown on it might not have been so unhappy after all.

On my fourth day in the sick quarters, I had just been detailed to the night shift when the chief doctor rushed in and asked me to volunteer for medical duties in another camp containing typhus patients. Against the urgent advice of my friends, and despite the fact that almost none of my colleagues offered their services, I decided to volunteer. I knew that in a working party I would die in a short time, but if I had to die, there might at least be some sense in my death. I thought that it would doubtless be more to the purpose to try and help my comrades as a doctor than to vegetate or finally lose my life as the unproductive laborer that I was then. For me, this was simple mathematics, not sacrifice. But secretly the warrant officer from the sanitation squad had ordered that the two doctors who had volunteered for the typhus camp should be taken care of till they left. We looked so weak that he feared that he might have two additional corpses on his hands rather than two doctors.

I mentioned earlier how everything that was not connected with the immediate task of keeping oneself and one's closest friends alive lost its value. Everything was sacrificed to this end. A man's character became involved to the point that he was caught in a mental turmoil which threatened all the values he held and threw them into doubt. Under the influence of a world which no longer recognized the value of human life and human dignity, which had robbed man of his will, and had made him an object to be exterminated, having planned, however, to make full use of him first, to the last ounce of his physical resources. Under this influence, the personal ego finally suffered a loss of values. If the man in the concentration camp did not struggle against this in a last effort to save his self-respect, he lost the feeling of being an individual, a being with a mind with inner freedom and personal value. He thought of himself then as only a part of an enormous mass of people. His existence descended to the level of animal life. The men were herded, sometimes to one place, then to another, sometimes driven together, then apart, like a flock of sheep, without a thought or a will of their own. A small but dangerous pack watched them from all sides, well-versed in methods of torture and sadism. They drove the herd incessantly backwards and forwards with shouts, kicks, and blows. And we, the sheep, thought of two things only. how to evade the bad dogs and how to get a little food. Just like sheep that crowd timidly into the center of a herd, each of us tried to get into the middle of our formations. That gave one a better chance of avoiding the blows of the guards who were marching on either side and to the front and rear of our column. The central position had the added advantage of affording protection against the bitter winds. It was therefore in an attempt to save one's own skin that one literally tried to submerge into the crowd. This was done automatically in the formations. But at other times it was a very conscious effort on our part in conformity with one of the camp's most imperative laws of self-preservation. Do not be conspicuous. We tried at all times to avoid attracting the attention of the SS.

There were times, of course, when it was possible and even necessary to keep away from the crowd. It is well known that an enforced community life, in which attention is paid to everything one does at all times, may result in an irresistible urge to get away, at least for a short time. The prisoner craved to be alone with himself and his thoughts. He yearned for privacy and for solitude. After my transportation to a so-called rest camp, I had the rare fortune to find solitude for about 5 minutes at a time. Behind the earthen hut where I worked, and in which were crowded about 50 delirious patients, there was a quiet spot in a corner of the double fence of barbed wire surrounding the camp. A tent had been improvised there with a few poles and branches of trees in order to shelter a halfozen corpses, the daily death rate in the camp. There was also a shaft leading to the water pipes. I squatted on the wooden lid of this shaft whenever my services were not needed. I just sat and looked out at the green flowering slopes and the distant blue hills of the Bavarian landscape framed by the meshes of barbed wire. I dreamed longingly, and my thoughts wandered north and northeast in the direction of my home, but I could only see clouds. The corpses near me, crawling with lice, did not bother me. Only the steps of passing guards could rouse me from my dreams. Or perhaps it would be a call to the sick bay, or to collect a newly arrived supply of medicine for my heart, consisting of perhaps five or 10 tablets of aspirin to last for several days for 50 patients. I collected them, and then did my rounds, feeling the patients pulses, and giving half tablets to the serious cases. But the desperately ill received no medicine. It would not have helped, and besides, it would have deprived those for whom there was still some hope. For light cases, I had nothing except perhaps a word of encouragement. In this way, I dragged myself from patient to patient, though I myself was weak and exhausted from a serious attack of typhus. Then I went back to my lonely place on the wood cover of the water shaft. This shaft, incidentally, once saved the lives of three fellow prisoners. Shortly before liberation, mass transports were organized to go to Dhau, and these three prisoners wisely tried to avoid the trip. They climbed down the shaft and hid there from the guards. I calmly sat on the lid, looking innocent and playing a childish game of throwing pebbles at the barbed wire. On spotting me, the guard hesitated for a moment, but then passed on. Soon I could tell the three men below that the worst danger was over.

It is very difficult for an outsider to grasp how very little value was placed on human life in camp. The camp inmate was hardened, but possibly became more conscious of this complete disregard of human existence when a convoy of sick men was arranged. The emaciated bodies of the sick were thrown on two- wheeled carts which were drawn by prisoners for many miles, often through snowstorms, to the next camp. If one of the sick men had died before the cart left, he was thrown on anyway. The list had to be correct. The list was the only thing that mattered. A man counted only because he had a prison number. One literally became a number, dead or alive. That was unimportant. The life of a number was completely irrelevant. What stood behind that number in that life mattered even less. The fate, the history, the name of the man. In the transport of sick patients that I, in my capacity as a doctor, had to accompany from one camp in Bavaria to another, there was a young prisoner whose brother was not on the list, and therefore would have to be left behind. The young man begged so long that the camp warden decided to work an exchange, and the brother took the place of a man who at the moment preferred to stay behind. But the list had to be correct. That was easy. The brother just exchanged numbers with the other prisoner. As I have mentioned before, we had no documents. Everyone was lucky to own his body, which after all was still breathing. All else about us, that is the rags hanging from our gaunt skeletons, was only of interest if we were assigned to a transport of sick patients. The departing Muslims were examined with unabashed curiosity to see whether their coats or shoes were not better than one's own. After all, their fates were sealed. But those who stayed behind in camp, who were still capable of some work, had to make use of every means to improve their chances of survival. They were not sentimental. The prisoners saw themselves completely dependent on the moods of the guards, play things of fate, and this made them even less human than the circumstances warranted.

In Ashvitz, I had laid down a rule for myself, which proved to be a good one, and which most of my comrades later followed. I generally answered all kinds of questions truthfully, but I was silent about anything that was not expressly asked for. If I were asked my age, I gave it. If asked about my profession, I said doctor, but did not elaborate. The first morning in Avitz, an SS officer came to the parade ground. We had to fall into separate groups of prisoners, over 40 years, under 40 years, metal workers, mechanics, and so forth. Then we were examined for ruptures, and some prisoners had to form a new group. The group that I was in was driven to another hut where we lined up again. After being sorted out once more, and having answered questions as to my age and profession, I was sent to another small group. Once more we were driven to another hut, and grouped differently. This continued for some time, and I became quite unhappy, finding myself among strangers who spoke unintelligible foreign languages. Then came the last selection, and I found myself back in the group that had been with me in the first hut. They had barely noticed that I had been sent from hut to hut in the meantime, but I was aware that in those few minutes fate had passed me in many different forms.

When the transport of sick patients for the rest camp was organized, my name, that is my number, was put on the list since a few doctors were needed. But no one was convinced that the destination was really a rest camp. A few weeks previously, the same transport had been prepared. Then, too, everyone had thought that it was destined for the gas ovens. When it was announced that anyone who volunteered for the dreaded night shift would be taken off the transport list, 82 prisoners volunteered immediately. A quarter of an hour later, the transport was cancelled, but the 82 stayed on the list for the night shift. For the majority of them, this meant death within the next fortnight. Now the transport for the rest camp was arranged for the second time. Again no one knew whether this was a roose to obtain the last bit of work from the sick, if only for 14 days, or whether it would go to the gas ovens or to a genuine rest camp. The chief doctor, who had taken a liking to me, told me fertively one evening at a/4 to 10, "I have made it known in the orderly room that you can still have your name crossed off the list. you may do so up till 10:00. I told him that this was not my way, that I had learned to let fate take its course. I might as well stay with my friends, I said. There was a look of pity in his eyes, as if he knew. He shook my hand silently, as though it were a farewell, not for life, but from life. Slowly, I walked back to my hut. There I found a good friend waiting for me. You really want to go with them? He asked sadly. Yes, I am going. Tears came to his eyes and I tried to comfort him. Then there was something else to do to make my will. Listen, Otto, if I don't get back home to my wife, and if you should see her again, then tell her that I talked of her daily hourly. You remember? Secondly, I have loved her more than anyone. Thirdly, the short time I have been married to her outweighs everything, even all we have gone through here. Otto, where are you now? Are you alive? What has happened to you since our last hour together? Did you find your wife again? And do you remember how I made you learn my will by heart, word for word, in spite of your childlike tears?

The next morning I departed with a transport. This time it was not a roose. We were not heading for the gas chambers, and we actually did go to a rest camp. Those who had pitted me remained in a camp where famine was to rage even more fiercely than in our new camp. They tried to save themselves, but they only sealed their own fates. Months later, after liberation, I met a friend from the old camp. He related to me how he, as camp policeman, had searched for a piece of human flesh that was missing from a pile of corpses. He confiscated it from a pot in which he found it cooking. Cannibalism had broken out. I had left just in time. Does this not bring to mind the story of death in Tehran? A rich and mighty Persian once walked in his garden with one of his servants. The servant cried that he had just encountered death who had threatened him. He begged his master to give him his fastest horse so that he could make haste and flee to Tehran which he could reach that same evening. The master consented and the servant galloped off on the horse. On returning to his house, the master himself met death and questioned him. Why did you terrify and threaten my servant? I did not threaten him. I only showed surprise in still finding him here when I planned to meet him tonight in Tehran, said death.

The camp inmate was frightened of making decisions and of taking any sort of initiative whatsoever. This was the result of a strong feeling that fate was one's master and that one must not try to influence it in any way, but instead let it take its own course. In addition, there was great apathy which contributed in no small part to the feelings of the prisoner. At times lightning decisions had to be made, decisions which spelled life or death. The prisoner would have preferred to let fate make the choice for him. This escape from commitment was most apparent when a prisoner had to make the decision for or against an escape attempt. In those minutes in which he had to make up his mind, and it was always a question of minutes, he suffered the tortures of hell. Should he make the attempt to flee? Should he take the risk? I too experienced this torment. As the battlefront drew nearer, I had the opportunity to escape. A colleague of mine, who had to visit huts outside the camp in the course of his medical duties, wanted to escape and take me with him. Under the pretense of holding a consultation about a patient whose illness required a specialist's advice, he smuggled me out. Outside the camp, a member of a foreign resistance movement was to supply us with uniforms and documents. At the last moment there was some technical difficulties, and we had to return to camp once more. We used this opportunity to provide ourselves with provisions, a few rotten potatoes, and to look for a rucks sack. We broke into an empty heart of the women's camp, which was vacant, as the women had been sent to another camp. The heart was in great disorder. It was obvious that many women had acquired supplies and fled. There were rags, straw, rotting food, and broken crockery. Some bowls were still in good condition, and would have been very valuable to us, but we decided not to take them. We knew that lately, as conditions had become desperate, they had been used not only for food, but also as wash basins and chamber pots. There was a strictly enforced rule against having any kind of utensil in the hut. However, some people were forced to break this rule, especially the typhus patients, who were much too weak to go outside, even with help. While I acted as a screen, my friend broke into the hut and returned shortly with a rucks sack, which he hid under his coat. He had seen another one inside which I was to take. So we changed places and I went in. As I searched in the rubbish, finding the rucks sack and even a toothbrush, I suddenly saw among all the things that had been left behind, the body of a woman. I ran back to my hut to collect all my possessions, my food bowl, a pair of torn mittens inherited from a dead tyus patient, and a few scraps of paper covered with shorthand notes, on which, as I mentioned before, I had started to reconstruct the manuscript which I lost at Avitz. I made a quick last round of my patients, who were lying huddled on the rotten planks of wood on either side of the huts. I came to my only countryman, who was almost dying, and whose life it had been my ambition to save in spite of his condition. I had to keep my intention to escape to myself, but my comrade seemed to guess that something was wrong. Perhaps I showed a little nervousness. In a tired voice, he asked me, "You two are getting out." I denied it, but I found it difficult to avoid his sad look. After my round, I returned to him again. A hopeless look greeted me, and somehow I felt it to be an accusation. The unpleasant feeling that had gripped me as soon as I had told my friend I would escape with him became more intense. Suddenly, I decided to take fate into my own hands for once. I ran out of the heart and told my friend that I could not go with him. As soon as I had told him with finality that I had made up my mind to stay with my patients, the unhappy feeling left me. I did not know what the following days would bring, but I had gained an inward peace that I had never experienced before. I returned to the hut, sat down on the boards at my countrymen's feet, and tried to comfort him. Then I chatted with the others, trying to quiet them in their delirium.

Our last day in camp arrived. As the battlefront came nearer, mass transports had taken nearly all the prisoners to other camps. The camp authorities, the capos, and the cooks had fled. On this day, an order was given that the camp must be evacuated completely by sunset. Even the few remaining prisoners, the sick, a few doctors, and some nurses would have to leave. At night, the camp was to be set on fire. In the afternoon, the trucks which were to collect the sick had not yet appeared. Instead, the camp gates were suddenly closed, and the barbed wire closely watched so that no one could attempt an escape. The remaining prisoners seemed to be destined to burn with the camp. For the second time, my friend and I decided to escape. We had been given an order to bury three men outside the barbed wire fence. We were the only two in camp who had strength enough to do the job. Nearly all the others lay in the few hut, which was still in use, prostrate with fever and delirium. We now made our plans. Along with the first body, we would smuggle out my friend's rug sack, hiding

It in the old laundry tub, which served as a coffin. When we took out the second body, we would also carry out my rucksack, and on the third trip, we intended to make our escape. The first two trips went according to plan. After we returned, I waited while my friend tried to find a piece of bread so that we would have something to eat during the next few days in the woods. I waited. Minutes passed. I became more and more impatient as he did not return.

After 3 years of imprisonment, I was picturing freedom joyously, imagining how wonderful it would be to run toward the battlefront. But we did not get that far. The very moment when my friend came back, the camp gate was thrown open. A splendid aluminium colored car on which were painted large red crosses slowly rolled onto the parade ground. A delegate from the international red cross in Geneva had arrived, and the camp and its inmates were under his protection. The delegate billeted himself in a farmhouse in the vicinity in order to be near the camp at all times in case of emergency. Who worried about escape now? Boxes with medicines were unloaded from the car. Cigarettes were distributed. We were photographed, and joy reigned supreme.

Now there was no need for us to risk running toward the fighting line. In our excitement, we had forgotten the third body, so we carried it outside and dropped it into the narrow grave we had dug for the three corpses. The guard who accompanied us, a relatively inoffensive man, suddenly became quite gentle. He saw that the tables might be turned and try to win our goodwill. He joined in the short prayers that we offered for the dead men before throwing soil over them. After the tension and excitement of the past days and hours, those last days in our race with death, the words of our prayer asking for peace were as fervent as any ever uttered by the human voice.

And so the last day in camp passed in anticipation of freedom, but we had rejoiced too early. The Red Cross delegate had assured us that an agreement had been signed and that the camp must not be evacuated. But that night the SS arrived with trucks and brought an order to clear the camp. The last remaining prisoners were to be taken to a central camp from which they would be sent to Switzerland within 48 hours to be exchanged for some prisoners of war. We scarcely recognized the SS. They were so friendly, trying to persuade us to get in the trucks without fear, telling us that we should be grateful for our good luck. Those who were strong enough crowded into the trucks, and the seriously ill and feeble were lifted up with difficulty. My friend and I, we did not hide our rucksacks now, stood in the last group from which 13 would be chosen for the next to last truck. The chief doctor counted out the requisite number, but he omitted the two of us. The 13 were loaded into the truck, and we had to stay behind. Surprised, very annoyed, and disappointed, we blamed the chief doctor, who excused himself by saying that he had been tired and distracted. He said that he had thought we still intended to escape. Impatiently we sat down, keeping our rucksacks on our backs, and waited with a few remaining prisoners for the last truck. We had to wait a long time. Finally, we lay down on the mattresses of the deserted guard room, exhausted by the excitement of the last few hours and days, during which we had fluctuated continuously between hope and despair. We slept in our clothes and shoes, ready for the journey.

The noise of rifles and cannons woke us. The flashes of tracer bullets and gunshots entered the hut. The chief doctor dashed in and ordered us to take cover on the floor. One prisoner jumped on my stomach from the bed above me and with his shoes on. That awakened me all right. Then we grasped what was happening. The battlefront had reached us. The shooting decreased, and morning dawned. Outside on the pole at the camp gate, a white flag floated in the wind.

Many weeks later, we found out that even in those last hours, fate had toyed with us few remaining prisoners. We found out just how uncertain human decisions are, especially in matters of life and death. I was confronted with photographs which had been taken in a small camp not far from ours. Our friends, who had thought they were traveling to freedom that night, had been taken in the trucks to this camp, and there they were locked in the huts and burned to death. Their partially charred bodies were recognizable on the photograph. I thought again of death in Tehran.

