The Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived four Nazi concentration camps and lost his wife, parents, and brother to them, argued in his 1946 book Man's Search for Meaning that human beings can endure almost any suffering as long as they can find a reason for it — and that a life without meaning is what actually breaks people

In September 1942, approximately nine months after his marriage to the young Viennese nurse Tilly Grosser, and approximately four years after Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria had progressively curtailed the specific professional practice options available to Jewish physicians in the specific city of Vienna, the 37-year-old Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Emil Frankl was arrested by the Gestapo alongside his wife, his parents, and his older brother Walter, and transported to the Theresienstadt Ghetto approximately 60 kilometres north of Prague. In the pocket of the specific coat he was wearing at the specific moment of his arrest, sewn into the lining, was the substantially complete manuscript of his first book — a specific 250-page theoretical text on a new form of psychotherapy that he had spent the preceding six years developing at the Steinhof Psychiatric Hospital and the Rothschild Hospital in Vienna, which he had provisionally titled Ärztliche Seelsorge (“The Doctor and the Soul”) and which laid out the specific therapeutic framework he called logotherapy (from the Greek logos, meaning “meaning”). Approximately two years later, on his arrival at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in October 1944, the specific coat containing the specific manuscript was confiscated during the substantial initial-processing procedure that essentially every prisoner arriving at Auschwitz was subjected to. Frankl received a different coat from the specific pile of confiscated clothing being redistributed among the arriving prisoners. In its pocket he found a single page torn from a Hebrew prayer book, containing the specific words of the Shema Yisrael prayer.

The single most-influential psychological work produced by any 20th-century survivor of the Nazi concentration-camp system was, in essential respects, the specific product of the substantially unique intersection between a pre-existing psychiatric theoretical framework about the specific role of meaning in human psychology and the specific empirical laboratory conditions that the Nazi camps unfortunately provided for testing that framework at the specific edge of human survivability. As detailed in Britannica’s institutional biographical entry on Viktor Frankl and his specific contributions to 20th-century psychology and philosophy, Frankl had, before his 1942 arrest, already spent approximately fifteen years developing the specific psychotherapeutic school that would eventually be recognised as the “third Viennese school of psychotherapy” following Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis (which located the central human motivation in the specific drive toward pleasure) and Alfred Adler’s individual psychology (which located it in the specific drive toward power). Frankl’s substantive theoretical contribution was to argue that the specific central human motivation was neither pleasure nor power but the specific search for meaning — the specific human need to identify some substantive purpose in one’s own existence that could sustain psychological wellbeing across the specific range of adversities that ordinary human life inevitably produces. The specific opportunity to test this substantially theoretical proposition against the substantial adversity of the Nazi concentration camp system was, in essential respects, the specific opportunity Frankl did not want but nevertheless received.

The specific losses Frankl experienced across the three years between his September 1942 arrival at Theresienstadt and his April 1945 liberation by American troops at the Türkheim subsidiary camp of Dachau were, per the Viktor E. Frankl Institute of America’s institutional biography of the specific arc of Frankl’s Holocaust experience, substantially total. His father Gabriel died at Theresienstadt of the specific combination of starvation and lung disease that killed approximately 33,000 prisoners at the specific transit camp across the specific 1941-1945 period. Frankl, using the specific medical skills that had been the substantial reason for his pre-war psychiatric training, injected his dying father with the specific last remaining dose of morphine he had managed to smuggle into the camp — the specific compassionate medical act that permitted his father to die in relative peace rather than the substantially more agonising process the specific underlying respiratory disease would otherwise have produced. His mother Elsa was murdered in the Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers on the specific October 1944 day the Frankl family arrived at the camp. His brother Walter was murdered at Auschwitz in the substantial subsequent weeks. His wife Tilly was transported from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, where she died of typhus at some point during the specific final months of the war — the specific date and specific circumstances of her death Frankl learned only after his liberation and return to Vienna in the specific August of 1945. Of Frankl’s immediate family, only his sister Stella — who had emigrated to Australia before the specific 1938 Nazi annexation of Austria — survived the war.

What he wrote in nine days

The specific book that emerged from Frankl’s three-year concentration-camp experience was written, per the National Library of Israel’s institutional summary of Frankl’s specific post-liberation writing process, across a substantially compressed nine-day period in the specific late summer of 1945, immediately following Frankl’s return to Vienna and his discovery that his entire immediate family (except his Australian-emigrant sister) was dead. Frankl dictated the specific book to a team of three assistants across the specific nine-day interval, initially intending to publish it anonymously — the specific first edition, released in German in 1946 under the specific title Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager (“A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp”), did not identify Frankl as the author. Only in the specific subsequent editions, after friends progressively persuaded Frankl that the specific book’s substantial reception in Austrian and German psychological circles warranted his personal identification with its contents, did Frankl agree to be named as author. The specific English translation was published in 1959 under the specific new title Man’s Search for Meaning. The book has, in the specific 67 years since that English publication, sold approximately 16 million copies across 52 languages. In a specific 1991 Library of Congress survey, it was ranked as one of the ten most influential books ever published in the United States.

The Nietzsche sentence at the centre

The specific substantive philosophical claim that Man’s Search for Meaning makes — and that Frankl argues, on the specific empirical evidence of his own concentration-camp observations, has been substantially confirmed under the specific extreme conditions the Nazi camp system produced — is one that Frankl himself credited to a specific single sentence written by the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, which Frankl quotes in the specific opening pages of the book: Wer ein Warum zu leben hat, erträgt fast jedes Wie (“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how”). As reported in HowStuffWorks’ summary of the specific Nietzschean framework at the centre of Frankl’s specific psychological argument, Frankl’s substantive observation from his three years in the camps was that the specific prisoners who survived the substantial physical and psychological trauma of the concentration-camp system were, disproportionately, the specific prisoners who had identified some specific reason to live — some specific person waiting for them at home, some specific task they still needed to complete, some specific meaning they could impose on the substantial arbitrary suffering the camps produced. The specific prisoners who did not identify such a reason — who progressively concluded that the specific suffering they were experiencing was substantially meaningless — died substantially faster than the specific physical circumstances of their imprisonment alone would have predicted. Meaning, on Frankl’s specific concentration-camp observation, was substantively load-bearing: humans could tolerate essentially any specific quantity of physical suffering provided they could locate some substantive reason for it, and humans could not tolerate substantially any quantity of physical suffering that they had concluded had no such reason. The specific substantive implication of that finding — that the specific human being’s search for meaning is, in essential respects, the specific psychological infrastructure that keeps human beings alive under conditions where nothing else can — is the specific therapeutic claim that Frankl’s logotherapy has, across the subsequent 80 years of clinical practice by the specific institutional network of Frankl-trained therapists currently practising across essentially every developed country in the world, progressively tested and progressively confirmed as one of the substantially more consequential insights that 20th-century clinical psychology has produced.