Logotherapy expands your perspective. Whenever you step outside yourself and see from a more all-encompassing vantage point, a subtle shift takes place on a theoretical and practical level.
The grasp of meaning to be found in
reality and even the meanings of words and concepts deepens, rendering the usual interpretations shallow or distorted.
In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl states that everything can be taken from a person except his attitude, his ability to choose his own way. He made this statement after being stripped bare of everything in the world, including his wife and unborn child, his parents, his prestigious job and the manuscript of this book that meant so much to him.
What should we conclude? Should we learn from him that everything is taken from a person and therefore there is nothing left but to be grateful for what remains? Rather, should we not learn that when everything is taken from a person, only then is he able to see for the first time the beauty and preciousness of what is.
Frankl wrote his book The Doctor and the Soul before being sent to concentration camps but in Man’s Search for Meaning he talks about awakening, while in the concentration camps, to the preciousness of life.
He writes there: “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 e 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 make-up often seemed to survive camp life better than did those of a robust nature…” (p. 55)
He goes on to describe his experience of holding on to the vivid image of his wife and concludes: “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.” (p. 57)
Why did he understand this only “for the first time” particularly there? When Frankl describes how every last vestige of their past life was wiped out and taken away from them, one might think this was said with an attitude of resignation, as if to say “Be grateful for what you have left. Be positive! See the glass half full!”
No, that’s not what Frankl was feeling and this is not what we have been commissioned to learn from him. He was seeing all of reality with a view from above, a view that penetrated into the spiritual reality of love and beauty and gratitude which, under ordinary circumstances tends to be lost in the background.
Instead, not so much despite his circumstances but even because of his circumstances he was able to see the background of love and beauty and gratitude and the preciousness of human life in the foreground, while all of the trappings of life with its suffering that are lacking in permanence recede into the background.
He relates his practice of looking for something to be grateful for.”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…” – He only found two “pleasurable” moments, but he looked for them! One occurred when he was assigned to the line of the cook who doled out the watery soup equally to everyone, adding that it is not for him to pass judgment on the cooks who play favorites. (p. 67)
Many, many books have been written about the holocaust but through his experience and the attitude he carried with him, Frankl helps us to understand that the value of life cannot be erased by sickness or by being paralyzed or in a coma or in a concentration camp. The philosophy-psychology he taught was first and foremost a teaching in how to live your life and what you need to know about life.
The value of life cannot be touched by anything.