Apart from its role as a defensive mechanism, the prisoner's apathy was also the result of other factors. Hunger and lack of sleep contributed to it, as they do in normal life also, and to the general irritability, which was another characteristic of the prisoner's mental state. The lack of sleep was due partly to the pestering of vermin, which infested the terribly overcrowded huts, because of the general lack of hygiene and sanitation. The fact that we had neither nicotine nor caffeine also contributed to the state of apathy and irritability. Besides these physical causes, there were mental ones in the form of certain complexes. The majority of prisoners suffered from a kind of inferiority complex. We all had once been or had fancied ourselves to be somebody. Now we were treated like complete non-entities. The consciousness of one's inner value is anchored in higher, more spiritual things and cannot be shaken by camp life. But how many free men, let alone prisoners, possess it? Without consciously thinking about it, the average prisoner felt himself utterly degraded. This became obvious when one observed the contrasts offered by the singular sociological structure of the camp. The more prominent prisoners, the capos, the cooks, the storekeepers, and the camp policemen did not, as a rule, feel degraded at all like the majority of prisoners, but on the contrary, promoted. Some even developed miniature delusions of grandeur. The mental reaction of the envious and grumbling majority toward this favored minority found expression in several ways, sometimes in jokes. For instance, I heard one prisoner talk to another about a cappo, saying, "Imagine, I knew that man when he was only the president of a large bank. Isn't it fortunate that he has risen so far in the world?"

Whenever the degraded majority and the promoted minority came into conflict, and there were plenty of opportunities for this, starting with the distribution of food, the results were explosive. Therefore, the general irritability, whose physical causes were discussed above, became most intense when these mental tensions were added. It is not surprising that this tension often ended in a general fight, since the prisoner continually witnessed scenes of beatings. The impulse toward violence was increased. I myself felt my fists clench when anger came over me while I was famished and tired. I was usually very tired since we had to stoke our stove, which we were allowed to keep in our hut for the typhus patients throughout the nights. However, some of the most idilic hours I have ever spent were in the middle of the night when all the others were delirious or sleeping. I could lie stretched out in front of the stove and roast a few pilford potatoes in a fire made from stolen charcoal. But the following day I always felt even more tired, insensitive, and irritable.

While I was working as a doctor in the typhus block, I also had to take the place of the senior block warden who was ill. Now therefore I was responsible to the camp authority for keeping the hut clean, if clean can be used to describe such a condition. The pretense at inspection to which the hut was frequently submitted was more for the purpose of torture than of hygiene. More food and a few drugs would have helped, but the only concern of the inspectors was whether a piece of straw was left in the center corridor, or whether the dirty, ragged, and verminous blankets of the patients were tucked in neatly at their feet. As to the fate of the inmates, they were quite unconcerned. If I reported smartly, whipping my prison cap from my sha head and clicking my heels, hut number six, stroke 9, 52 patients, two nursing orderlys, and one doctor, they were satisfied, and then they would leave. But until they arrived, often they were hours later than announced, and sometimes did not come at all, I was forced to keep straightening blankets, picking up bits of straw which fell from the bunks, and shouting at the poor devils, who tossed in their beds, and threatened to upset all my efforts at tidiness and cleanliness. Apathy was particularly increased among the feverish patients, so that they did not react at all unless they were shouted at. Even this failed at times, and then it took tremendous self-control not to strike them, for one's own irritability took on enormous proportions in the face of the others apathy, and especially in the face of the danger, that is, the approaching inspection which was caused by it.

In attempting this psychological presentation and a psychopathological explanation of the typical characteristics of a concentration camp inmate, I may give the impression that the human being is completely and unavoidably influenced by his surroundings. In this case, the surroundings being the unique structure of camp life which forced the prisoner to conform his conduct to a certain set pattern. But what about human liberty? Is there no spiritual freedom in regard to behavior and reaction to any given surroundings? Is that theory true which would have us believe that man is no more than a product of many conditional and environmental factors, be they of a biological, psychological, or sociological nature? Is man but an accidental product of these? Most important, do the prisoner's reactions to the singular world of the concentration camp prove that man cannot escape the influences of his surroundings? Does man have no choice of action in the face of such circumstances?

We can answer these questions from experience as well as on principle. The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action. There were enough examples often of a heroic nature which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed. Man can preserve a vestage of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress. We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing, the last of the human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. And there were always choices to make. every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision. A decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom, which determined whether or not you would become the play thing of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate. Seen from this point of view, the mental reactions of the inmates of a concentration camp must seem more to us than the mere expression of certain physical and sociological conditions. Even though conditions such as lack of sleep, insufficient food, and various mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis, it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision and not the result of camp influences alone. Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp.

Dstku said once, "There is only one thing that I dread, not to be worthy of my sufferings." These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp whose suffering and death bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings. The way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom which cannot be taken away that makes life meaningful and purposeful. An active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity to realize values in creative work. While a passive life of enjoyment affords him the opportunity to obtain fulfillment in experiencing beauty, art or nature. But there is also purpose in that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior, namely in man's attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces. A creative life and a life of enjoyment are banned to him. But not only creativeness and enjoyment are meaningful. If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an inerdicable part of life even as fate and death. Without suffering and death, human life cannot be complete. The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross gives him ample opportunity even under the most difficult circumstances to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified, and unselfish. or in the bitter fight for self-preservation, he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.

Do not think that these considerations are unworldly or too far removed from real life. It is true that only a few people are capable of reaching such high moral standards. Of the prisoners, only a few kept their full inner liberty and obtained those values which their suffering afforded. But even one such example is sufficient proof that man's inner strength may raise him above his outward fate. Such men are not only in concentration camps. Everywhere man is confronted with fate, with the chance of achieving something through his own suffering. Take the fate of the sick, especially those who are incurable. I once read a letter written by a young invalid in which he told a friend that he had just found out he would not live for long, that even an operation would be of no help. He wrote further that he remembered a film he had seen in which a man was portrayed who waited for death in a courageous and dignified way. The boy had thought it a great accomplishment to meet death so well. Now he wrote fate was offering him a similar chance. Those of us who saw the film called Resurrection taken from a book by Toltoy years ago may have had similar thoughts. Here were great destinies and great men. For us at that time there was no great fate. There was no chance to achieve such greatness. After the picture, we went to the nearest cafe, and over a cup of coffee and a sandwich, we forgot the strange metaphysical thoughts which for one moment had crossed our minds. But when we ourselves were confronted with a great destiny, and faced with the decision of meeting it with equal spiritual greatness, by then we had forgotten our youthful resolutions of long ago, and we failed.

Perhaps there came a day for some of us when we saw the same film again or a similar one. But by then other pictures may have simultaneously unrolled before one's inner eye. Pictures of people who attained much more in their lives than a sentimental film could show. Some details of a particular man's inner greatness may have come to one's mind, like the story of the young woman whose death I witnessed in a concentration camp. It is a simple story. There is little to tell, and it may sound as if I had invented it, but to me it seems like a poem. This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days, but when I talked to her, she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. "I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard," she told me. "In my former life, I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously." pointing through the window of the heart she said, "This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness. Through that window, she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms." "I often talked to this tree," she said to me. "I was startled and didn't quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations?" Anxiously, I asked her if the tree replied, "Yes." What did it say to her? She answered, "It said to me, I am here. I am here. I am life, eternal life."

We have stated that that which was ultimately responsible for the state of the prisoner's inner self was not so much the enumerated psychological causes as it was the result of a free decision. Psychological observations of the prisoners have shown that only the men who allowed their inner hold on their moral and spiritual selves to subside eventually fell victim to the camp's degenerating influences. The question now arises, what could or should have constituted this inner hold? Former prisoners, when writing or relating their experiences, agree that the most depressing influence of all was that a prisoner could not know how long his term of imprisonment would be. He had been given no date for his release. In our camp, it was pointless even to talk about it. Actually, a prison term was not only uncertain, but unlimited. A well-known research psychologist has pointed out that life in a concentration camp could be called a provisional existence. We can add to this by defining it as a provisional existence of unknown limit. New arrivals usually knew nothing about the conditions at a camp. Those who had come back from other camps were obliged to keep silent, and from some camps no one had returned. On entering camp, a change took place in the minds of the men. With the end of uncertainty there came the uncertainty of the end. It was impossible to foresee whether or when, if at all, this form of existence would end. The Latin word phenise has two meanings, the end or the finish, and a goal to reach. A man who could not see the end of his provisional existence was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life. He ceased living for the future in contrast to a man in normal life. Therefore, the whole structure of his inner life changed. Signs of decay set in which we know from other areas of life. The unemployed worker, for example, is in a similar position. His existence has become provisional, and in a certain sense, he cannot live for the future or aim at a goal. Research work done on unemployed miners has shown that they suffer from a peculiar sort of deformed time, inner time, which is a result of their unemployed state. Prisoners too suffered from this strange time experience. In camp, a small time unit, a day for example, filled with hourly torches and fatigue, appeared endless. A larger time unit, perhaps a week, seemed to pass very quickly. My comrades agreed when I said that in camp a day lasted longer than a week. How paradoxical was our time experience.

In this connection, we are reminded of Thomas Man's The Magic Mountain, which contains some very pointed psychological remarks. Man studies the spiritual development of people who are in an analogous psychological position, that is, tuberculosis patients in a sanatorium, who also know no date for their release. They experience a similar existence without a future and without a goal. One of the prisoners, who on his arrival marched with a long column of new inmates from the station to the camp, told me later that he had felt as though he were marching at his own funeral. His life had seemed to him absolutely without future. He regarded it as over and done, as if he had already died. This feeling of lifelessness was intensified by other causes. In time, it was the limitlessness of the term of imprisonment which was most acutely felt. in space the narrow limits of the prison. Anything outside the barbed wire became remote, out of reach, and in a way unreal. The events and the people outside, all the normal life there, had a ghostly aspect for the prisoner. The outside life, that is, as much as he could see of it, appeared to him almost as it might have to a dead man who looked at it from another world. A man who let himself decline because he could not see any future goal found himself occupied with retrospective thoughts. In a different connection, we have already spoken of the tendency there was to look into the past to help make the present with all its horrors less real. But in robbing the present of its reality, there lay a certain danger. It became easy to overlook the opportunities to make something positive of camp life, opportunities which really did exist. Regarding our provisional existence as unreal was in itself an important factor in causing the prisoners to lose their hold on life. Everything in a way became pointless. Such people forget that often it is just such an exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself. Instead of taking the camp's difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised it as something of no consequence. They prefer to close their eyes and to live in the past. Life for such people became meaningless. Naturally, only a few people were capable of reaching great spiritual heights, but a few were given the chance to attain human greatness even through their apparent worldly failure and death. an accomplishment which in ordinary circumstances they would never have achieved. To the others of us, the mediocre and the half-hearted, the words of Bismar could be applied. Life is like being at the dentist. You always think that the worst is still to come, and yet it is over already. Varying this, we could say that most men in a concentration camp believed that the real opportunities of life had passed. Yet in reality there was an opportunity and a challenge. One could make a victory of these experiences, turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did a majority of the prisoners.

Any attempt at fighting the camp's psychopathological influence on the prisoner by psychotherrapeutic or psychoygenic methods had to aim at giving him inner strength by pointing out to him a future goal to which he could look forward. Instinctively some of the prisoners attempted to find one on their own. It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future subspecies eternitatis. and this is his salvation in the most difficult moments of his existence, although he sometimes has to force his mind to the task. I remember a personal experience. Almost in tears from pain, I had terrible sores on my feet from wearing torn shoes, I limped a few kilometers with our long column of men from the camp to our work site. Very cold, bitter winds struck us. I kept thinking of the endless little problems of our miserable life. What would there be to eat tonight? If a piece of sausage came as an extra ration, should I exchange it for a piece of bread? Should I trade my last cigarette, which was left from a bonus I received a fortnite ago, for a bowl of soup? How could I get a piece of wire to replace the fragment which served as one of my shoelaces? Would I get to our work site in time to join my usual working party, or would I have to join another which might have a brutal foreman? What could I do to get on good terms with the Cappo, who could help me to obtain work in camp instead of undertaking this horribly long daily march? I became disgusted with the state of affairs which compelled me daily and hourly to think of only such trivial things. I forced my thoughts to turn to another subject. Suddenly, I saw myself standing on the platform of a well-lit, warm, and pleasant lecture room. In front of me sat an attentive audience on comfortable upholstered seats. I was giving a lecture on the psychology of the concentration camp. All that oppressed me at that moment became objective, seen and described from the remote viewpoint of science. By this method I succeeded somehow in rising above the situation, above the sufferings of the moment, and I observed them as if they were already of the past. Both I and my troubles became the object of an interesting psychoscientific study undertaken by myself. What does Spinoza say in his ethics? Ideam emotion which is suffering ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.

The prisoner who had lost faith in the future his future was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future he also lost his spiritual hold. He let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay. Usually this happened quite suddenly in the form of a crisis the symptoms of which were familiar to the experienced camp inmate. We all feared this moment not for ourselves which would have been pointless but for our friends. Usually it began with the prisoner refusing one morning to get dressed and wash or to go out on the parade grounds. No intreaties, no blows, no threats had any effect. He just lay there hardly moving. If this crisis was brought about by an illness, he refused to be taken to the sick bay or to do anything to help himself. He simply gave up. There he remained, lying in his own excretor, and nothing bothered him anymore. I once had a dramatic demonstration of the close link between the loss of faith in the future and this dangerous giving up. F. My senior block warden, a fairly well-known composer and libertist, confided in me one day. "I would like to tell you something, doctor. I have had a strange dream. A voice told me that I could wish for something, that I should only say what I wanted to know, and all my questions would be answered. What do you think I asked? That I would like to know when the war would be over for me. You know what I mean, doctor? For me? I wanted to know when we when our camp would be liberated and our sufferings come to an end." "And when did you have this dream?" I asked. "In February 1945," he answered. It was then the beginning of March. "What did your dream voice answer?" He whispered to me, "March 30th." When F told me about his dream, he was still full of hope and convinced that the voice of his dream would be right. But as the promised day drew nearer, the war news which reached our camp made it appear very unlikely that we would be free on the promised date. On March 29th, F suddenly became ill and ran a high temperature. On March 30th, the day his prophecy had told him that the war and suffering would be over for him, he became delirious and lost consciousness. On March 31st, he was dead. To all outward appearances, he had died of typhus. Those who know how close the connection is between the state of mind of a man, his courage and hope or lack of them, and the state of immunity of his body, will understand that the sudden loss of hope and courage can have a deadly effect. The ultimate cause of my friend's death was that the expected liberation did not come, and he was severely disappointed. This suddenly lowered his body's resistance against the latent typhus infection. His faith in the future and his will to live had become paralyzed, and his body fell victim to illness, and thus the voice of his dream was right.

After all, the observations of this one case, and the conclusion drawn from them, are in accordance with something that was drawn to my attention by the chief doctor of our concentration camp. The death rate in the week between Christmas 1944 and New Year's 1945 increased in camp beyond all previous experience. In his opinion, the explanation for this increase did not lie in the harder working conditions or the deterioration of our food supplies or a change of weather or new epidemics. It was simply that the majority of the prisoners had lived in the naive hope that they would be home again by Christmas. As the time drew near and there was no encouraging news, the prisoners lost courage and disappointment overcame them. This had a dangerous influence on their powers of resistance, and a great number of them died.

As we said before, any attempt to restore a man's inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal. Nature's words, "He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how" could be the guiding motto for all psychotherrapeutic and psychoygenic efforts regarding prisoners. Whenever there was an opportunity for it, one had to give them a why, an aim for their lives, in order to strengthen them to bear the terrible how of their existence. Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no a no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost. The typical reply with which such a man rejected all encouraging arguments was, "I have nothing to expect from life anymore." What sort of answer can one give to that? What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and furthermore we had to teach the despairing men that it did not really matter what we expected from life but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life daily and hourly. Our answer must consist not in talk and meditation but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual. These tasks and therefore the meaning of life differ from man to man and from moment to moment. Thus, it is impossible to define the meaning of life in a general way. Questions about the meaning of life can never be answered by sweeping statements. Life does not mean something vague, but something very real and concrete. Just as life's tasks are also very real and concrete, they form man's destiny which is different and unique for each individual. No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny. No situation repeats itself and each situation calls for a different response. Sometimes the situation in which a man finds himself may require him to shape his own fate by action. At other times it is more advantageous for him to make use of an opportunity for contemplation and to realize assets in this way. Sometimes man may be required simply to accept fate to bear his cross. Every situation is distinguished by its uniqueness and there is always only one right answer to the problem posed by the situation at hand. When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task, his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering, he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.

