Viktor Frankl Taught Me How to Exist

Part I of III: "The Freedom of the Will"

Next week, I’m headed to Vienna, the birthplace of Viktor Frankl, an existential psychoanalyst who managed to practice therapy as a prisoner in Auschwitz. Despite losing most of his family to mass murder, Frankl survived multiple concentration camps and went on to write Man’s Search for Meaning, the most optimistic humanistic book I’ve ever read.

Frankl’s Logotherapy can be translated as “meaning” (logos in Greek) therapy, and given the times we’re living in told we’re living in (the endless death-screen is very real), it feels fitting to reconsider some of Frankl’s theory before I head off for an adventure in Vienna, Budapest, Prague, and Munich.

preamble

Over the past months during a busy Paris walking tour season, a whole lot of Americans United Statesians have expressed a renewed interest in learning about the Nazi Occupation of Paris fascism.¹

Often, when I speak to clients about the history of Nazism,² I’m asked, “What surprises you most about what’s happening today?” and my answer is always the same: “What surprises me most is that we’re still surprised.”

Alas, since we as a species can’t seem to stop voting violent bigots with inferiority complexes into power,

it feels pertinent to reflect upon how Viktor Frankl, an Auschwitz survivor, believed we can be better … but lest this become a treatise on how obviously idiotic, infuriating, and all-too-human animalistic the autocrats all over the world are behaving, here are a few concise bullet points about what I think, because at a certain point we all of us have to define our lines in the sand:

• The deliberate, systematic, and repetitive bombing of the world’s largest and longest-lasting ghetto the occupied Palestinian people is, at best, a contemporary definition of ethnic cleansing, which is a more academic term for what it really means: genocide.³

• The state of Israel exists, and of course I believe in its right to exist, but the question, “Do you believe Israel has a right to exist?” is idiotic. Nobody aside from religious extremists on the other side says that Israel should disappear from the map. On the contrary, Israel’s current administration does believe in the erasure of the Palestinian people.

• The state-sponsored perpetuation of fundamentalist ethno-nationalist ideologies peddled by the likes of Netanyahu Trump Hamas Modi Putin has led to the mass death of human beings since time immemorial.

• Donald Trump is an uneducated, bigoted kleptomaniac a doofus who I’m unsure is intelligent enough to understand he is actually a white supremacist, and the Republican Party’s cowardice and many United Statesians’ veneration for chauvinist billionaires will go down in history as the reason why the US empire is crumbling.

• When governments begin to use words like “mass deportation,” “paramilitary,” “plain clothed,” “holy war,” “chosen people,” “black site,” “deportation center,” “illegals,” “invasion,” “pacification,” “eradicate terrorism” and a long list of other dehumanizing words that pit “us” versus “them,” they are exhibiting textbook signs of fascism.

With these points in mind, according to Viktor Frankl, we still have a choice a responsibility in how we respond, which brings me to Part I of this three-part essay.

Part I: The “Freedom of the Will”

There are three tenets to Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy:

1. The freedom of the will

2. The will to meaning

3. The meaning of life

“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.” Viktor Frankl⁴

The “freedom of the will” is based on the notion that human beings are not free from life’s conditions, but we are free in how we respond. Unlike the two other major Viennese schools of psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler), Frankl does not believe that psychological, environmental, and biological conditioning processes solely determine the human condition.

Sigmund Freud spent most of his life peddling the idea of the “pleasure principle,” suggesting that most people seek pleasure and avoid pain. In his later years, he argued for a different kind of binary, suggesting a simmering psychic tension between good Eros (love) and evil Thanatos (violence). Alfred Adler came next, rejecting Freud’s theory of the “will to pleasure” and proposing what he deemed the “will to power,” i.e., the human need to sublimate our inferiority complex by pursuing power within the context of what he deemed “the social feeling.”

But historical context is important, and while Freud, Adler, and Frankl all lived through one of the most violent eras in human history,

only Viktor Frankl, an Auschwitz survivor, was able to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

After witnessing the brutality of World War One (20+ million dead), Freud watched his daughter die during the Spanish Flu (alongside some other 50+ million human beings) and witnessed the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany before he he was diagnosed with jaw cancer in 1923 (no wonder he spent so much time theorizing about pain).

Similarly, Alfred Adler grew up during the rise of nation states, and thus was convinced humans need to overcome a deeply ingrained inferiority complex. One need only look at Alfred Adler’s childhood, however, to understand why he believed humans feel so weak: he got run over by a car twice when he was a boy, watched his brother die next to him when he was three years old, and spent much of his childhood in bed with rickets and pneumonia (woof).

Viktor Frankl’s simple point is that the traumas we experience do not dictate the entirety of our psyches. As is symptomatic of any fully developed human brain, rather than outright rejecting the ideas which preceded him, Frankl synthesized Freud’s and Adler’s theories to suggest that while “the will to pleasure” and “the will to power” are aspects of the human condition, these drives reside in the animal, not human, dimension—Frankl’s “will to meaning” thus completes the triptych.

In Frankl’s view, the evolved human being doesn’t simply want to have pleasure or be powerful, but rather to have reasons to experience joy and feel accomplished. To this end, regardless of personal circumstance, Frankl suggests human beings have the unique potential (not guarantee) to be self-determining. Unlike animals, which are entirely subject to their biochemical makeup and environments, what makes us distinctly human is our ability to transcend our animal nature by assigning a multitude of meanings to our existence.

“The uniqueness of man, his humanness, does not contradict the fact that in the psychological and biological dimensions he is still an animal […] being human [is more] than being a pawn and plaything of conditioning processes or drives and instincts.”

While Frankl’s predecessors reduced the human psyche to a “nothing-but-ness,” pathologizing patients instead of treating human beings, Frankl acknowledged the reality of the psychic, chemical, biological, and environmental dimensions, but never accepted them as an exhaustive explanation for existential malaise what makes us human.

This is the crux of the “freedom of the will”:

the human animal, Homo sapiens, may very well be concerned with power > weakness and pleasure > pain, but Homo patiens, the suffering human, is concerned with fulfillment over despair.

While we are capable of transcending our conditioning processes and environments, there is no guarantee (as we’ve seen throughout the world today since The Beginning). The human animal is pushed by the Freudian “pleasure principle” and an Adlerian “will to power,” but we also can choose to be pulled by the “will to meaning,” which will be discussed more deeply in Part II of this essay.

PS: If you’re curious how all of this relates to the current political moment, you can either read The Requisitions or check out my 4-part essay on “The Origins of Fascism,” which analyzes Freud, Adler, and Frankl’s theories in the context of Italian fascism in the 1920s.

1. One anecdote I’d be remiss not to mention: a Nazi Occupation tour client who openly stated she voted for Trump told me at one point: “I have an illegal working for me. She’s very nice.” I politely smiled and corrected her obtuse language, “So you mean you have someone working for you who doesn’t have papers? So what happens if ICE comes to your door?” “Oh, I wouldn’t let her go! I love her. She’s so nice.” My smile widened. “Well, m’am, whether you like it or not, you are now officially part of The Resistance.”

2. I went through an MA studying the psychology of genocide and an MFA studying historiographic metafiction, both of which ultimately resulted in my latest novel, The Requisitions, which is set in 2024 and Nazi-occupied Poland.

3. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s definition of genocide: “Certain acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.”

4. All quotes in this piece were taken from Viktor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006)