Sunday, June 10, 2012

Who Defines You?


Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com


Who Defines You?

The 20th Century may not be remembered as much for the invention of radio, television, flight, and broad-spectrum antibiotics as it will for the matter of so many governments putting so many people behind barbed wire.

In 1942 Dr. Viktor Frankl, a middle-aged Austrian psychiatrist considered unworthy of life in the new world order, was one of the millions sent to Nazi camps, and in 1945 was one of the several thousand who survived.  His intellectual discipline as a physician remained with him through the horror, making him a rational observer in an irrational milieu.

In 1946 Dr. Frankl wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, a two-part book reflecting on his experiences in the prison camps and analyzing those experiences for meaning that extends to all of life.  His conclusion – and this is an oversimplification - is that all of life has meaning, especially suffering, even when we do not know what the meaning is.

Dr. Frankl does not lapse into that tired 19th-century Darwinianism about the survival of the fittest: he states categorically that the best died because they helped others, often with their own inadequate bits of food:

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that 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.

Just as strongly, Dr. Frankl repudiates determinism: “Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.”

Dr. Frankl is a bit rough on himself for making it through, perhaps because of survivors’ guilt, but he never indulges in self-pity and never focuses on himself.  Indeed, his concept of therapy is openly against that of Freudianism and its ideas of endless introspection and self-pity.  For Dr. Frankl, emotional healing lies in the individual searching for meaning for his own life but simultaneously outside his life:

By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system…being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself - be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself--by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love--the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.

One of the cliches’ of our time is “defined a generation,” a weak passivity that should be rejected, certainly in the context of such drivel as “The music of X defined a generation” or “The movies of Y defined a generation.”  No, they didn’t.  Collective definitions are always flawed, and in any event a strong individual defines himself and refuses to be a lemming.  Dr. Frankl was no lemming sobbing into a MySpace account:

We have come to know Man as he really is.  After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.

Some collateral reading:

Bernard, Jean.  Priestblock 25487.

Frank, Anne, Diary of a Young Girl.

Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki, and James D. Houston, Farewell to Manzanar.   One wonders how much of this book is by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, who was behind the wire, and how much is by James D. Houston, who was not.  Is Mr. Houston a not-so-grey eminence? 

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