For us as prisoners, these thoughts were not speculations far removed from reality. They were the only thoughts that could be of help to us. They kept us from despair, even when there seemed to be no chance of coming out of it alive. Long ago we had passed the stage of asking what was the meaning of life, a naive query which understands life as the attaining of some aim through the active creation of something of value. For us, the meaning of life embraced the wider cycles of life and death, of suffering and dying. Once the meaning of suffering had been revealed to us, we refused to minimize or alleviate the camp's tortures by ignoring them or harboring false illusions and entertaining artificial optimism. Suffering had become a task on which we did not want to turn our backs. We had realized its hidden opportunities for achievement. the opportunities which caused the poet Rilka to write "Vivulu how much suffering there is to get through." Rielka spoke of getting through suffering as others would talk of getting through work. There was plenty of suffering for us to get through. Therefore, it was necessary to face up to the full amount of suffering, trying to keep moments of weakness and fertive tears to a minimum. But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer. Only very few realized that. Shamefacedly, some confessed occasionally that they had wept, like the comrade who answered my question of how he had gotten over his edema by confessing, "I have wept it out of my system."

The tender beginnings of a psychotherapy or psycho hygiene were, when they were possible at all in the camp, either individual or collective in nature. The individual psychotherrapeutic attempts were often a kind of life-saving procedure. These efforts were usually concerned with the prevention of suicides. A very strict camp ruling forbad any efforts to save a man who attempted suicide. It was forbidden, for example, to cut down a man who was trying to hang himself. Therefore, it was all important to prevent these attempts from occurring. I remember two cases of wouldbe suicide, which bore a striking similarity to each other. Both men had talked of their intentions to commit suicide. Both used the typical argument, they had nothing more to expect from life. In both cases it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them. Something in the future was expected of them. We found in fact that for the one it was his child whom he adored and who was waiting for him in a foreign country. For the other it was a thing not a person. This man was a scientist and had written a series of books which still needed to be finished. His work could not be done by anyone else any more than another person could ever take the place of the father in his child's affections. This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love. When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuence to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him or to an unfinished work will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the why for his existence and will be able to bear almost any how.

The opportunities for collective psychotherapy were naturally limited in camp. The right example was more effective than words could ever be. A senior block warden who did not side with the authorities had by his just and encouraging behavior a thousand opportunities to exert a far-reaching moral influence on those under his jurisdiction. The immediate influence of behavior is always more effective than that of words. But at times a word was effective too when mental receptiveness had been intensified by some outer circumstances. I remember an incident when there was occasion for psychotherrapeutic work on the inmates of a whole hut due to an intensification of their receptiveness because of a certain external situation. It had been a bad day. On parade an announcement had been made about the many actions that would from then on be regarded as sabotage and therefore punishable by immediate death by hanging. Among these were crimes such as cutting small strips from our old blankets in order to improvise ankle supports and very minor thefts. A few days previously a semi- starved prisoner had broken into the potato store to steal a few pounds of potatoes. The theft had been discovered and some prisoners had recognized the burglar. When the camp authorities heard about it, they ordered that the guilty man be given up to them or the whole camp would starve for a day. Naturally, the two and a half thousand men preferred to fast. On the evening of this day of fasting, we lay in our earth and huts in a very low mood. Very little was said, and every word sounded irritable. Then, to make matters even worse, the light went out. Tempers reached their lowest eb. But our senior block warden was a wise man. He improvised a little talk about all that was on our minds at that moment. He talked about the many comrades who had died in the last few days, either of sickness or of suicide. But he also mentioned what may have been the real reason for their deaths, giving up hope. He maintained that there should be some way of preventing possible future victims from reaching this extreme state. And it was to me that the warden pointed to give this advice. God knows I was not in the mood to give psychological explanations or to preach any sermons, to offer my comrades a kind of medical care of their souls. I was cold and hungry, irritable and tired. But I had to make the effort and use this unique opportunity. Encouragement was now more necessary than ever. So I began by mentioning the most trivial of comforts first. I said that even in this Europe in the sixth winter of the Second World War, our situation was not the most terrible we could think of. I said that each of us had to ask himself what irreplaceable losses he had suffered up to then. I speculated that for most of them these losses had really been few. Whoever was still alive had reason for hope. health, family, happiness, professional abilities, fortune, position in society. All these were things that could be achieved again or restored. After all, we still had all our bones intact. Whatever we had gone through could still be an asset to us in the future. And I quoted from nature, that which does not kill me makes me stronger. Then I spoke about the future. I said that to the impartial, the future must seem hopeless. I agreed that each of us could guess for himself how small were his chances of survival. I told them that although there was still no typhus epidemic in the camp, I estimated my own chances at about 1 in 20. But I also told them that in spite of this, I had no intention of losing hope and giving up. For no man knew what the future would bring, much less the next hour. Even if we could not expect any sensational military events in the next few days, who knew better than we, with our experience of camps, how great chances sometimes opened up quite suddenly, at least for the individual, for instance, one might be attached unexpectedly to a special group with exceptionally good working conditions, for this was the kind of thing which constituted the luck of the prisoner. But I did not only talk of the future and the veil which was drawn over it. I also mentioned the past, all its joys, and how its light shone even in the present darkness. Again, I quoted a poet to avoid sounding like a preacher myself who had written, "What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you. Not only our experiences but all we have done whatever great thoughts we may have had and all we have suffered. All this is not lost though it is past. We have brought it into being. Having been is also a kind of being and perhaps the shest kind." Then I spoke of the many opportunities of giving life a meaning. I told my comrades, who lay motionless, although occasionally a sigh could be heard, that human life under any circumstances never ceases to have a meaning, and that this infinite meaning of life includes suffering and dying, privation and death. I ask the poor creatures who listen to me attentively in the darkness of the hut to face up to the seriousness of our position. They must not lose hope but should keep their courage in the certainty that the hopelessness of our struggle did not detract from its dignity and its meaning. I said that someone looks down on each of us in difficult hours, a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead or a god, and he would not expect us to disappoint him. He would hope to find us suffering proudly, not miserably, knowing how to die. And finally I spoke of our sacrifice which had meaning in every case. It was in the nature of this sacrifice that it should appear to be pointless in the normal world, the world of material success. But in reality our sacrifice did have a meaning. Those of us who had any religious faith, I said frankly, could understand without difficulty. I told them of a comrade who on his arrival in camp had tried to make a pact with heaven that his suffering and death should save the human being he loved from a painful end. For this man suffering and death were meaningful. His was a sacrifice of the deepest significance. He did not want to die for nothing. None of us wanted that. The purpose of my words was to find a full meaning in our life then and there in that hut and in that practically hopeless situation. I saw that my efforts had been successful. When the electric bulb flared up again, I saw the miserable figures of my friends limping toward me to thank me with tears in their eyes. But I have to confess here that only too rarely had I the inner strength to make contact with my companions in suffering and that I must have missed many opportunities for doing so.

We now come to the third stage of a prisoner's mental reactions. The psychology of the prisoner after his liberation. But prior to that we shall consider a question which the psychologist is asked frequently especially when he has personal knowledge of these matters. What can you tell us about the psychological makeup of the camp guards? How is it possible that men of flesh and blood could treat others as so many prisoners say they have been treated? Having once heard these accounts and having come to believe that these things did happen, one is bound to ask how psychologically they could happen. To answer this question without going into great detail, a few things must be pointed out. First, among the gods there were some sadists. sadists in the purest clinical sense. Second, these sadists were always selected when a really severe detachment of guards was needed. There was great joy at our work site when we had permission to warm ourselves for a few minutes after 2 hours of work in the bitter frost in front of a little stove which was fed with twigs and scraps of wood. But there were also some foremen who found a great pleasure in taking this comfort from us. How clearly their faces reflected this pleasure when they not only forbaded us to stand there, but turned over the stove and dumped its lovely fire into the snow. When the SS took a dislike to a person, there was always some special man in their ranks known to have a passion for and to be highly specialized in sadistic torture to whom the unfortunate prisoner was sent. Third, the feelings of the majority of the guards had been dulled by the number of years in which, in everinccreasing doses, they had witnessed the brutal methods of the camp. These morally and mentally hardened men at least refused to take active part in sadistic measures, but they did not prevent others from carrying them out. Fourth, it must be stated that even among the guards, there were some who took pity on us. I shall only mention the commander of the camp from which I was liberated. It was found after the liberation, only the camp doctor, a prisoner himself, had known of it previously, that this man had paid no small sum of money from his own pocket, in order to purchase medicines for his prisoners from the nearest market town. But the senior camp warden, a prisoner himself, was harder than any of the SS guards. He beat the other prisoners at every slightest opportunity, while the camp commander, to my knowledge, never once lifted his hand against any of us.

There is a footnote here. An interesting incident with reference to this SS commander is in regard to the attitude toward him of some of his Jewish prisoners. At the end of the war, when the American troops liberated the prisoners from our camp, three young Hungarian Jews hid this commander in the Bavarian woods. Then they went to the commandant of the American forces who was very eager to capture this SS commander, and they said they would tell him where he was, but only under certain conditions. The American commander must promise that absolutely no harm would come to this man. After a while, the American officer finally promised these young Jews that the SS commander, when taken into captivity, would be kept safe from harm. Not only did the American officer keep his promise, but as a matter of fact, the former SS commander of this concentration camp was in a sense restored to his command, for he supervised the collection of clothing among the nearby Bavarian villages, and its distribution to all of us who at that time still wore the clothes we had inherited from other inmates of Camp Avitz, who were not as fortunate as we, having been sent to the gas chamber immediately upon their arrival at the railway station. It is apparent that the mere knowledge that

A man was either a camp guard or a prisoner tells us almost nothing. Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn. The boundaries between groups overlapped, and we must not try to simplify matters by saying that these men were angels and those were devils.

Certainly, it was a considerable achievement for a guard or foreman to be kind to the prisoners in spite of all the camp's influences, and on the other hand, the baseness of a prisoner who treated his own companions badly was exceptionally contemptable. Obviously, the prisoners found the lack of character in such men especially upsetting, while they were profoundly moved by the smallest kindness received from any of the guards. I remember how one day a foreman secretly gave me a piece of bread which I knew he must have saved from his breakfast ration. It was far more than the small piece of bread which moved me to tears at that time. It was the human something which this man also gave to me. The word and look which accompanied the gift.

From all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world. But only these two, the race of the decent man and the race of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere. They penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people. In this sense, no group is of pure race, and therefore one occasionally found a decent fellow among the camp guards. Life in a concentration camp tore open the human soul and exposed its depths. Is it surprising that in those depths we again found only human qualities which in their very nature were a mixture of good and evil? The rift dividing good from evil which goes through all human beings reaches into the lowest depths and becomes apparent even on the bottom of the abyss which is laid open by the concentration camp.

And now to the last chapter in the psychology of a concentration camp. The psychology of the prisoner who has been released. In describing the experiences of liberation, which naturally must be personal, we shall pick up the threads of that part of our narrative which told of the morning when the white flag was hoisted above the camp gates after days of high tension. This state of inner suspense was followed by total relaxation, but it would be quite wrong to think that we went mad with joy. What then did happen?

With tired steps, we prisoners dragged ourselves to the camp gates. Timidly we looked around and glanced at each other questioningly. Then we ventured a few steps out of camp. This time no orders were shouted at us, nor was there any need to duck quickly to avoid a blow or kick. Oh no, this time the guards offered us cigarettes. We hardly recognized them at first. They had hurriedly changed into civilian clothes. We walked slowly along the road leading from the camp. Soon our legs hurt and threatened to buckle, but we limped on. We wanted to see the camp's surroundings for the first time with the eyes of free men. Freedom. We repeated to ourselves, and yet we could not grasp it. We had said this word so often during all the years we dreamed about it that it had lost its meaning. Its reality did not penetrate into our consciousness. We could not grasp the fact that freedom was ours. We came to meadows full of flowers. We saw and realized that they were there, but we had no feelings about them. The first spark of joy came when we saw a rooster with a tail of multicolored feathers, but it remained only a spark. We did not yet belong to this world. In the evening when we all met again in our heart, one said secretly to the other, "Tell me, were you pleased today?" And the other replied, feeling ashamed, as he did not know that we all felt similarly, "Truthfully, no." We had literally lost the ability to feel pleased and had to relearn it slowly.

Psychologically, what was happening to the liberated prisoners could be called depersonalization. Everything appeared unreal, unlikely, as in a dream. We could not believe it was true. How often in the past years had we been deceived by dreams? We dreamt that the day of liberation had come, that we had been set free, had returned home, greeted our friends, embraced our wives, sat down at the table, and started to tell of all the things we had gone through, even of how we had often seen the day of liberation in our dreams. And then a whistle shrilled in our ears, the signal to get up, and our dreams of freedom came to an end. And now the dream had come true. But could we truly believe in it?

The body has fewer inhibitions than the mind. It made good use of the new freedom from the first moment on. It began to eat ravenously for hours and days, even half the night. It is amazing what quantities one can eat. And when one of the prisoners was invited out by a friendly farmer in the neighborhood, he ate and ate and then drank coffee which loosened his tongue, and he then began to talk, often for hours. The pressure which had been on his mind for years was released at last. Hearing him talk, one got the impression that he had to talk, that his desire to speak was irresistible. I have known people who have been under heavy pressure for only a short time, for example, through a cross-examination by the Gestapo to have similar reactions. Many days passed until not only the tongue was loosened, but something within oneself as well. Then feeling suddenly broke through the strange fetters which had restrained it.

One day, a few days after the liberation, I 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 for step I progressed until I again became a human being.

The way that led from the acute mental tension of the last days in camp, from that war of nerves to mental peace, was certainly not free from obstacles. It would be an error to think that a liberated prisoner was not in need of spiritual care anymore. We have to consider that a man who has been under such enormous mental pressure for such a long time is naturally in some danger after his liberation, especially since the pressure was released quite suddenly. This danger in the sense of psychological hygiene is the psychological counterpart of the Benz. Just as the physical health of the question worker would be endangered if he left his divers's chamber suddenly where he is under enormous atmospheric pressure, so the man who has suddenly been liberated from mental pressure can suffer damage to his moral and spiritual health.

During this psychological phase, one observed that people with natures of a more primitive kind could not escape the influences of the brutality which had surrounded them in camp life. Now being free, they thought they could use their freedom wantonly and ruthlessly. The only thing that had changed for them was that they were now the oppressors instead of the oppressed. They became instigators, not objects of willful force and injustice. They justified their behavior by their own terrible experiences. This was often revealed in apparently insignificant events. A friend was walking across a field with me toward the camp when suddenly he came to a field of green crops. Automatically I avoided it, but he drew his arm through mine and dragged me through it. I stammered something about not treading down the young crops. He became annoyed, gave me an angry look, and shouted, "You don't say. And hasn't enough been taken from us? My wife and child have been gassed, not to mention everything else, and you would forbid me to tread on a few stalks of oats." Only slowly could these men be guided back to the commonplace truth that no one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them. We had to strive to lead them back to this truth, or the consequences would have been much worse than the loss of a few thousand stalks of oats. I can still see the prisoner who rolled up his shirt sleeves, thrust his right hand under my nose, and shouted, "May this hand be cut off if I don't stain it with blood on the day when I get home." I want to emphasize that the man who said these words was not a bad fellow. He had been the best of comrades in camp and afterwards.

Apart from the moral deformity resulting from the sudden release of mental pressure, there were two other fundamental experiences which threatened to damage the character of the liberated prisoner. Bitterness and disillusionment when he returned to his former life. Bitterness was caused by a number of things he came up against in his former hometown. When on his return a man found that in many places he was met only with a shrug of the shoulders and with hackneyed phrases, he tended to become bitter and to ask himself why he had gone through all that he had. When he heard the same phrases nearly everywhere, "We did not know about it and we too have suffered." Then he asked himself, "Have they really nothing better to say to me?"

The experience of disillusionment is different. Here it was not one's fellow man whose superficiality and lack of feeling was so disgusting that one finally felt like creeping into a hole and neither hearing nor seeing human beings anymore. But fate itself which seemed so cruel. A man who for years had thought he had reached the absolute limit of all possible suffering now found that suffering has no limits and that he could suffer still more and still more intensely. When we spoke about attempts to give a man in camp mental courage, we said that he had to be shown something to look forward to in the future. He had to be reminded that life still waited for him, that a human being waited for his return. But after liberation, there were some men who found that no one awaited them. Woe to him who found that the person whose memory alone had given him courage in camp did not exist anymore. Woe to him who, when the day of his dreams finally came, found it so different from all he had longed for. Perhaps he boarded a trolley, traveled out to the home which he had seen for years in his mind, and only in his mind, and pressed the bell, just as he had longed to do in thousands of dreams, only to find that the person who should open the door was not there, and would never be there again.

We all said to each other in camp that there could be no earthly happiness which could compensate for all we had suffered. We were not hoping for happiness. It was not that which gave us courage and gave meaning to our suffering, our sacrifices and our dying. And yet we were not prepared for unhappiness. This disillusionment which awaited not a small number of prisoners was an experience which these men have found very hard to get over and which for a psychiatrist is also very difficult to help them overcome. But this must not be a discouragement to him. On the contrary, it should provide an added stimulus. But for every one of the liberated prisoners, the day comes when, looking back on his camp experiences, he can no longer understand how he endured it all. As the day of his liberation eventually came, when everything seemed to him like a beautiful dream, so also the day comes when all his camp experiences seemed to him nothing but a nightmare. The crowning experience of all for the homecoming man is the wonderful feeling that after all he has suffered, there is nothing he need fear anymore except his God.

