144 Man's Search
for Meaning
with someone who is prone to suicide. I explain 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 explana
tion 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 syn
drome—aggression—let me cite an experiment once con
ducted by Carolyn Wood Sherif. She had succeeded in
artificially building up mutual aggressions between groups
of boy scouts, and observed that the aggressions only sub
sided when the youngsters dedicated themselves to a collec
tive 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.
3
As for the third issue, addiction, I am reminded of the
findings presented by Annemarie von Forstmeyer who
noted that, as evidenced by tests and statistics, 90 percent of
the alcoholics she studied had suffered from an abysmal
feeling of meaninglessness. Of the drug addicts studied by
Stanley Krippner, 100 percent believed that "things seemed
meaningless."
4
25For further information on this experiment, see Viktor E. Frankl,
The Unconscious God, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1978, p.
140;
and Viktor E.
Frankl,
The Unheard Cry for Meaning, New
York,
Simon and Schuster, 1978, p. 36.
26For further information, see The Unconscious God, pp. 97-100; and
The Unheard Cry for Meaning, pp. 26-28.
The Case for a Tragic Optimism 145
Now let us turn to the question of meaning itself. To
begin with, I would like to clarify that, in the first place,
the logotherapist 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 con
sists 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 com
ponents, 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 po
tential meaning of each single situation has been actualized
to the best of the respective individual's knowledge and
belief?
The fact remains that meaning, and its perception, as
seen from the logotherapeutic angle, is completely down to
earth rather than afloat in the air or resident in an ivory
tower. Sweepingly, I would locate the cognition of meaning
—of the personal meaning of a concrete situation—midway
between an "aha" experience along the lines of Karl
Biihler's concept and a Gestalt perception, say, along the
lines of Max Wertheimer's theory. The perception of mean
ing differs from the classical concept of Gestalt perception
insofar as the latter implies the sudden awareness of a
"figure" on a "ground," whereas the perception of mean
ing, as I see it, more specifically 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.
146 Man's Search for Meaning
And how does a human being go about finding meaning?
As Charlotte Buhler 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."
6
In addition to such a biographical
approach, however, we may as well embark on a biological
approach. Logotherapy 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 situa
tion has to be evaluated in the light of a set of criteria,
in the light of a hierarchy of values. These values, how
ever, cannot be espoused and adopted by us on a conscious
level—they are something that we are. They have crystal
lized in the course of the evolution of our species; they are
founded on our biological past and are rooted in our bio
logical depth. Konrad Lorenz might have had something
similar in mind when he developed the concept of a biologi
cal 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-understanding exists, we may as
sume that it is ultimately anchored in our biological her
itage.
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, mean
ing can be found not only in work but also in love. Edith
Weisskopf-Joelson observed in this context that the logo-
therapeutic "notion that experiencing can be as valuable as
achieving is therapeutic because it compensates for our
one-
5 "Basic Theoretical Concepts of Humanistic Psychology," Ameri
can Psychologist, XXVI (April 1971), p. 378.
The Case for a Tragic Optimism 147
sided emphasis on the external world of achievement at the
expense of the internal world of experience."
6
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 Weisskopf-Joelson who, as mentioned on p. 118, once
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 con
sider it ennobling 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 depart
ment of a general hospital and bore witness to my patients'
capacity to turn their predicaments into human achieve
ments. 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 ex
plicitly claimed that although their captivity was ex
traordinarily stressful—filled with torture, disease, malnu
trition, and solitary confinement—they nevertheless . . .
benefited from the captivity experience, seeing it as a
growth experience."
7
But the most powerful arguments in favor of "a tragic
optimism" are those which in Latin are called
argumenta
ad hominem. Jerry Long, to cite an example, is a living
testimony to "the defiant power of the human spirit," as it
27"The Place of Logotherapy in the World Today," The Interna
tional Forum for Logotherapy, Vol. 1, No. 3 (1980), pp. 3-7.
28W. H. Sledge, J. A. Boydstun and A. J. Rabe, "Self-Concept
Changes
Related to War Captivity," Arch. Gen. Psychiatry, 37 (1980), pp.
430-
443-