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.
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?
-30-
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