Part Two. Logotherapy in a Nutshell. This part, which has been revised and updated, first appeared as basic concepts of logotherapy in the 1962 edition of Man's Search for Meaning. Readers of my short autobiographical story usually ask for a fuller and more direct explanation of my therapeutic doctrine. Accordingly, I added a brief section on logotherapy to the original edition of From Death Camp to Existentialism. But that was not enough, and I have been besieged by requests for a more extended treatment. Therefore, in the present edition, I have completely rewritten and considerably expanded my account. The assignment was not easy to convey to the reader within a short space all the material which required 20 volumes in German is an almost hopeless task.

I am reminded of the American doctor who once turned up in my office in Vienna and asked me, "Now, doctor, are you a psychoanalyst?" Whereupon I replied, "Not exactly a psychoanalyst. Let's say a psychotherapist." Then he continued questioning me, "What school do you stand for?" I answered, "It is my own theory. I call it logotherapy." "Can you tell me in one sentence what is meant by logotherapy? At least, what is the difference between psychoanalysis and logotherapy?" he asked. "Yes," I said, "but in the first place, can you tell me in one sentence what you think the essence of psychoanalysis is?" This was his answer: "During psychoanalysis, the patient must lie down on a couch and tell you things which sometimes are very disagreeable to tell." Whereupon I immediately retorted with the following improvisation: "Now, in logotherapy, the patient may remain sitting erect, but he must hear things which sometimes are very disagreeable to hear." Of course, this was meant facetiously and not as a capsule version of logotherapy. However, there is something in it, inasmuch as logotherapy, in comparison with psychoanalysis, is a method less retrospective and less introspective. Logotherapy focuses rather on the future, that is to say, on the meanings to be fulfilled by the patient in his future. Logotherapy indeed is a meaning-centered psychotherapy. At the same time, logotherapy defocuses all the vicious circle formations and feedback mechanisms which play such a great role in the development of neurosis. Thus, the typical self-centeredness of the neurotic is broken up instead of being continually fostered and reinforced. To be sure, this kind of statement is an oversimplification. Yet, in logotherapy, the patient is actually confronted with and reoriented toward the meaning of his life, and to make him aware of this meaning can contribute much to his ability to overcome his neurosis.

Let me explain why I have employed the term logotherapy as the name for my theory. Logos is a Greek word which denotes meaning. Logotherapy, or as it has been called by some authors, the third Viennese school of psychotherapy, focuses on the meaning of human existence as well as on man's search for such a meaning. According to logotherapy, this striving to find a meaning in one's life is the primary motivational force in man. That is why I speak of a will to meaning, in contrast to the pleasure principle, or as we could also term it, the will to pleasure, on which Freudian psychoanalysis is centered, as well as in contrast to the will to power, on which Adlerian psychology, using the term striving for superiority, is focused.

The Will to Meaning. Man's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a secondary rationalization of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone. Only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning. There are some authors who contend that meanings and values are nothing but defense mechanisms, reaction formations, and sublimations. But as for myself, I would not be willing to live merely for the sake of my defense mechanisms, nor would I be ready to die merely for the sake of my reaction formations. Man, however, is able to live and even to die for the sake of his ideals and values.

A public opinion poll was conducted a few years ago in France. The results showed that 89% of the people polled admitted that man needs something for the sake of which to live. Moreover, 61% conceded that there was something or someone in their own lives for whose sake they were even ready to die. I repeated this poll at my hospital department in Vienna among both the patients and the personnel, and the outcome was practically the same as among the thousands of people screened in France. The difference was only 2%. Another statistical survey of 7,948 students at 48 colleges was conducted by social scientists from John's Hopkins University. Their preliminary report is part of a 2-year study sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health. Asked what they considered very important to them, now, 16% of the students checked "making a lot of money." 78% said their first goal was "finding a purpose and meaning to my life." Of course, there may be some cases in which an individual's concern with values is really a camouflage of hidden inner conflicts. But if so, they represent the exceptions from the rule rather than the rule itself. In these cases, we have actually to deal with pseudo values, and as such, they have to be unmasked. Unmasking, however, should stop as soon as one is confronted with what is authentic and genuine in man. For example, man's desire for a life that is as meaningful as possible. If it does not stop, then the only thing that the unmasking psychologist really unmasks is his own hidden motive, namely his unconscious need to debase and depreciate what is genuine, what is genuinely human in man.

Existential Frustration. Man's will to meaning can also be frustrated, in which case logotherapy speaks of existential frustration. The term existential may be used in three ways: to refer to one's existence itself (that is, the specifically human mode of being), two, the meaning of existence, and three, the striving to find a concrete meaning in personal existence (that is to say, the will to meaning). Existential frustration can also result in neurosis. For this type of neurosis, logotherapy has coined the term noögenic neurosis, in contrast to neurosis in the traditional sense of the word, that is, psychogenic neurosis. Noögenic neuroses have their origin not in the psychological but rather in the noölogical (from the Greek *nous*, meaning mind) dimension of human existence. This is another logotherapeutic term which denotes anything pertaining to the specifically human dimension. Noögenic neurosis. Neurogenic neuroses do not emerge from conflicts between drives and instincts, but rather from existential problems. Among such problems, the frustration of the will to meaning plays a large role. It is obvious that in noögenic cases, the appropriate and adequate therapy is not psychotherapy in general, but rather logotherapy, a therapy that is which dares to enter the specifically human dimension.

Let me quote the following instance. A high-ranking American diplomat came to my office in Vienna in order to continue psychoanalytic treatment which he had begun 5 years previously with an analyst in New York. At the outset, I asked him why he thought he should be analyzed, why his analysis had been started in the first place. It turned out that the patient was discontented with his career and found it most difficult to comply with American foreign policy. His analyst, however, had told him again and again that he should try to reconcile himself with his father, because the government of the United States, as well as his superiors, were nothing but father images, and consequently his dissatisfaction with his job was due to the hatred he unconsciously harbored toward his father. Through an analysis lasting 5 years, the patient had been prompted more and more to accept his analyst's interpretations until he finally was unable to see the forest of reality for the trees of symbols and images. After a few interviews, it was clear that his will to meaning was frustrated by his vocation, and he actually longed to be engaged in some other kind of work. As there was no reason for not giving up his profession and embarking on a different one, he did so with most gratifying results. He has remained contented in this new occupation for over 5 years, as he recently reported. I doubt that in this case I was dealing with a neurotic condition at all, and that is why I thought that he did not need any psychotherapy, nor even logotherapy, for the simple reason that he was not actually a patient.

Not every conflict is necessarily neurotic. Some amount of conflict is normal and healthy. In a similar sense, suffering is not always a pathological phenomenon. Rather than being a symptom of neurosis, suffering may well be a human achievement, especially if the suffering grows out of existential frustration. I would strictly deny that one's search for a meaning to his existence or even his doubt of it in every case is derived from or results in any disease. Existential frustration is in itself neither pathological nor pathogenic. A man's concern, even his despair over the worthwhileness of life, is an existential distress, but by no means a mental disease. It may well be that interpreting the first in terms of the latter motivates a doctor to bury his patient's existential despair under a heap of tranquilizing drugs. It is his task rather to pilot the patient through his existential crisis of growth and development.

Logotherapy regards its assignment as that of assisting the patient to find meaning in his life. Inasmuch as logotherapy makes him aware of the hidden *logos* of his existence, it is an analytical process. To this extent, logotherapy resembles psychoanalysis. However, in logotherapy's attempt to make something conscious again, it does not restrict its activity to instinctual facts within the individual's unconscious, but also cares for existential realities such as the potential meaning of his existence to be fulfilled as well as his will to meaning. Any analysis, however, even when it refrains from including the noölogical dimension in its therapeutic process, tries to make the patient aware of what he actually longs for in the depth of his being. Logotherapy deviates from psychoanalysis insofar as it considers man a being whose main concern consists in fulfilling a meaning rather than in the mere gratification and satisfaction of drives and instincts, or in merely reconciling the conflicting claims of id, ego, and superego, or in the mere adaptation and adjustment to society and environment.

Noödynamics. To be sure, man's search for meaning may arouse inner tension rather than inner equilibrium. However, precisely such tension is an indispensable prerequisite of mental health. There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one's life. There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: "He who has a *why* to live for can bear almost any *how*." I can see in these words a motto which holds true for any psychotherapy. In the Nazi concentration camps, one could have witnessed that those who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfill were most apt to survive. The same conclusion has since been reached by other authors of books on concentration camps and also by psychiatric investigations into Japanese, North Korean, and North Vietnamese prisoner of war camps.

As for myself, when I was taken to the concentration camp of Auschwitz, a manuscript of mine ready for publication was confiscated. (Footnote: It was the first version of my first book, the English translation of which was published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, in 1955, under the title, *The Doctor and the Soul: An Introduction to Logotherapy*.) Certainly, my deep desire to write this manuscript anew helped me to survive the rigors of the camps I was in. For instance, when in a camp in Bavaria, I fell ill with typhus fever, I jotted down on little scraps of paper many notes intended to enable me to rewrite the manuscript should I live to the day of liberation. I am sure that this reconstruction of my lost manuscript in the dark barracks of a Bavarian concentration camp assisted me in overcoming the danger of cardiovascular collapse. Thus, it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension. The tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being. We should not then be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. It is only thus that we evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency.

I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, homeostasis – that is, a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him. What man needs is not homeostasis but what I call noödynamics – that is, the existential dynamics in a polar field of tension where one pole is represented by a meaning that is to be fulfilled and the other pole by the man who has to fulfill it. And one should not think that this holds true only for normal conditions. In neurotic individuals, it is even more valid. If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load which is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together. So if therapists wish to foster their patients' mental health, they should not be afraid to create a sound amount of tension through a reorientation toward the meaning of one's life.

Having shown the beneficial impact of meaning orientation, I turn to the detrimental influence of that feeling of which so many patients complain today, namely the feeling of the total and ultimate meaninglessness of their lives. They lack the awareness of a meaning worth living for. They are haunted by the experience of their inner emptiness, a void within themselves. They are caught in that situation which I have called the existential vacuum.

The Existential Vacuum. The existential vacuum is a widespread phenomenon of the 20th century. This is understandable. It may be due to a two-fold loss which man has had to undergo since he became a truly human being. At the beginning of human history, man lost some of the basic animal instincts in which an animal's behavior is embedded and by which it is secured. Such security, like paradise, is closed to man forever. Man has to make choices. In addition to this, however, man has suffered another loss in his more recent development, inasmuch as the traditions which buttressed his behavior are now rapidly diminishing. No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do. Sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism). A statistical survey recently revealed that among my European students, 25% showed a more or less marked degree of existential vacuum. Among my American students, it was not 25% but 60%. The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom. Now, we can understand Schopenhauer when he said that mankind was apparently doomed to vacillate eternally between the two extremes of distress and boredom. In actual fact, boredom is now causing, and certainly bringing to psychiatrists, more problems to solve than distress. And these problems are growing increasingly crucial, for progressive automation will probably lead to an enormous increase in the leisure hours available to the average worker. The pity of it is that many of these will not know what to do with all their newly acquired free time. Let us consider, for instance, Sunday neurosis – that kind of depression which afflicts people who become aware of the lack of content in their lives when the rush of the busy week is over and the void within themselves becomes manifest. Not a few cases of suicide can be traced back to this existential vacuum. Such widespread phenomena as depression, aggression, and addiction are not understandable unless we recognize the existential vacuum underlying them. This is also true of the crises of pensioners and aging people. Moreover, there are various masks and guises under which the existential vacuum appears. Sometimes the frustrated will to meaning is vicariously compensated for by a will to power, including the most primitive form of the will to power, the will to money. In other cases, the place of frustrated will to meaning is taken by the will to pleasure. That is why existential frustration often eventuates in sexual compensation. We can observe in such cases that the sexual libido becomes rampant in the existential vacuum. An analogous event occurs in neurotic cases. There are certain types of feedback mechanisms and vicious circle formations which I will touch upon later. One can observe again and again, however, that this symptomatology has invaded an existential vacuum wherein it then continues to flourish. In such patients, what we have to deal with is not a noögenic neurosis. However, we will never succeed in having the patient overcome his condition if we have not supplemented the psychotherapeutic treatment with logotherapy. For by filling the existential vacuum, the patient will be prevented from suffering further relapses. Therefore, logotherapy is indicated not only in noögenic cases, as pointed out above, but also in psychogenic cases and sometimes even in somatogenic pseudo-neuroses. Viewed in this light, a statement once made by Magda B. Arnold is justified: "Every therapy must in some way, no matter how restricted, also be logotherapy." (Magda B. Arnold and John A. Gasson, *The Human Person*, Ronald Press, New York, 1954, page 618.)

Let us now consider what we can do if a patient asks what the meaning of his life is. The Meaning of Life. I doubt whether a doctor can answer this question in general terms, for the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day, and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general, but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment. To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: "Tell me, master, what is the best move in the world?" There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and a particular personality of one's opponent. The same holds for human existence. One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone's task is as unique as his specific opportunity to implement it. As each situation in life represents a challenge to man and presents a problem for him to solve, the question of the meaning of life may actually be reversed. Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life, and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life. To life he can only respond by being responsible.

Thus, logotherapy sees in responsibleness the very essence of human existence. The Essence of Existence. This emphasis on responsibleness is reflected in the categorical imperative of logotherapy, which is: "Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now." It seems to me that there is nothing which would stimulate a man's sense of responsibleness more than this maxim which invites him to imagine first that the present is past and second that the past may yet be changed and amended. Such a precept confronts him with life's finitness as well as the finality of what he makes out of both his life and himself.

Logotherapy tries to make the patient fully aware of his own responsibleness. Therefore, it must leave to him the option for what, to what, or to whom he understands himself to be responsible. That is why a logotherapist is the least tempted of all psychotherapists to impose value judgments on his patients, for he will never permit the patient to pass to the doctor the responsibility of judging. It is therefore up to the patient to decide whether he should interpret his life task as being responsible to society or to his own conscience. There are people, however, who do not interpret their own lives merely in terms of a task assigned to them, but also in terms of the taskmaster who has assigned it to them.

Logotherapy is neither teaching nor preaching. It is as far removed from logical reasoning as it is from moral exhortation. To put it figuratively, the role played by a logotherapist is that of an eye specialist rather than that of a painter. A painter tries to convey to us a picture of the world as he sees it. An ophthalmologist tries to enable us to see the world as it really is. The logotherapist's role consists of widening and broadening the visual field of the patient so that the whole spectrum of potential meaning becomes conscious and visible to him. By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. I have termed this constitutive characteristic the self-transcendence of human existence. It denotes the fact that being human always points and is directed to something or someone other than oneself – be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love, the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side effect of self-transcendence.

Thus far we have shown that the meaning of life always changes but that it never ceases to be. According to logotherapy, we can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: One, by creating a work or doing a deed. Two, by experiencing something or encountering someone. And three, by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering. The first, the way of achievement or accomplishment, is quite obvious. The second and third need further elaboration.

The second way of finding a meaning in life is by experiencing something such as goodness, truth, and beauty; by experiencing nature and culture; or last but not least, by experiencing another human being in his very uniqueness by loving him.

The Meaning of Love. Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person. And even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true. In logotherapy, love is not interpreted as a mere epiphenomenon, a phenomenon that occurs as the result of a primary phenomenon of sexual drives and instincts in the sense of a so-called sublimation. Love is as primary a phenomenon as sex. Normally, sex is a mode of expression for love. Sex is justified, even sanctified, as soon as, but only as long as it is a vehicle of love. Thus, love is not understood as a mere side effect of sex. Rather, sex is a way of expressing the experience of that ultimate togetherness which is called love.

The third way of finding a meaning in life is by suffering.

The Meaning of Suffering. We must never forget that we may also find meaning in life even when confronted with a hopeless situation, when facing a fate that cannot be changed. For what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn one's predicament into a human achievement. When we are no longer able to change a situation, just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer, we are challenged to change ourselves. Let me cite a clear-cut example. Once an elderly general practitioner consulted me because of his severe depression. He could not overcome the loss of his wife who had died two years before and whom he had loved above all else. Now, how could I help him? What should I tell him? Well, I refrained from telling him anything, but instead confronted him with the question, "What would have happened, doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?" "Oh," he said, "for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered." Whereupon I replied, "You see, doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it was you who have spared her this suffering. To be sure, at the price that now you have to survive and mourn her." He said no word but shook my hand and calmly left my office. In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice. Of course, this was no therapy in the proper sense, since first, his despair was no disease, and second, I could not change his fate. I could not revive his wife. But in that moment, I did succeed in changing his attitude toward his unalterable fate, inasmuch as from that time on he could at least see a meaning in his suffering. It is one of the basic tenets of logotherapy that man's main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life. That is why man is even ready to suffer, on the condition, to be sure, that his suffering has a meaning. But let me make it perfectly clear that in no way is suffering necessary to find meaning. I only insist that meaning is possible even in spite of suffering, provided, certainly, that the suffering is unavoidable. If it were avoidable, however, the meaningful thing to do would be to remove its cause, be it psychological, biological, or political. To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.

