In the midst of despair, discovering a way to have hope

LATE in March, holed up in my flat in New York, I received the terrible news that the coronavirus pandemic had claimed the life of someone I knew. Just as shocking was the fact that it wasn’t Covid-19 that had overwhelmed her body. It was, instead, despair that had killed her spirit.

We cannot know all the factors that played into the tragic logic that led her to suicide. But piecing the story together afterwards, her closest friends think that when New York shut down, she believed that so, too, had the possibility of continuing the full life she had created there.

Before the pandemic, her calendar overflowed not just with work and volunteer activities, but with social engagements and cultural events, scheduled through the rest of this year and into the next.

And now amid the cascade of closings, cancellations and postponements into an unknowable future of all the work, volunteer, arts and other events she had so carefully planned, her own life seemed to be crumbling. So she negated it, all of it.

This is only one among many deaths of despair against our current backdrop of heightened stress, uncertainty and vulnerability.

It’s the challenge posed by any crisis: 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,

devoted the bulk of his career to answering.

Now, with the publication for the first time in English of

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 his later classic.

But in whichever version you encounter them, Frankl’s ideas bear particular consideration now.

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.

Frankl, who was Jewish, 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 threat of being shot, beaten or gassed to death, Frankl endured. He held on to the hope that he would see his family after the war. He also set his sights on completing the unfinished manuscript describing his theories that the Nazis had destroyed.

He even jotted down notes on scraps of paper, which he hid in his threadbare uniform, about how his experience of life in extremis bore out his ideas. He observed that fellow inmates who were able to maintain an inner purpose were less likely to give up.

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 in time completing his manuscript, as well as composing, less than a year after being freed, the three public lectures that make up

With World War II’s horrific death toll still being reckoned, and the atomic bomb having been unleashed as a new existential threat, Frankl described the public mood as “spiritually bombed out”.

How could survivors return to life if they did not believe that their lives held value? In the approach to psychotherapy he developed, which he called Logotherapy,

Frankl proposed an antidote to such nihilism: taking hold of life’s meaning – and more precisely, the particular aim we set for ourselves.

If we search, such a purpose can be found embedded in our values, beliefs, experiences and capabilities, and in the communities and caring relationships we’ve created. Even at the end of life, Frankl wrote, people can derive a sense of fulfilment from taking “a stance toward the unalterable, fated, inevitable, and unavoidable limitation of their possibilities: how they adapt to this… how they accept this fate”.

The fate Frankl confronted was the Holocaust. Our fate today is wrapped up in the pandemic. Finding and sustaining meaning in the midst of crisis is not easy. I wish my friend had known about this strategy, and sought help that could have harnessed her back to life. |