Review: Embracing Hope by Viktor E Frankl
Embracing Hope claims to reveal 'how to turn tragedy into triumph and lead a fulfilled, purposeful life.' For a fraught time such as this, with pandemics, raging wild fires, full-blown wars and killings and the shenanigans of authoritarian regimes assailing us, offline and online, every day, it sounds like an enticing proposition. For me, having lived through two years of great unrest with no peace in sight, this book, a compilation of the writings and speeches of Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor E Frankl, spanning the period from 1946 to 1984, feels like exactly what the doctor ordered.
The pieces in this volume include Collective Neuroses (first published in 1955), an interview of Frankl for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1977, the text of a lecture titled Existential Analysis and the Problems of Our Times given at the Franco-Austrian University in December 1946, and Conquering Transience, the text of another lecture delivered at Dornbirn, Austria, in October, 1984. Forewords by Edith Eger, a fellow holocaust survivor, and Tobias Esch, an eminent neuroscientist, further enrich the book by providing context.
An Austrian Jew who survived Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps but lost his brother, wife and parents to the holocaust, Frankl was not beaten down by his experiences. Instead, they spurred him to a second life filled with meaning and success. A recipient of 29 honorary doctorates from universities across the world, he obtained his pilot's license at age 67 and lived a full life until he died aged 92 in 1997. He wrote 39 books including the acclaimed Man's Search for Meaning and pioneered the field of logotherapy, a sub-field within psychotherapy, which aims to help people find meaning in their lives.
This book is anchored in a belief in human ingenuity and boundless resilience. Frankl agrees entirely with Dostoevsky's definition of man 'as a creature who can get used to anything' and celebrates the inalienable freedom and choice with which humankind is endowed. Perhaps you cannot help what happened to you, or what bad people or totalitarian regimes did to you. However, how you choose to respond is entirely up to you. No one can take that freedom away. As Frankl famously wrote in Man's Search for Meaning: 'Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.'
Frankl chose to respond to the deadened and insufferable conditions of the camp with mental images of his smiling wife. He talked to her and imagined what good times awaited them. He looked for and found humour amidst the dead and dying. These were his survival tools. For Edith Eger, freedom lay in choosing to live instead of just giving up and dying like others around her. She realized that she could still choose which blade of grass to eat as she lay in the mud, numbed with pain and unable to move. For both, Frankl and Eger, the concentration camp experience turned from being a curse to a well of treasure from which they gained perspective, meaning, strength and purpose. Their external pain did not dim their internal light, but rather strengthened it.
Unlike Man's Search for Meaning, which was Frankl's account of his concentration camp experiences and the insights gained from it (he claims it was written in nine consecutive days), Embracing Hope is less personal and more about those who have been impacted by his story, and have benefited from logotherapy. It draws less from extreme examples of the holocaust and more from the mundane, daily challenges of people living in a 'leisure society'. The unifying theme is how to find meaning in everyday life and work. It speaks to the present moment where we, glued to the screen, feel harried and exhausted yet vacuous and unproductive all the time.
Frankl's central message is that we are born with the urge to find meaning in our lives. A meaningful life is one endowed with love, forbearance and fulfilment; it is one lived in accord with the better angels of human nature. It has nothing to do with riches or material success and is not about chasing happiness either. Happiness will ensue if meaning is found. People can find it in all sorts of ways and at all stages of life. Frankl identified the three main avenues through which the individual can find meaning: work, love and suffering.
Those who experience involuntary suffering, like a debilitating medical condition or the holocaust, often experience higher mental clarity and illumination. They find reasons to be grateful about things that ordinary folk take for granted. Many re-emerge having discovered faith, hope, compassion and common human decency rather than hatred and anger. As the writer Pico Iyer reported in The Value of Suffering: 'I once met a Zen-trained painter in Japan, in his 90s, who told me that suffering is a privilege, it moves us toward thinking about essential things and shakes us out of short sighted complacency; when he was a boy, he said, it was believed you should pay for suffering, it proves such a hidden blessing.'
Secondly, to experience love, to have someone to love, or have someone love us, is, according to Frankl, one of the surest ways to find meaning. His own love for his wife and his fond memories of her equipped him with the will to live and sustained him through his camp life.
As for work, Frankl approvingly quotes the American neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing: 'The only way to endure life is always to have a task to complete.' Much of the book is about the need to engage in meaningful work. Work doesn't just earn us money, but also accords us dignity and a sense of fulfilment. It is well recognized that there is a close correlation between levels of unemployment and the degree of criminality in any given area or community.
Frankl states that people love to be challenged. Indeed, it is more dangerous to make too few demands of them than to make too many. When a person's will to meaning is not fulfilled, he tries to take solace in his will to pleasure, which leads to a life of sexual depravity, criminality and substance abuse. In Frankl's reckoning, meaning represents higher instincts while unhindered pleasure represents man's baser ones.
But Embracing Hope is more than your average motivational book. What lends it weight and depth is that it melds insights and lessons wrenched out of the author's extreme physical experience at concentration camps with his lifelong study of the human mind. Those receptive to its message will find enough resources here to answer the pressing questions of existence. I have no doubt that the lessons from this book can lead one to a more fulfilling and meaningful life, whatever one's circumstances.
Thangkhanlal Ngaihte is assistant professor of Political Science at Churachandpur College, Manipur and PhD candidate at Mizoram University, Aizawl.
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