Edith V. Jolen, before her death professor of psychology at the University of Georgia, contended in her article on logotherapy that "our current mental hygiene philosophy stresses the idea that people ought to be happy, that unhappiness is a symptom of maladjustment. Such a value system might be responsible for the fact that the burden of unavoidable unhappiness is increased by unhappiness about being unhappy." (Some Comments on a Viennese School of Psychiatry, *The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology*, 51, 1955, pages 701-3.) And in another paper, she expressed the hope that "logotherapy may help counteract certain unhealthy trends in the present-day culture of the United States, where the incurable sufferer is given very little opportunity to be proud of his suffering and to consider it ennobling rather than degrading so that he is not only unhappy but also ashamed of being unhappy." (*Logotherapy and Existential Analysis*, *Acta Psychotherapeutica*, 6, 1958, pages 93-204.)

There are situations in which one is cut off from the opportunity to do one's work or to enjoy one's life. But what never can be ruled out is the unavoidability of suffering. In accepting this challenge to suffer bravely, life has a meaning up to the last moment and it retains this meaning literally to the end. In other words, life's meaning is an unconditional one, for it even includes the potential meaning of unavoidable suffering.

Let me recall that which was perhaps the deepest experience I had in the concentration camp. The odds of surviving the camp were no more than 1 in 28, as can easily be verified by exact statistics. It did not even seem possible, let alone probable, that the manuscript of my first book, which I had hidden in my coat when I arrived at Auschwitz, would ever be rescued. Thus I had to undergo and to overcome the loss of my mental child. And now it seemed as if nothing and no one would survive me, neither a physical nor a mental child of my own. So I found myself confronted with the question whether under such circumstances my life was ultimately void of any meaning. Not yet did I notice that an answer to this question with which I was wrestling so passionately was already in store for me and that soon thereafter this answer would be given to me. This was the case when I had to surrender my clothes and in turn inherited the worn-out rags of an inmate who had already been sent to the gas chamber immediately after his arrival at the Auschwitz railway station. Instead of the many pages of my manuscript, I found in a pocket of the newly acquired coat one single page torn out of a Hebrew prayer book containing the most important Jewish prayer, *Shema Yisrael*. How should I have interpreted such a coincidence other than as a challenge to live my thoughts instead of merely putting them on paper? A bit later, I remember it seemed to me that I would die in the near future. In this critical situation, however, my concern was different from that of most of my comrades. Their question was, "Will we survive the camp? For if not, all this suffering has no meaning." The question which beset me was, "Has all this suffering, this dying around us, a meaning? For if not, then ultimately there is no meaning to survival. For a life whose meaning depends upon such a happenstance, as whether one escapes or not, ultimately would not be worth living at all."

Metaclinical Problems. More and more a psychiatrist is approached today by patients who confront him with human problems rather than neurotic symptoms. Some of the people who nowadays call on a psychiatrist would have seen a pastor, priest, or rabbi in former days. Now they often refuse to be handed over to a clergyman and instead confront the doctor with questions such as, "What is the meaning of my life?"

A Logodrama. I should like to cite the following instance. Once the mother of a boy who had died at the age of 11 years was admitted to my hospital department after a suicide attempt. Dr. Kurt Kotjurk invited her to join a therapeutic group, and it happened that I stepped into the room where he was conducting a psychodrama. She was telling her story. At the death of her boy, she was left alone with another older son who was crippled, suffering from the effects of infantile paralysis. The poor boy had to be moved around in a wheelchair. His mother, however, rebelled against her fate, but when she tried to commit suicide together with him, it was the crippled son who prevented her from doing so. He liked living. For him, life had remained meaningful. Why was it not so for his mother? How could her life still have a meaning, and how could we help her to become aware of it? Improvising, I participated in the discussion and questioned another woman in the group. I asked her how old she was, and she answered, "30." I replied, "No, you are not 30, but instead 80 and lying on your deathbed. And now you are looking back on your life, a life which was childless, but full of financial success and social prestige. And then I invited her to imagine what you would feel in this situation. What will you think of it? What will you say to yourself?" Let me quote what she actually said from a tape which was recorded during that session: "Oh, I married a millionaire. I had an easy life full of wealth, and I lived it up. I flirted with men. I teased them. But now I am 80. I have no children of my own. Looking back as an old woman, I cannot see what all that was for. Actually, I must say, my life was a failure."

I then invited the mother of the handicapped son to imagine herself similarly looking back over her life. Let us listen to what she had to say as recorded on the tape: "I wished to have children, and this wish has been granted to me. One boy died. The other, however, the crippled one, would have been sent to an institution if I had not taken over his care. Though he is crippled and helpless, he is, after all, my boy, and so I have made a fuller life possible for him; I have made a better human being out of my son." At this moment, there was an outburst of tears and crying. She continued, "As for myself, I can look back peacefully on my life, for I can say my life was full of meaning and I have tried hard to fulfill it. I have done my best. I have done the best for my son. My life was no failure." Viewing her life as if from her deathbed, she had suddenly been able to see a meaning in it, a meaning which even included all of her sufferings. By the same token, however, it had become clear as well that a life of short

Duration, like that, for example, of her dead boy, could be so rich in joy and love that it could contain more meaning than a life lasting 80 years.

After a while, I proceeded to another question, this time addressing myself to the whole group. The question was whether an ape which was being used to develop polomiitis serum and for this reason punctured again and again would ever be able to grasp the meaning of its suffering. Unanimously the group replied that of course it would not. With its limited intelligence it could not enter into the world of man. That is the only world in which the meaning of its suffering would be understandable.

Then I pushed forward with the following question. And what about Nan? Are you sure that the human world is a terminal point in the evolution of the cosmos? Is it not conceivable that there is still another dimension, a world beyond man's world, a world in which the question of an ultimate meaning of human suffering would find an answer. The super meaning. This ultimate meaning necessarily exceeds and surpasses the finite intellectual capacities of man. In logger theapy, we speak in this context of a super meaning. What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms. Logos is deeper than logic.

A psychiatrist who goes beyond the concept of the super meaning will sooner or later be embarrassed by his patience, just as I was when my daughter at about 6 years of age asked me the question, "Why do we speak of the good Lord?" Whereupon I said, "Some weeks ago you were suffering from measles, and then the good Lord sent you full recovery." However, the little girl was not content. she retorted, "Well, but please, Daddy, do not forget, in the first place, he had sent me the measles."

However, when a patient stands on the firm ground of religious belief, there can be no objection to making use of the therapeutic effect of his religious convictions, and thereby drawing upon his spiritual resources. In order to do so, the psychiatrist may put himself in the place of the patient. That is exactly what I did once, for instance, when a rabbi from Eastern Europe turned to me and told me his story. He had lost his first wife and their six children in the concentration camp of Awitz, where they were gassed, and now it turned out that his second wife was sterile. I observed that procreation is not the only meaning of life, for then life in itself would become meaningless, and something which in itself is meaningless cannot be rendered meaningful merely by its perpetuation. However, the rabbi evaluated his plight as an Orthodox Jew in terms of despair that there was no son of his own who would ever say kadesh, a prayer for the dead, for him after his death. But I would not give up. I made a last attempt to help him by inquiring whether he did not hope to see his children again in heaven. However, my question was followed by an outburst of tears, and now the true reason for his despair came to the four. He explained that his children since they died as innocent martyrs the kiddos basm that is for the sanctification of God's name were thus found worthy of the highest place in heaven. But as for himself he could not expect as an old sinful man to be assigned the same place.

I did not give up, but retorted, "Is it not conceivable, Rabbi, that precisely this was the meaning of your surviving your children, that you may be purified through these years of suffering, so that finally you too, though not innocent like your children, may become worthy of joining them in heaven? Is it not written in the Psalms that God preserves all your tears? Thou hast kept count of my tossings? Put thou my tears in thy bottle? Are they not in thy book?" Psalm 56:8. So perhaps none of your sufferings were in vain. For the first time in many years, he found relief from his suffering through the new point of view which I was able to open up to him.

Life's transitors. Those things which seem to take meaning away from human life include not only suffering but dying as well. I never tire of saying that the only really transitory aspects of life are the potentialities. But as soon as they are actualized, they are rendered realities at that very moment. They are saved and delivered into the past wherein they are rescued and preserved from transitoriness. For in the past nothing is irretrievably lost, but everything irrevocably stored. With us thus the transitoriness of our existence in no way makes it meaningless but it does constitute our responsibleness for everything hinges upon our realizing the essentially transitory possibilities. Man constantly makes his choice concerning the mass of present potentialities. Which of these will be condemned to non-being and which will be actualized? Which choice will be made in actuality once and forever? An immortal footprint in the sands of time. At any moment man must decide for better or for worse what will be the monument of his existence. Usually to be sure man considers only the stubble field of transatrinus and overlooks the full granaries of the past wherein he had salvaged once and for all his deeds his joys and also his sufferings. Nothing can be undone and nothing can be done away with. I should say having been is the shest kind of being.

Loggerapy keeping in mind the essential transiatroness of human existence is not pessimistic but rather activistic. To express this point figuratively, we might say the pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar from which he daily tears a sheet grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest. What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees? Or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him. No, thank you, he will think, instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past. Not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud though these are things which cannot inspire envy.

Logger therapy as a technique. A realistic fear like the fear of death cannot be tranquilized away by its psychonamic interpretation. On the other hand, a neurotic fear such as agriophobia cannot be cured by philosophical understanding. However, logger therapy has developed a special technique to handle such cases too. To understand what is going on whenever this technique is used, we take as a starting point a condition which is frequently observed in neurotic individuals, namely anticipatory anxiety. It is characteristic of this fear that it produces precisely that of which the patient is afraid. An individual, for example, who is afraid of blushing when he enters a large room and faces many people will actually be more prone to blush under these circumstances. In this context, one might amend the saying, "The wish is farther to the thought," to the fear is mother of the event. Ironically enough, in the same way that fear brings to pass what one is afraid of, likewise, a forced intention makes impossible what one forcibly wishes. This excessive intention or hyperintention as I call it can be observed particularly in cases of sexual neurosis. The more a man tries to demonstrate his sexual potency or a woman her ability to experience orgasm, the less they are able to succeed. Pleasure is and must remain a side effect or byproduct and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it is made a goal in itself.

In addition to excessive intention as described above, excessive attention or hyperrelection as it is called in logotherapy may also be pathogenic that is lead to sickness. The following clinical report will indicate what I mean. A young woman came to me complaining of being frigid. The case history showed that in her childhood she had been sexually abused by her father. However, it had not been this traumatic experience in itself which had eventuated her sexual neurosis, as could easily be evidenced, for it turned out that through reading popular psychoanalytic literature, the patient had lived constantly with a fearful expectation of the toll which her traumatic experience would someday take. This anticipatory anxiety resulted both in excessive intention to confirm her femininity and excessive attention centered upon herself rather than upon her partner. This was enough to incapacitate the patient for the peak experience of sexual pleasure since the orgasm was made an object of intention and an object of attention as well instead of remaining an unintended effect of unreflected dedication and surrender to the partner. After undergoing short-term logootherapy, the patients excessive attention and intention of her ability to experience orgasm had been dereflected to introduce another logootherrapeutic term. When her attention was refocused toward the proper object, that is the partner, orgasm established itself spontaneously.

Footnote. In order to treat cases of sexual impetence, a specific logootherapeutic technique has been developed based on the theory of hyperintention and hyperrelection as sketched above. Victor E. Frankl the pleasure principle and sexual neurosis the international journal of sexology volume 5 number 3 1952 pages 128 to30. Of course this cannot be dealt with in this brief presentation of the principles of logotherapy.

Loggerapy bases its technique called paradoxical intention on the two-fold fact that fear brings about that which one is afraid of and that hyperintention makes impossible what one wishes in German I described paradoxical intention as early as 1939 Victor E. Frankles of Medictosen the psychotherapy by Neurosen Schwitzer archive for neurology and psychiatry volume 43 pages 26 to 31. In this approach the phobic patient is invited to intend even if only for a moment precisely that which he fears. Let me recall a case. A young physician consulted me because of his fear of persspiring whenever he expected an outbreak of perspiration. this anticipatory anxiety was enough to precipitate excessive sweating. In order to cut this circle formation, I advised the patient in the event that sweating should recur to resolve deliberately to show people how much he could sweat. A week later he returned to report that whenever he met anyone who triggered his anticipatory anxiety, he said to himself, "I only sweated out of quart, but now I'm going to pour at least 10 quarts." The result was that after suffering from his phobia for 4 years, he was able after a single session to free himself permanently of it within one week.

The reader will note that this procedure consists of a reversal of the patients attitude in as much as his fear is replaced by a paradoxical wish. By this treatment, the wind is taken out of the sails of the anxiety. Such a procedure, however, must make use of the specifically human capacity for self-deterrent in a sense of humor. This basic capacity to detach one from oneself is actualized whenever the logger therapeutic technique called paradoxical intention is applied. At the same time, the patient is enabled to put himself at a distance from his own neurosis. A statement consistent with this is found in Gordon W. Alport's book, The Individual and His Religion. The neurotic who learns to laugh at himself may be on the way to self-management, perhaps to cure. New York, the McMillan Company, 1956, page 92. Paradoxical intention is the empirical validation and clinical application of Alport's statement.

A few more case reports may serve to clarify this method further. The following patient was a bookkeeper who had been treated by many doctors and in several clinics without any therapeutic success. When he was admitted to my hospital department, he was in extreme despair, confessing that he was close to suicide. For some years, he had suffered from a writer's cramp which had recently become so severe that he was in danger of losing his job. Therefore, only immediate short-term therapy could alleviate the situation. In starting treatment, Dr. Eva Cdera recommended to the patient that he do just the opposite of what he usually had done, and namely, instead of trying to write as neatly and legibly as possible, to write with the worst possible scroll. He was advised to say to himself, "Now I will show people what a good scribbler I am." And at the moment in which he deliberately tried to scribble, he was unable to do so. "I tried to scroll, but simply could not do it," he said the next day. Within 48 hours the patient was in this way freed from his writer's cramp and remained free for the observation period after he had been treated. He is a happy man again and fully able to work.

A similar case dealing however with speaking rather than writing was related to me by a colleague in the larynological department of the Vienna Poly Clinic Hospital. It was the most severe case of stuttering he had come across in his many years of practice. Never in his life, as far as the stutterer could remember, had he been free from his speech trouble even for a moment, except once. This happened when he was 12 years old, and had hooked a ride on a street car. When caught by the conductor, he thought that the only way to escape would be to elicit his sympathy, and so he tried to demonstrate that he was just a poor, stuttering boy. At that moment, when he tried to stutter, he was unable to do it. without meaning to. He had practiced paradoxical intention, though not for therapeutic purposes.

However, this presentation should not leave the impression that paradoxical intention is effective only in monosymptomatic cases. By means of this logger therapeutic technique, my staff at the Vienna Poly Clinic Hospital has succeeded in bringing relief even in obsessive compulsive neurosis of a most severe degree and duration. I refer for instance to a woman 65 years of age who had suffered for 60 years from a washing compulsion. Dr. Eva Costera started logo therapeutic treatment by means of paradoxical intention and 2 months later the patient was able to lead a normal life before admission to the neurological department of the Vienna Poly Clinic Hospital. She had confessed life was hell for me. Handicapped by her compulsion and bacteriaophobic obsession, she finally remained in bed all day, unable to do any housework. It would not be accurate to say that she is now completely free of symptoms, for an obsession may come to her mind. However, she is able to joke about it, as she says, in short to apply paradoxical intention.

Paradoxical intention can also be applied in cases of sleep disturbance. The fear of sleeplessness results in a hyperintention to fall asleep which in turn incapacitates the patient to do so. Footnote, the fear of sleeplessness is in the majority of cases due to the patients ignorance of the fact that the organism provides itself by itself with a minimum amount of sleep really needed. To overcome this particular fear, I usually advise the patient not to try to sleep, but rather to try to do just the opposite. That is to stay awake as long as possible. In other words, the hyperintention to fall asleep arising from the anticipatory anxiety of not being able to do so must be replaced by the paradoxical intention not to fall asleep, which soon will be followed by sleep.

Paradoxical intention is no panacea. Yet it lends itself as a useful tool in treating obsessive compulsive and phobic conditions, especially in cases with underlying anticipatory anxiety. Moreover, it is a short-term therapeutic device. However, one should not conclude that such a short-term therapy necessarily results in only temporary therapeutic effects. One of the more common illusions of Freudian orthodoxy to quote the late Emile A. Good is that the durability of results corresponds to the length of therapy. American Journal of Psychotherapy 10 1956 page 134. In my files there is, for instance, the case report of a patient to whom paradoxical intention was administered more than 20 years ago. The therapeutic effect proved to be nevertheless a permanent one.

