Discovering a way to have hope

The challenge posed by any crisis is: How do we hang on to hope? It is also the question that Viktor Frankl (1905-1997), the Viennese psychiatrist and author best known for his exploration of trauma and resilience, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” devoted the bulk of his career to answering.

Now, with the publication for the first time in English of “Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything,” originally written as a series of lectures in 1946, we have the opportunity to read what amounts to a brief, early draft of the concepts he presented in more accessible form and in greater detail in his later classic.

Frankl stressed the importance of what he called the will to meaning. He believed that having a sense of meaning or purpose or a goal in life drives us forward from one day to the next, even when we confront personal suffering, family tragedy or public calamity. That is the inner compass that gives us direction; when we lose it, we begin to drift and can become lost in, and to, despair.

Frankl had begun to develop his ideas about the pivotal role meaning plays in our lives before the Nazi regime deported him and his family to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1942.

But despite four years of being shuttled from one camp to another, suffering the ravages of typhus and starvation and the nonstop threat of being killed, Frankl endured. He held onto the hope that he would see his family after the war. He also set his sights on completing the unfinished manuscript.

Those goals kept him focused on the possibility of a postwar future. He observed that fellow inmates who were able to maintain an inner purpose were less likely to give up and give in to the futility of camp existence.

After the war, Frankl was devastated to learn that neither his parents nor his wife had made it out of the camps alive. But he did have his work, and he buried himself in it, reconstructing and completing the manuscript the Nazis had seized, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” as well as composing the three public lectures that make up “Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything.”

The fate Frankl confronted was the Holocaust. Our fate today is wrapped up in the coronavirus pandemic. Finding and sustaining meaning in the midst of crisis is not easy but Frankl’s methods offer hope.