Viktor Frankl’s famous book ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ was published in 1946, and includes desperate accounts of his experiences as a Jew in the Nazi concentration camps. (Re-reading his painful descriptions in 2025, there are now some terrible echoes of the situation in Gaza.) By the time Frankl entered the concentration camps at 37 years old, he had already spent much of his adult life as a psychiatrist and neurologist, specializing in the treatment of suicidal patients. He had also developed his own psychotherapy school called Logotherapy (Greek for “healing through meaning”).
He later coined the term “existential vacuum” to describe the void of meaninglessness that was being experienced by so many people, especially students, warning that this void would produce anxiety, depression, addiction, and even suicide. He believed that the ‘mechanistic’ institutional systems developed in the 20th century (governments, schools, corporations) contributed to the existential vacuum. For Frankl finding meaning is a central factor in mental health – a meaning personal to each and one where our humanity is valued.
In times of great difficulties and desperation there can be consolation from a sense of greater meaning. Frankl writes of his experiences in the camps where sometimes ‘the intensification of inner life’ can give ‘a refuge from the emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty’. He found great comfort by imagining his wife still alive: ‘I knew only one thing- which I have learned very well by now: Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved.’ It finds its deepest meaning in their spiritual being: their inner self. ‘I didn’t know whether my wife was alive and I had no means of finding out; but at that moment it ceased to matter.’
‘Another time we were at work in a trench. The dawn was grey around us; grey was the sky above; grey the snow in the place light of dawn; grey the rags in which my fellow prisoners were clad, and grey 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 grey of a dawning morning in Bavaria . “Et lux in tenebris 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 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.’
Frankl’s wife Tilly died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen towards the end of the war.