One of the most remarkable facts is that paradoxical intention is effective regardless of the ideological basis of the case concerned. This confirms a statement once made by Edith Viceov Jollesen. Although traditional psychotherapy has insisted that therapeutic practices have to be based on findings on eeteology, it is possible that certain factors might cause neurosis during early childhood and that entirely different factors might relieve neurosis during adulthood. Some comments on a vianese school of psychiatry, the journal of abnormal and social psychology 51 1955 pages 701-3. As for the actual causation of neurosis, apart from constitutional elements, whether somatic or psychic in nature, such feedback mechanisms as anticipatory anxiety, seem to be a major pathogenic factor. A given symptom is responded to by a phobia. The phobia triggers the symptom and the symptom in turn reinforces the phobia. A similar chain of events, however, can be observed in obsessivecompulsive cases in which the patient fights the ideas which haunt him.

Footnote, this is often motivated by the patients fear that his obsessions indicate an imminent or even actual psychosis. The patient is not aware of the empirical fact that an obsessive compulsive neurosis is immunizing him against a formal psychosis rather than endangering him in this direction. Thereby, however, he increases their power to disturb him since pressure precipitates counter pressure. Again, the symptom is reinforced. On the other hand, as soon as the patient stops fighting his obsessions and instead tries to ridicule them by dealing with them in an ironical way by applying paradoxical intention, the vicious circle is cut. The symptom diminishes and finally atrophies. In the fortunate case where there is no existential vacuum which invites and elicits the symptom, the patient will not only succeed in ridiculing his neurotic fear, but finally will succeed in completely ignoring it. As we see, anticipatory anxiety has to be counteracted by paradoxical intention. Hyper inention as well as hyperrelection have to be counteracted by dreflection. Dreflection however ultimately is not possible except by the patients orientation toward his specific vocation and mission in life.

Footnote this conviction is supported by Alport who once said as the focus of striving shifts from the conflict to selfless goals the life as a whole becomes sounder even though the neurosis may never completely disappear. Opposite page 95. It is not the neurotic's self- concern whether pity or contempt which breaks the circle formation. The cue to cure is self-trcendence.

The collective neurosis. Every age has its own collective neurosis and every age needs its own psychotherapy to cope with it. The existential vacuum which is the mass neurosis of the present time can be described as a private and personal form of nihilism. For neihilism can be defined as the contention that being has no meaning. As for psychotherapy, however, it will never be able to cope with this state of affairs on a mass scale if it does not keep itself free from the impact and influence of the contemporary trends of a neolistic philosophy. Otherwise, it represents a symptom of the mass neurosis rather than its possible cure. Psychotherapy would not only reflect a neihilistic philosophy but also even though unwillingly and unwittingly transmit to the patient what is actually a caricature rather than a true picture of man.

First of all, there is the danger inherent in the teaching of man's nothing but the theory that man is nothing but the result of biological, psychological and sociological conditions or the product of heredity and environment. Such a view of man makes a neurotic believe what he is prone to believe anyway, namely that he is the porn and victim of outer influences or inner circumstances. This neurotic fatalism is fostered and strengthened by a psychotherapy which denies that man is free. To be sure, a human being is a finite thing and his freedom is restricted. It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions. As I once put it, as a professor in two fields, neurology and psychiatry, I am fully aware of the extent to which man is subject to biological, psychological, and sociological conditions. But in addition to being a professor in two fields, I am a survivor of four camps, concentration camps that is, and as such, I also bear witness to the unexpected extent to which man is capable of defying and braving even the worst conditions conceivable from Value Dimensions in Teaching, a color television film produced by Hollywood Animators, Inc. for the California Junior College Association.

Critique of pandeterminism. Psychoanalysis has often been blamed for its so-called pansexualism. I for one doubt whether this reproach has ever been legitimate. However, there is something which seems to me to be an even more erroneous and dangerous assumption, namely that which I call pandeterminism. By that I mean the view of man which disregards his capacity to take a stand toward any conditions whatsoever. Man is not fully conditioned and determined, but rather determines himself, whether he gives in to conditions or stands up to them. In other words, man is ultimately self-determining. Man does not simply exist, but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment. By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant. Therefore, we can predict his future only within the large framework of a statistical survey referring to a whole group. The individual personality, however, remains essentially unpredictable. The basis for any predictions would be represented by biological, psychological, or sociological conditions. Yet, one of the main features of human existence is the capacity to rise above such conditions, to grow beyond them. Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible and of changing himself for the better if necessary.

Let me cite the case of Dr. J. He was the only man I ever encountered in my whole life whom I would dare to call a mephistoan being a satanic figure. At that time he was generally called the mass murderer of Steinhoff, the large mental hospital in Vienna. When the Nazis started their euthanasia program, he held all the strings in his hands and was so fanatic in the job assigned to him that he tried not to let one single psychotic individual escaped the gas chamber. After the war, when I came back to Vienna, I asked what had happened to Dr. J. He had been imprisoned by the Russians in one of the isolation cells of Steinhoff, they told me. The next day, however, the door of his cell stood open and Dr. J was never seen again. Later I was convinced that like others he had with the help of his comrades made his way to South America. More recently, however, I was consulted by a former Austrian diplomat who had been imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain for many years, first in Siberia and then in the famous Lubiana prison in Moscow. While I was examining him neurologically, he suddenly asked me whether I happened to know Dr. J. After my affirmative reply, he continued, "I made his acquaintance in Lubiana. There he died at about the age of 40 from cancer of the urinary bladder." Before he died, however, he showed himself to be the best comrade you can imagine. He gave consolation to everybody. He lived up to the highest conceivable moral standard. He was the best friend I ever met during my long years in prison. This is the story of Dr. J, the mass murderer of Steinhoff. How can we dare to predict the behavior of man? We may predict the movements of a machine of an automatan. More than this, we may even try to predict the mechanisms or dynamisms of the human psyche as well. But man is more than psyche.

Freedom, however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the east coast be supplemented by a statue of responsibility on the west coast.

The psychiatric credo. There is nothing conceivable which would so condition a man as to leave him without the slightest freedom. Therefore, a residue of freedom, however limited it may be, is left to man in neurotic and even psychotic cases. Indeed, the innermost core of the patients personality is not even touched by a psychosis. An incurably psychotic individual may lose his usefulness, but yet retain the dignity of a human being. This is my psychiatric credo. Without it, I should not think it worthwhile to be a psychiatrist. For whose sake? just for the sake of a damaged brain machine which cannot be repaired. If the patient were not definitely more euthanasia would be justified.

Psychiatry rehumanized for too long a time for half a century in fact psychiatry tried to interpret the human mind merely as a mechanism and consequently the therapy of mental disease merely in terms of a technique. I believe this dream has been dreamt out. What now begins to loom on the horizon are not the sketches of a psychized medicine, but rather those of a humanized psychiatry. A doctor, however, who would still interpret his own role mainly as that of a technician, would confess that he sees in his patient nothing more than a machine instead of seeing the human being behind the disease. A human being is not one thing among others. Things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes within the limits of endowment and environment he has made out of himself. In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory, and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine, while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself. Which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions. Our generation is realistic for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Ashvitz. However, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Israel on his lips.

Postcript 1984 the case for a tragic optimism. This chapter is based on a lecture I presented at the third world congress of logger therapy ragensburg university west Germany June 1983 dedicated to the memory of Edith Vice Jolen whose pioneering efforts in logger therapy in the United States began as early as 1955 and whose contributions to the field have been invaluable. Let us first ask ourselves what should be understood by a tragic optimism. In brief, it means that one is and remains optimistic in spite of the tragic triad as it is called in logger therapy. A triad which consists of those aspects of human existence which may be circumscribed by one pain, two guilt and three death. This chapter in fact raises the question, how is it possible to say yes to life in spite of all that? How, to pose the question differently, can life retain its potential meaning in spite of its tragic aspects? After all, saying yes to life in spite of everything, to use the phrase in which the title of a German book of mine is couched, presupposes that life is potentially meaningful under any conditions, even those which are most miserable. And this in turn presupposes the human capacity to creatively turn life's negative aspects into something positive or constructive. In other words, what matters is to make the best of any given situation. The best, however, is that which in Latin is called optimum. Hence the reason I speak of a tragic optimism, that is, an optimism in the face of tragedy, and in view of the human potential, which at its best always allows for one, turning suffering into a human achievement and accomplishment, two, deriving from guilt the opportunity to change oneself for the better, and three, deriving from life's transitors, an incentive to take responsible action.

It must be kept in mind, however, that optimism is not anything to be commanded or ordered. One cannot even force oneself to be optimistic indiscriminately against all odds, against all hope. And what is true for hope is also true for the other two components of the triad, in as much as faith and love cannot be commanded or ordered either. To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that again and again one is commanded and ordered to be happy. But happiness cannot be pursued. It must ensue. One must have a reason to be happy. Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness, but rather in search of a reason to become happy. Last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation. This need for a reason is similar in another specifically human phenomenon, laughter. If you want anyone to laugh, you have to provide him with a reason. For example, you have to tell him a joke. In no way is it possible to evoke real laughter by urging him or having him urge himself to laugh. Doing so would be the same as urging people posed in front of a camera to say cheese only to find that in the finished photographs their faces are frozen in artificial smiles. In logger therapy, such a behavior pattern is called hyper inention. It plays an important role in the causation of sexual neurosis, be it fragidity or impotence. The more a patient instead of forgetting himself through giving himself directly strives for orgasm that is sexual pleasure, the more this pursuit of sexual pleasure becomes self-defeating. Indeed, what is called the pleasure principle is rather a fun spoiler.

Once an individual's search for a meaning is successful, it not only renders him happy but also gives him the capability to cope with suffering. And what happens if one's groping for a meaning has been in vain? This may well result in a fatal condition. Let us recall, for instance, what sometimes happened in extreme situations such as prisoner of war camps or concentration camps. In the first, as I was told by American soldiers, a behavior pattern crystallized to which they referred as give up ititis. In the concentration camps, this behavior was paralleled by those who one morning at 5 refused to get up and go to work and instead stayed in the hut on the straw wet with urine and feces. Nothing, neither warnings nor threats could induce them to change their minds. And then something typical occurred. They took out a cigarette from deep down in a pocket where they had hidden it and started smoking. At that moment we knew that for the next 48 hours or so we would watch them dying. Meaning orientation had subsided and consequently the seeking of immediate pleasure had taken over. Is this not reminiscent of another parallel? A parallel that confronts us day by day. I think of those youngsters who on a worldwide scale refer to themselves as the no future generation. To be sure, it is not just a cigarette to which they resort. It is drugs. In fact, the drug scene is one aspect of a more general mass phenomenon, namely the feeling of meaninglessness resulting from a frustration of our existential needs, which in turn has become a universal phenomenon in our industrial societies.

Today, it is not only logger therapists who claim that the feeling of meaninglessness plays an everinccreasing role in the eeology of neurosis. As Irvin D. Yalom of Stanford University states in existential psychotherapy of 40 consecutive patients applying for therapy at a psychiatric outpatient clinic 12 30% had some major problem involving meaning as a judged from self-ratings therapists or independent judges basic books New York 1980 page 448 thousands of miles east of PaloAlto the situation differs only by 1% the Most recent pertinent statistics indicate that in Vienna 29% of the population complain that meaning is missing from their lives. As to the causation of the feeling of meaninglessness, one may say, albeit in an oversimplifying vein, that people have enough to live by but nothing to live for. They have the means but no meaning. To be sure, some do not even have the means. In particular, I think of the mass of people who are today unemployed. 50 years ago, I published a study devoted to a specific type of depression I had diagnosed in cases of young patients suffering from what I called unemployment neurosis. And I could show that this neurosis really originated in a two-fold erroneous identification. Being jobless was equated with being useless and being useless was equated with having a meaningless life. Consequently, whenever I succeeded in persuading the patients to volunteer in youth organizations, adult education, public libraries, and the like, in other words, as soon as they could fill their abundant free time with some sort of unpaid but meaningful activity, their depression disappeared, although their economic situation had not changed and their hunger was the same. The truth is that man does not live by welfare alone.

Along with unemployment neurosis which is triggered by an individual's socioeconomic situation, there are other types of depression which are traceable back to psychonamic or biochemical conditions whichever the case may be. Accordingly, psychotherapy and pharmarmacotherapy are indicated respectively. In so far as the feeling of meaninglessness is concerned, however, we should not overlook and forget that per se it is not a matter of pathology. Rather than being the sign and symptom of a neurosis, it is, I would say, the proof of one's humanness. But although it is not caused by anything pathological, it may well cause a pathological reaction. In other words, it is potentially pathogenic. Just consider the mass neurotic syndrome so pervasive in the young generation. There is ample empirical evidence that the three facets of this syndrome depression, aggression, addiction are due to what is called in logotherapy the existential vacuum. A feeling of emptiness and meaninglessness. It goes without saying that not each and every case of depression is to be traced back to a feeling of meaninglessness. Nor does suicide in which depression sometimes eventuates always result from an existential vacuum. But even if each and every case of suicide had not been undertaken out of a feeling of meaninglessness, it may well be that an individual's impulse to take his life would have been overcome had he been aware of some meaning and purpose worth living for.

If thus a strong meaning orientation plays a decisive role in the prevention of suicide, what about intervention in cases in which there is a suicide risk? As a young doctor, I spent four years in Austria's largest state hospital, where I was in charge of the pavilion in which severely depressed patients were accommodated, most of them having been admitted after a suicide attempt. I once calculated that I must have explored 12,000 patients during those four years. What accumulated was quite a store of experience from which I still draw whenever I am confronted with someone who is prone to suicide. I explained to such a person that patients have repeatedly told me how happy they were that the suicide attempt had not been successful. Weeks, months, years later, they told me it turned out that there was a solution to their problem, an answer to their question, a meaning to their life. Even if things only take such a good turn in one of a thousand cases, my explanation continues. Who can guarantee that in your case it will not happen one day sooner or later? But in the first place, you have to live to see the day on which it may happen. So you have to survive in order to see that day dawn. And from now on, the responsibility for survival does not leave you.

Regarding the second facet of the mass neurotic syndrome, aggression, let me cite an experiment once conducted by Carolyn Wood Sheriff. She had succeeded in artificially building up mutual aggressions between groups of boy scouts, and observed that the aggressions only subsided when the youngsters dedicated themselves to a collective purpose, that is, the joint task of dragging out of the mud a carriage in which food had to be brought to their camp. Immediately they were not only challenged, but also united by a meaning they had to fulfill. A footnote for further information on this experiment, see Victor E. Frankle, the unconscious God, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1978, page 140. And Victor E. Frankl, the unheard cry for meaning, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1978, page 36.

As for the third issue, addiction, I am reminded of the findings presented by Anmarie von Forchmier, who noted that as evidenced by tests and statistics, 90% of the alcoholics she studied had suffered from an abysmal feeling of meaninglessness. Of the drug addicts studied by Stanley Krypner, 100% believed that things seemed meaningless. Footnote for further information see the unconscious God pages 97 to 100 and the unheard cry for meaning pages 26 to 28.

Now let us turn to the question of meaning itself. To begin with I would like to clarify that in the first place the logger therapist is concerned with the potential meaning inherent and dormant in all the single situations one has to face throughout his or her life. Therefore, I will not be elaborating here on the meaning of one's life as a whole, although I do not deny that such a long range meaning does exist. To invoke an analogy, consider a movie. It consists of thousands upon thousands of individual pictures, and each of them makes sense and carries a meaning. Yet, the meaning of the whole film cannot be seen before its last sequence is shown. However, we cannot understand the whole film without having first understood each of its components, each of the individual pictures. Isn't it the same with life? Doesn't the final meaning of life too reveal itself, if at all, only at its end, on the verge of death? And doesn't this final meaning too depend on whether or not the potential meaning of each single situation has been actualized to the best of the respective individuals knowledge and belief? The fact remains that meaning and its perception as seen from the logger therapeutic angle is completely down to earth rather than a float in the air or resident in an ivory tower. sweepingly I would locate the cognition of meaning of a personal meaning of a concrete situation midway between an aha experience along the lines of Carl Buer's concept and a gestalt perception say along the lines of Max Wertheimr's theory the perception of meaning differs from the classical concept of gestalt perception in so far as the latter implies the sudden awareness of a figure on a ground whereas the perception of meaning as I see it more specifically ly boils down to becoming aware of a possibility against the background of reality or to express it in plain words to becoming aware of what can be done about a given situation.

And how does a human being go about finding meaning? As Charlotte Buler has stated, all we can do is study the lives of people who seem to have found their answers to the questions of what ultimately human life is about as against those who have not. Basic theoretical concepts of humanistic psychology. American psychologist 26, April 1971, page 378. In addition to such a biographical approach, however, we may as well embark on a biological approach. Loggerapy conceives of conscience as a prompter which if need be indicates the direction in which we have to move in a given life situation. In order to carry out such a task, conscience must apply a measuring stick to the situation one is confronted with. And this situation has to be evaluated in the light of a set of criteria, in the light of a hierarchy of values. These values, however, cannot be espoused and adopted by us on a conscious level. They are something that we are. They have crystallized in the course of the evolution of our species. They are founded on our biological past and are rooted in our biological depth. Conrad Lorren might have had something similar in mind when he developed the concept of a biological a priori and when both of us recently discussed my own view on the biological foundation of the valuing process, he enthusiastically expressed his accord. In any case, if a pre-reflective axiological self-standing exists, we may assume that it is ultimately anchored in our biological heritage.

