AMDG

PSYCHOLOGY/THEOLOGY

A MEANING IN LIFE

“He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how."
Frederick Nietzsche

One of the ten most influential books ever written was a 1946 account of Victor Frankl’s life in a Nazi Concentration camp. The book was entitled ‘Man’s Search for Meaning”. Frankl recounts the horrors and the trials of trying to survive, physically and psychologically, Theresienstadt concentration camp. Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist who was imprisoned with his entire family. At first, he worked as a general physician in the camp’s clinic but when the Nazi’s discovered that he was a psychiatrist, they forced him to work with the suicidal prisoners to prevent them from killing themselves. In the pathologically twisted minds of the Nazis, they wanted to prevent the suicides of the Jews so that they could recover and go to their prescribed deaths in the gas chambers.
Frank did his job conscientiously by supporting and comforting the prisoners who couldn’t adapt to life in the camp, In the midst of this climate of horror, Frankl concluded that even under the most horror filled and depressing of conditions, the prisoners could rely on the firm belief that life, any life, has meaning and that even suffering has meaning. No matter how devastating and cruel their lives were, any prisoner at any time could turn inward to their spiritual core, an area that even the Nazis couldn’t destroy.
Victor Frankl did survive Theresienstadt and even Auschwitz and Turkheim to go on to a successful career as the founder of Logotherapy, an existential therapy that focuses on values and purpose in life.
The same phenomenon was observed in the American prisoners of war in the Korean conflict. Although not nearly as cruel as the Nazis, the Red Chinese semi-starved their prisoners, placed them in overcrowded barracks and constantly tried to get them to collaborate by signing insignificant confessions of wrongdoing. This approach met with great success among most of the prisoners and alarmed the American military. Some of the prisoners could not adapt at all and turned into “blanket cases”. They just crawled under their blankets and died. Psychologists after the war were interested the resistors rather than the collaborators and came up with interesting findings. Those who resisted and did not collaborate were made up of three groups---The Officers, those prisoners with a life history of resisting any authority and those men raised in religions that focused on inner spiritual values. In language almost identical to Frankl’s, these men reported that they were able to turn to their spiritual cores for strength.
Hans Kung, a student of Pope Benedict and one of the most brilliant theologians in the Catholic Church came to the same conclusion in one of his many books about the existence of God. After hundreds of pages of very complex philosophical arguments, Kung states that it all “boils” down to this-----“either your life has meaning or it doesn’t”. If you believe that it does have meaning, then God exists within you to give it meaning.

JVP