As logotherapy teaches, there are three main avenues on which one arrives at meaning in life. The first is by creating a work or by doing a deed. The second is by experiencing something or encountering someone. In other words, meaning can be found not only in work but also in love. Edith Weissop Jolson observed in this context that the logger therapeutic notion that experiencing can be as valuable as achieving is therapeutic because it compensates for our one-sided emphasis on the external world of achievement at the expense of the internal world of experience. The place of logotherapy in the world today. The international forum for logotherapy volume 1 number 3 1980 pages 3 to7. Most important however is the third avenue to meaning in life. Even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation facing a fate he cannot change may rise above himself may grow beyond himself and by so doing change himself. He may turn a personal tragedy into a triumph.

Again, it was Edith Weissop Jollesen who, as mentioned on page 136, once expressed the hope that logger therapy may help counteract certain unhealthy trends in the present-day culture of the United States, where the incurable sufferer is given very little opportunity to be proud of his suffering, and to consider it enobling rather than degrading, so that he is not only unhappy, but also ashamed of being unhappy. For a quarter of a century, I ran the neurological department of a general hospital and bore witness to my patients capacity to turn their predicaments into human achievements. In addition to such practical experience, empirical evidence is also available which supports the possibility that one may find meaning in suffering. Researchers at the Yale University School of Medicine have been impressed by the number of prisoners of war of the Vietnam War who explicitly claimed that although their captivity was extraordinarily stressful, filled with torture, disease, malnutrition, and solitary confinement, they nevertheless benefited from the captivity experience, seeing it as a growth experience. Wh Sledge, JA Boydston, and AJ Rae self-concept changes related to war captivity. Archive of General Psychiatry 37 1980 pages 430 to 443.

But the most powerful arguments in favor of a tragic optimism are those which in Latin are called argumenta ad homonym. Jerry Long to cite an example is a living testimony to the defiant power of the human spirit as it is called in logotherapy. Footnote. The defiant power of the human spirit was in fact the title of a paper presented by Long at the Third World Congress of Logger therapy in June 1983. To quote the Texacana Gazette, Jerry Long has been paralyzed from his neck down since a diving accident which rendered him a quadriplegic 3 years ago. He was 17 when the accident occurred. Today, Long can use his mouth stick to type. He attends two courses at community college via a special telephone. The intercom allows Long to both hear and participate in class discussions. He also occupies his time by reading, watching television and writing. And in a letter I received from him, he writes, "I view my life as being abundant with meaning and purpose. The attitude that I adopted on that fateful day has become my personal credo for life. I broke my neck. It didn't break me. I am currently enrolled in my first psychology course in college. I believe that my handicap will only enhance my ability to help others. I know that without the suffering, the growth that I have achieved would have been impossible."

Is this to say that suffering is indispensable to the discovery of meaning? In no way. I only insist that meaning is available in spite of, nay, even through suffering, provided, as noted in part two of this book, that the suffering is unavoidable. If it is avoidable, the meaningful thing to do is to remove its cause, for unnecessary suffering is masochistic rather than heroic. If, on the other hand, one cannot change a situation that causes his suffering, he could still choose his attitude. footnote. I won't forget an interview I once heard on Austrian TV given by a Polish cardiologist who during World War II had helped organize the Warsaw Ghetto upheaval. What a heroic deed, exclaimed the reporter, "Listen," calmly replied the doctor, "to take a gun and shoot is no great thing. But if the SS leads you to a gas chamber or to a mass grave to execute you on the spot, and you can't do anything about it, except for going your way with dignity, you see, this is what I would call heroism. Attitudinal heroism, so to speak. Long had not been chosen to break his neck, but he did decide not to let himself be broken by what had happened to him. As we see, the priority stays with creatively changing the situation that causes us to suffer. But the superiority goes to the knowh how to suffer if need be. And there is empirical evidence that literally the man in the street is of the same opinion. Austrian public opinion pollsters recently reported that those held in highest esteem by most of the people interviewed are neither the great artists nor the great scientists, neither the great statesmen nor the great sports figures, but those who master a hard lot with their heads held high.

In turning to the second aspect of the tragic triad, namely guilt, I would like to depart from a theological concept that has always been fascinating to me. I refer to what is called mysterium iniquitartis, meaning as I see it, that a crime in the final analysis remains inexplicable in as much as it cannot be fully traced back to biological, psychological, and/or sociological factors. Totally explaining one's crime would be tantamount to explaining away his or her guilt, and to seeing in him or her not a free and responsible human being, but a machine to be repaired. Even criminals

themselves abhor this treatment, and prefer to be held responsible for their deeds. From a convict serving his sentence in an Illinois penitentiary, I received a letter in which he deplored that the criminal never has a chance to explain himself. He is offered a variety of excuses to choose from. Society is blamed, and in many instances, the blame is put on the victim.

Furthermore, when I addressed the prisoners in San Quentin, I told them that you are human beings like me, and as such, you were free to commit a crime, to become guilty. Now, however, you are responsible for overcoming guilt by rising above it, by growing beyond yourselves, by changing for the better. They felt understood.

Footnote. See also Joseph B. Fabri, *The Pursuit of Meaning*, New York, Harper and Row, 1980.

And from Frank E. W., an ex-prisoner, I received a note which stated that he had started a logger therapy group for ex-felons. "We are 27 strong, and the newer ones are staying out of prison through the pure strength of those of us from the original group. Only one returned, and he is now free."

Footnote. C.F. Victor E. Frankl, *The Unheard Cry for Meaning*, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1978, pages 42 to 43.

As for the concept of collective guilt, I personally think that it is totally unjustified to hold one person responsible for the behavior of another person or a collective of persons. Since the end of World War II, I have not become weary of publicly arguing against the collective guilt concept.

Footnote. See also Victor E. Frankl, *Psychotherapy and Existentialism*, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1967.

Sometimes, however, it takes a lot of didactic tricks to detach people from their superstitions. An American woman once confronted me with a reproach, "How can you still write some of your books in German, Adolf Hitler's language?" In response, I asked her if she had knives in her kitchen, and when she answered that she did, I acted dismayed and shocked, exclaiming, "How can you still use knives after so many killers have used them to stab and murder their victims?" She stopped objecting to my writing books in German.

The third aspect of the tragic triad concerns death, but it concerns life as well, for at any time, each of the moments of which life consists is dying, and that moment will never recur. And yet, is not this transitoriness a reminder that challenges us to make the best possible use of each moment of our lives? It certainly is. And hence my imperative: live as if you are living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.

In fact, the opportunities to act properly, the potentialities to fulfill a meaning are affected by the irreversibility of our lives. But also the potentialities alone are so affected. For as soon as we have used an opportunity and have actualized a potential meaning, we have done so once and for all. We have rescued it into the past, wherein it has been safely delivered and deposited. In the past, nothing is irretrievably lost, but rather, on the contrary, everything is irrevocably stored and treasured. To be sure, people tend to see only the stubble fields of transitors, but overlook and forget the full granaries of the past into which they have brought the harvest of their lives: the deeds done, the loves loved, and, last but not least, the sufferings they have gone through with courage and dignity.

From this, one may see that there is no reason to pity old people. Instead, young people should envy them. It is true that the old have no opportunities, no possibilities in the future. But they have more than that. Instead of possibilities in the future, they have realities in the past. The potentialities they have actualized, the meanings they have fulfilled, the values they have realized. And nothing and nobody can ever remove these assets from the past.

In view of the possibility of finding meaning in suffering, life's meaning is an unconditional one, at least potentially. That unconditional meaning, however, is paralleled by the unconditional value of each and every person. It is that which warrants the indelible quality of the dignity of man. Just as life remains potentially meaningful under any conditions, even those which are most miserable, so too does the value of each and every person stay with him or her. And it does so because it is based on the values that he or she has realized in the past and is not contingent on the usefulness that he or she may or may not retain in the present. More specifically, this usefulness is usually defined in terms of functioning for the benefit of society. But today's society is characterized by achievement orientation and, consequently, it adores people who are successful and happy, and in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise and, in so doing, blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness.

If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual's value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency, not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler's program, that is to say, mercy killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer.

Confounding the dignity of man with mere usefulness arises from a conceptual confusion that, in turn, may be traced back to the contemporary nihilism transmitted on many an academic campus and many an analytical couch. Even in the setting of training analyses, such an indoctrination may take place. Nihilism does not contend that there is nothing, but it states that everything is meaningless. And George A. Sergeant was right when he promulgated the concept of learned meaninglessness. He himself remembered a therapist who said, "George, you must realize that the world is a joke. There is no justice. Everything is random. Only when you realize this will you understand how silly it is to take yourself seriously. There is no grand purpose in the universe. It just is. There's no particular meaning in what decision you make today about how to act."

Footnote. Transference and Counter Transference in Logotherapy. *The International Forum for Logotherapy*, Volume 5, Number Two, Fall-Winter 1982, pages 115 to 118.

One must not generalize such a criticism. In principle, training is indispensable. But if so, therapists should see their task in immunizing the trainee against nihilism rather than inoculating him with a cynicism that is a defense mechanism against their own nihilism. Logotherapy therapists may even conform to some of the training and licensing requirements stipulated by the other schools of psychotherapy. In other words, one may howl with the wolves if need be, but when doing so, one should be, I would urge, a sheep in wolf's clothing. There is no need to become untrue to the basic concept of man and the principles of the philosophy of life inherent in logotherapy. Such a loyalty is not hard to maintain in view of the fact that, as Elizabeth S. Lucas once pointed out, throughout the history of psychotherapy, there has never been a school as undogmatic as logotherapy.

Footnote. Logotherapy is not imposed on those who are interested in psychotherapy. It is not comparable to an oriental bazaar, but rather to a supermarket. In the former, the customer is talked into buying something. In the latter, he is shown and offered various things from which he may pick what he deems usable and valuable.

And at the First World Congress of Logotherapy, San Diego, California, November 6th to 8th, 1980, I argued not only for the rehumanization of psychotherapy, but also for what I called the degorification of logotherapy. My interest does not lie in raising parrots that just rehash their master's voice, but rather in passing the torch to independent and inventive, innovative, and creative spirits.

Sigmund Freud once asserted, "Let one attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly to hunger. With the increase of the imperative urge of hunger, all individual differences will blur, and in their stead will appear the uniform expression of the one unstilled urge." Thank heaven Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz. There the individual differences did not blur. But on the contrary, people became more different. People unmasked themselves: both the swine and the saints. And today, you need no longer hesitate to use the word saints. Think of Father Maximilian Kolbe, who was starved and finally murdered by an injection of carbolic acid at Auschwitz and who, in 1983, was canonized.

You may be prone to blame me for invoking examples that are the exceptions to the rule, said Omni Praelia Rara Sunt. But everything great is just as difficult to realize as it is rare to find, reads the last sentence of the ethics of Spinoza. You may, of course, ask whether we really need to refer to saints. Wouldn't it suffice just to refer to decent people? It is true that they form a minority. More than that, they always will remain a minority. And yet, I see therein the very challenge to join the minority. For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best. So let us be alert. Alert in a two-fold sense. Since Auschwitz, we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima, we know what is at stake.

Theme. During World War II, 1939-1945, millions of people suffered the physical and existential terror of the Nazi concentration camps. The names now are famous: Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Birkenau, the largest, and unlike the others, a combined death camp and labor camp. At the time war was declared, Victor E. Frankl was a respected psychiatrist at the Rothschild Hospital in Vienna, Austria. His work had already made a great impact in his field. He had begun several highly successful programs to treat suicidal patients, and his opinions on psychological matters were highly sought after across Europe, even by well-respected psychoanalysts such as Wilhelm Reich and Sigmund Freud. After the Nazi Anschluss, the German occupation of Austria in 1938, Frankl was legally disallowed from treating Aryans or non-Jews. Along with millions of other Jews, he and his family were persecuted and eventually detained in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. A successful psychiatrist with a probing mind, Frankl used much of what he'd learned about human psychology to survive and help others survive the camps. After a long and brutal imprisonment during which almost all of his family perished, he was one of the few to walk out of Auschwitz at the end of the war. Frankl wrote a book about his experiences, describing in detail the lessons in human psychology he had gleaned from the extreme conditions of the camps. Nevertheless, *Say Yes to Life*, written in German and distributed under many other titles, was published anonymously in 1946, since Frankl didn't believe it would have much public impact. But demand for the book soon grew. When the English translation titled *Man's Search for Meaning* was finally published in 1959, it sold millions of copies. To this day, it is reprinted regularly. The central idea of Frankl's work was the practice of logotherapy, a Greek-based term that more or less translates to "meaning therapy." Never as broadly popularized as Freud's psychotherapy or Rogerian group therapy, logotherapy is nonetheless spectacularly effective in treating patients with suicidal thoughts, midlife crisis, depression, and various other conditions. The process of logotherapy involves seeking out, discovering, and naming what can be said to be the true meaning of your individual life, whether that meaning centers on love, family, work, or something else. Since his death in 1997, Frankl's work has been carried forward in numerous logotherapy institutes across the world. His most popular book, *Man's Search for Meaning*, remains a classic that continues to be read by new generations each decade.

Background. Victor Frankl's classic, *Man's Search for Meaning*, can be seen as both a memoir of his years in Nazi concentration camps and a founding document for the field of logotherapy. The first and largest section of the book covers Frankl's own experiences in both large and small camps across Nazi-occupied territory, going into vivid detail about the conditions, agonies, and day-to-day grind of being a prisoner under a criminal regime in Europe. He makes the point, though, that the story he tells is not about the heroes and martyrs fighting tyranny and extremists, but rather the common experiences of regular prisoners, average family people and workers, many of whom he watched die in the camps. The experience of a Nazi concentration camp is one of unimaginable suffering. The all-powerful institution of violence and coercion effectively controlled every aspect of daily life for Frankl and the other prisoners, leaving little room for the ordinary. The camps were a reality unto themselves, allowing no communication with the outside world, and the daily experience of violence, murder, starvation, and deprivation kept the surviving inmates disempowered and docile. Still, Frankl discovered some surprising things about human resilience and psychology: ideas that challenged the era's preconceptions about physical and mental well-being. How was it that people could survive such an ordeal? What kinds of reactions did different people have? And could those reactions be examined and categorized? Frankl was already a well-known doctor at the Rothschild Hospital in Vienna, and inmates and Nazi officials alike sought after his expertise during his time in the camps. His background and profession proved useful. He was stationed in the typhus block where he aided the sick, though it wasn't much of a recovery clinic, and occasionally one of the guards took a liking to him for his willingness to listen to personal stories and offer advice. Because of this, Frankl had more consistent and regular interaction with the variety of personalities there, and he was able to see things both from the perspective of the officials and from the viewpoint of enslaved laborers, the thriving and the dying. In secret, he took shorthand notes on scraps of paper, remarking on the notable or widespread responses of moral apathy, depersonalization, extinguished sex drive, gallows humor, suicidal tendencies, and the physical and emotional responses of people when subjected to long-term starvation and sleep deprivation. Frankl noted that suffering, whether a small or large amount of it, completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, making ordinary existence impossible and stoking a range of reactions that would be impossible to imagine in any other circumstances. Still, the book offers insights on and a direct challenge to the idea of surviving that is still the accepted notion today, providing a reasoned contradiction of the idea that only the strong make it through while the weak perish. In many ways, Frankl found the opposite to be true. He describes young, healthy, physically exemplary prisoners who were some of the first to perish, noting to himself with some surprise that someone who was physically weaker often had a better chance of surviving if he had a rich inner life. This was where Frankl began to take note of the power of meaningfulness in a person's life. Intellectual life in the camp was totally absent, and those prisoners who turned to their own memories of great literature and ideas—Frankl quotes Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, the Bible, Thomas Mann, and others—tended to have the moral stamina not only to survive but also to act selflessly for others in the face of great personal risk. This idea became the basis for logotherapy. In each individual case, a prisoner's unique psychopathology influenced his or her battle with the terrorizing influences of the camps. Frankl shares anecdotes about various experiences and how those experiences led either to death or survival. The suffering in the camps brought out each individual's basest traits. And it was inevitably these characteristics, personal beliefs, inner life, moral quality, that defined that person's experience of life under heavy oppression. Once liberated from the camps, these traits would also shape the person's ability to cope in a free world. Frankl's brief autobiographical document of concentration camp life is one of the most detailed and psychologically interesting on record. There are other accounts of life in the camps, dramatizations and memoirs. But Frankl's training in psychology allowed him to remove himself and describe the activities and events of the camp as a visiting third-party observer might. Reading his account, you not only come to understand the terrors and unlivable conditions of the camps, but also begin to imagine yourself coping with the horrifying circumstances. What are your most basic personality and moral traits? What is at the core of meaningfulness in your own life? These and other questions will inevitably define your own search for meaning. In the postscript and afterward, in light of his description of concentration camp life, Frankl tasks himself with explaining for the lay reader the nature and usefulness of his own school of psychotherapy, logotherapy. He also discusses his idea of tragic optimism in the face of life's tragic triad: pain, guilt, and death. The psychiatric approach has many aspects to it, including noamics, noetic neurosis, existential frustration, and Frankl largely makes use of anecdotal evidence to make his case for his theories. It may go without saying that after he was released from the camps, Frankl eventually returned to his work with a fresh enthusiasm and armed with the unique insights he gained by experiencing one of history's most horrific events of systemic oppression. He died in 1997, a celebrated proponent of the meaningful life.

Abstract. One experiences in the concentration camp. Frankl begins with the institutional brutality of his own entry into the camps: the formal orderliness with which Nazi officials organized transport, admission, regulation, and control of the prisoners, the processing of prisoners, giving them numbers, dividing them up into random groups, stripping them naked, beating them, selecting privileged capos, setting them to work from early in the morning to late in the day, and starving them. In Frankl's estimation, this was a way of depriving people of their connections to others and to their own lives and histories. As a manner of control, this was very effective. People were too frightened, alienated, and intent on surviving to even consider resistance. The Nazis projected an image of total control and order, and an essential part of this was weakening and disempowering their prisoners. Thoughts of suicide, fear of death, and brutal working conditions kept the prisoners down. But Frankl recounts moments where human behavior seemed to run counter to what was and often still is popularly thought about human psychology. Some obedient prisoners were selected by the Nazis and became kapos, helpers and orderlies of the regime, but more often prisoners would help strangers in the camp at great risk to themselves. On his second day at Auschwitz, Frankl was approached by a man who broke the rules, risking death by sneaking out to his hut to offer advice on how to survive in the camp. This deed was entirely selfless and also completely unnecessary, as it did little to help either party in the end. Though suicide was possible—all one had to do was run into the wire, the highly electrified fence surrounding the camp—few people actually killed themselves. And though many of those who repressed thoughts of suicide were still murdered, a small minority of survivors continued to take great risks for others and to find ways of maintaining calm, level-headedness, and some optimism. Frankl found these cases the most interesting. To understand better, Frankl broke the experience up into a few loose phases. The first phase was one of an ironic curiosity. Most inmates, subject to such hopelessness, moved into a state of removed curiosity as to how much pain they could take and whether they would survive. With the elimination of personal agency, it seemed that initially the intellectual mind took over and found itself stimulated to see what would happen next. How long could a person go without sleep? How long could a person stand out in two-degree weather without boots or a coat? The brief first phase was then followed by a phase of apathy and a permanent and total lack of libido. Frankl viewed these characteristics as central symptoms of imprisonment. Prisoners began to view death and suffering as just another part of the day, unremarkable for the camps. Frankl too fell into this behavior, often viewing the body of a friend who died right in front of him, or watching people ransack a dead body for a coat, shoes, and other possessions without the slightest reaction. He also had very few sexual thoughts and was reduced essentially to a state of physical and libidinal anhedonia or disinterest. These responses were characteristics of psychological self-defense and were necessary for survival. To feel, see, and live as normal in the camp was impossible. So, in order to make it through the ordeal, the human mind naturally withdrew to a state of moral, physical, and emotional apathy.

Frankl discusses what he calls cultural hibernation and the importance of a rich inner life. The belief systems and culture of the prisoners were largely absent during internment. But Frankl writes that there were often heady discussions of a political, academic, or religious nature. This led him to some insights about the importance of intellectual lives for human beings. He remarks that the biggest and healthiest prisoners would often perish sooner than those with slighter constitutions who had rich intellectual lives. Inner peace and a desire to find meaning through literature, science, theology, etc., even when confronted with violence and chaos, was central not only to survival but also to finding meaning in one's life. Frankl refers to his own knowledge of literature to aid his understanding of the range of human responses to the anguish. He quotes Lessing, "There are things which must cause you to lose your reason or you have none to lose," and Dostoevsky: "Yes, man can get used to anything, but do not ask how." Thoughts of poetry, literature, and science helped Frankl to understand himself and the world around him and led to one of his central revelations. During a particularly difficult march in the cold, he recognized that he and other inmates were thinking of their wives in order to comfort themselves. Love was central, he thought, to survival and to finding meaning. "The salvation of man is through love and in love." The intensification of the inner life centering around thoughts of meaning and love gave the prisoners respite, if brief, from the moral and intellectual desolation of the camps.

Additional experiences composing a kind of third phase of life in the camp centered on the pursuit of spiritual freedom. This struggle was the most intense and personal of all. It came out in various ways. Some people sang to one another or recited poems. In one case, a cabaret was put on for the group's entertainment. But psychological freedom was also found in brief or accidental respites, coming across a pair of old shoelaces, finding peas in your soup, doing something to help a friend. Frankl did this last one often. He was once involved in a plan to break out from the camp and escape. He was excited, but also felt morally distraught over leaving his friends and patients behind. At the last minute, just when he and a friend were about to get away, he decided to remain behind to help his patients in the typhus block. Immediately, he felt better, liberated in a way. The struggle to maintain one's own values, he realized, was common among the prisoners. Many failed to find a way to do it, but others, like Frankl, did. Sacrificing oneself for others is, in the end, a way of surviving. It builds you up and makes you stronger because it provides your life with meaning. Finally, Frankl quoted Dostoevsky to himself: "There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings." Frankl brings this section of the book to a close with a long discussion of the choices we have in our own freedom. Psychological pressures, imprisonment, abuse, physical restraint—all of these have effects on the human mind. But for Frankl, it came down to the fact that we are able to choose to continue seeing value in living and see ahead into the future and set goals even in the most dire situations. The people who were able to do this not only survived but also found peace and even happiness. Those who gave up perished. Frankl tells a story of an inmate who had a dream predicting that the horrible war with Germany would be over on March 30th, 1945. The man pinned all of his hopes on it. For the weeks and months leading up to that date, he was healthy and optimistic, completely believing in his dream. He'd given himself a goal, a small hope, and it opened up a world of optimism in him. But as March 30th, 1945, drew closer, and there was no sign of the war ending, the man fell ill. In the final days of March, he grew worse and worse until there was no hope. And on March 30th, he died. Frankl says that what people like this inmate knew at first but later forgot was the idea that it does not really matter what we expect from life, but rather what life expects from us. One cannot force his way in the world by pinning all his hopes on a single date on the calendar because, in the end, life teaches you how to live. It has its own expectations. The response to life, the choice a person must make to maintain hope and inner richness will dictate whether and how well he or she survives. In some cases, it may be a person's individual fate to suffer. In this instance, it is the acceptance of this that brings liberation and meaning into that person's life. Those who are able to see this, whether consciously or not, find inner peace.

Need to Know. From 1942 to 1945, Austrian therapist Dr. Victor Frankl was detained in various Nazi concentration camps throughout occupied Europe. Although existence for prisoners was dire agony beyond imagining, Frankl noted that those who survived tended to be individuals who found meaning and inner richness in their lives. An inner life that centered on love and selflessness, even at great personal risk, would eventually lead to a revelatory inner liberation. Phases of ironic curiosity, apathy, suicidal tendencies, and the suppression of spiritual freedom were experienced by all in the camp. But those who found meaning in the smallest consolations—memories, literature, song, generosity—were those who were able to say yes to life and maintain hope and therefore find spiritual liberation. These experiences led Frankl not only to insights about psychological suffering and the human mind but also about the very nature of life itself. According to his assessments, it will not do to have expectations of life. You only find freedom in realizing that life itself has expectations of you. Accepting this idea is critical to living a psychologically healthy life and finding meaning.

Two. Logotherapy in a Nutshell. Logotherapy is a meaning-based therapy, a treatment based on what Frankl observes is man's universal search for meaning. He calls it the third Viennese school of psychotherapy, next to Freudian psychology (the will to pleasure) and Adlerian psychology (the will to power). Frankl's work is based on the idea of the will to meaning. A lack of meaning is called existential frustration and typically results in a person being depressed because he or she feels there is no meaning in life. This existential state leads to noetic neurosis (from *noos*, meaning mind), which typically presents itself as depression or dissatisfaction. The neurosis emerge on the basis of noodynamics, based on the idea of necessary tension between what one has achieved and what one ought to achieve. When there is no tension in life, that is, no goal or hope, one reaches a state of homeostasis or equilibrium, and this leads to depression. Although equilibrium is generally seen as the proper end state in other schools of therapy, Frankl sees it as dangerous. Without that tension, that motivation to do and produce in the world, depression, dissatisfaction, or even suicidal tendencies emerge. In other words, a person must have some use in the world, some reason for existing that drives him forward.

Frankl then describes the existential vacuum, a historical concept. Frankl says that at some point in ancient history, man lost animal instincts that provided security, survival, a reason for living. Then, many thousands of years later, in our modern era, man lost tradition, which may refer to religious, familial, or some other form of tradition that operates as a guide in one's life. With mass production, the centralization of power, and a general increase in life's comforts, people found themselves with less meaning or reason to go forward. Frankl notes that as many as 25% of the people in Europe were, at the time of writing, experiencing agony in this existential vacuum. In America, he interestingly notes, this figure rose to 60%. As a way of treating this, each patient must search for his own meaning of life and essence of existence. This differs from patient to patient. There is no universal answer. Frankl writes that one must confront life's finitude as well as its finality and freely choose to live as if he is being given a second chance to live better. Living meaningfully means responding to life's ever-changing meaning. What life demands of a person may change from day to day, year to year. There are three basic ways to discover this changing meaning: by creating or doing some deed; by experiencing something or encountering someone; and by changing your attitude toward suffering. It is through the meaning of love and the meaning of suffering that we are able to take hold of the core that makes up our personality and become free. Love helps us see our potential, and suffering helps us see the final meaning. Although suffering is not necessary to find meaning, Frankl insists that in the right kind of life, it is possible to find meaning despite suffering. This meaning is discovered through examination and choice, and also through giving oneself over to life and its demands. Through the logodrama, an instance in which our loss of or search for meaning is dramatized poignantly in our day-to-day life, we may discover what Frankl calls the super-meaning. This super-meaning is the mystery of the cosmos: the fact that despite all of our advancements in sciences and knowledge, there is still an indifferent universe out there about which we can never know anything. In such a context, our finitude is clear. And it is through the acceptance of this that we may come to understand that the universe is not meaningless but rather has unconditional meaningfulness.

As a small example of a logotherapy technique, Frankl offers the notions of hyperintention and hyperreflection. Hyperintention is the fear of something, such as failure, that finally brings about that which is feared. Frankl uses the example of a man who is afraid of blushing when he enters a room; hyperintention will cause that to happen. The opposite is also true: a forced intention will not bring about the desired outcome. Frankl's example is of a man wishing to prove his sexual potency; the more he tries to, the more he fails. Hyperreflection, the tendency to overthink and constantly imagine how one might fail, will bring about paralysis. Frankl's solution is to engage in paradoxical intention: that is, the intentional embrace of the fear. If you fear sweating in public, as one of his patients did, the idea is to intentionally try to demonstrate how much you can sweat in public. Patients who underwent paradoxical intention found themselves losing their fears and finally being cured of them. Such a method can be applied to issues of sleep disturbance, public speaking, and many others.

There is also something Frankl calls collective neurosis, which is the current neurosis of any particular era. At the time of writing, he determined that nihilism was the most widespread problem. People felt then, and still do now, that life is nothing but a system of laws and organs and predetermined functions. This led to a mass sense of meaninglessness. As a result of this, and to some extent as a result of the influence of Freud, mankind fell into what he calls pandeterminism, or the sense that we are determined by our childhoods and cannot really take a stand against adverse conditions, the way Frankl did during the Holocaust. But people, Frankl insists, are free to choose. It is this faculty in us that makes us more than merely our bodies, past conditions, or suffering. Freedom is not the only important element in life. However, Frankl says that in order to be truly free and moral, one must have a counterbalancing aspect of responsibility. Here, Frankl makes his famous declaration that in addition to the Statue of Liberty, the United States should build a statue of responsibility on the West Coast.

Frankl announces his psychiatric credo: "An incurably psychotic individual may lose his usefulness but yet retain the dignity of a human being." Frankl uses this belief to guide his work and as a basic principle for treating patients. He goes on to say that for far too long, the human mind has been viewed as a machine or a mechanism which can be repaired or abandoned according to the wishes of doctors. He finds this repugnant. He calls for a move away from Freudianism and an embrace of humanized psychology wherein a man or woman is viewed as a self-determining and free individual.

Need to Know. The application and practice of logotherapy is somewhat complicated in its details but is ultimately easy to understand intellectually. The real difficulty lies in applying it to one's own life. Frankl describes logotherapy as a therapeutic practice of telling his patients things which sometimes are very disagreeable to hear. Although being facetious when he said this, it holds true that the application of meaning therapy is above all personal to each individual and therefore will delve into that person's worst fears and phobias and then demand that the person make a choice. Logotherapy can only be used and understood in relation to a single individual's direct experience of life and his or her conflict within the greater context, the collective neurosis or the super-meaning of society at large. Examining the concepts of noetic neurosis, existential vacuum, and super-meaning may help. But what it takes, in fact, in the end, is nothing more than a willingness to listen to what life is telling you, to accept the mysteries of the universe, to be selfless and loving, and to embrace the unknown. All of this is done in pursuit of Frankl's credo that all individuals, no matter how sick, confused, or morally compromised, retain the dignity of a human being.

Postscript 1984. The Case for a Tragic Optimism. Tragic optimism is defined as the ability to remain hopeful in the face of Frankl's tragic triad: pain, guilt, and death. Doing so will enable the user of logotherapy to do the following three things: turn suffering into achievement; use guilt to transform oneself for the better; and use the fact of life's fleetingness to take greater responsibility rather than shrug it off as hopeless. In life, one must find tragic optimism in order to overcome depression and nihilism. But this optimism is, in the end, not something one can choose or pursue. Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. This means finding a reason, finding meaning to propel you through life, even in the most dire of circumstances. Unemployed people, who are the most likely to experience depression, find themselves happy and animated again once they volunteer their ample free time to good causes: libraries, food drives, local schools, or churches. In this context, the choice to remain down is the only thing preventing you from obtaining a new happiness. Though some sufferers may have extreme issues, Frankl points out that even if through logotherapy and tragic optimism, a patient has only a one in a thousand chance of finding meaning, isn't that reason enough to pursue it? In truth, the odds are much better than that. Frankl points out the three symptoms of mass neurotic syndrome: depression, aggression, and addiction. The solution to such psychological phenomena centers on finding some way to be useful and therefore locating a wellspring of hope within one's potentially dire or painful existence. This has to do with the defiant power of the human spirit: an element of deep yearning and need within the human soul that has no explanation in the sciences or in any other field. This spirit can lead us through the triad of pain, guilt, and death. Finding what offers you meaning can, if generalized across society, create a world populated with independent and inventive, innovative, and creative spirits.

Need to Know. Maintaining hope in the form of tragic optimism is a great individual challenge that Frankl lays down before each of us. Pain, guilt, and death are universally suffered, and the response increasingly over time has been to revert to depression, aggression, and addiction. It is true, Frankl points out, that decent people in this world make up a minority, and that nihilists have a strong point when they shrug and say, "Why bother when everything is so random and chaotic and decent people are few and far between?" But this is the ultimate logotherapeutic challenge: to see the possibility for love, goodness, and hope in the direst of circumstances. This is precisely the idea of meaning therapy: to struggle for goodness and meaning in the darkness. The world will only worsen for all when that minority of decent people weakens and the nihilistic masses continue to thrive. Therefore, pursuing meaning in your own life is not only good for your own life and spirit, but is also a step toward forming a better world for all.

About the Author. Victor E. Frankl is a professor at the University of Vienna Medical School where he teaches neurology and psychiatry. After Adler's individual psychology and Freud's psychoanalysis, he founded what is now known as the third Viennese school of psychotherapy, or the school of logotherapy. The *American Journal of Psychiatry* has referred to his work as "perhaps the most significant thinking since Freud and Adler." Dr. Frankl was born in 1905 and graduated from the University of Vienna with a doctorate in medicine and philosophy. He was at Auschwitz, Dachau, and other concentration camps for 3 years during World War II. *The International Journal of Psychoanalysis* published Dr. Frankl's first article in 1924. Since then, he has written 30 volumes which have been translated into 23 languages, including Chinese and Japanese. In addition to institutions in Pittsburgh, San Diego, and Dallas, he has served as a visiting professor at Harvard. Twenty-seven universities have awarded him honorary doctorates, and the American Psychiatric Association has given him the Oscar Pfister Award. In addition to giving guest lectures at colleges throughout the globe, he has given more than 90 lecture tours in the US alone.

This has been *Man's Search for Meaning* by Victor E. Frankl, narrated by Charles Schiller.