Casting Out Fear

Depression is deeply tedious for all concerned; the depressive, their family, friends and acquaintances. In Britain today about 20 per cent of adults suffer depression and/or extreme anxiety in the course of a lifetime. We seem to be in a depression epidemic. And that’s very boring, too.

All kinds of things can trigger depression. In my case it was being made redundant twice in as many years, and worrying about how I would support my family. My ‘cure’ – it’s always tentative – was a combination of therapy, pills and exercise. But I also needed to find something to read that would give me hope, something that would lift me beyond my own petty obsessions – and I have learned that they are all petty. Mapp and Lucia, maybe . . . No, too whimsical. I needed something meaningful, something that would, with luck, stop me being a complete bore – or at least, less of a bore. Then I stumbled across Viktor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (1946). How had I missed it? Man’s Search for Meaning has apparently sold more than 10 million copies and been published in 24 languages. It is, according to the Library of Congress, one of the ‘ten most influential books in the United States’. When you are happy, E. F. Benson or some other undemanding text is enough; when you torture yourself, you need to find ways of coping. Frankl’s book is unlike any other Holocaust memoir I have read. From the darkest degradation he brings hope. He finds meaning amid the meaningless. It would be an exaggeration to say that his book saved my life – but it did help me find meaning. Viktor Frankl was born into a Jewish family in Vienna in 1905. The course his life followed in the 1940s was thus all too familiar. In an act of wonderful defiance he married Tilly Grosser in December 1941. In September 1942 he was forced out of the Rothschild Hospital in Vienna, the only one that still admitted Jews, where he had been head of neurology. The couple were arrested and deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto and then, in October 1944, to Auschwitz. Viktor was shortly after transferred to Kaufering, a sub-camp of Dachau, but Tilly was moved to Bergen-Belsen. At Theresienstadt Frankl set up a suicide watch scheme, assisted by the Berlin-born Regina Jonas, the first woman to be ordained as a rabbi. Viktor’s mother and brother died in Auschwitz, as did Jonas; his sister Stella survived, having fled Austria for Australia. What sustained Frankl through the dirt, the stench, the beatings and exhausted semi-starvation, the perpetual threat of casual, random, painful death, was an image of his beloved wife. As he marched in a column of the hopeless he occasionally looked up at the sky:

the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.

In the depths of unimaginable suffering, Frankl experiences what can only be described as an epiphany, when he is transfixed by a thought: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. What Frankl achieves is a kind of spiritual acceptance, a position of equilibrium, which is of course interrupted by brutality but which never quite departs, is never completely obliterated. He speaks of an intensification of inner life which

helped the prisoner find a refuge from the emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty of his existence . . . As the inner life of the prisoner tended to become more intense, he also experienced the beauty of art and nature as never before . . . One evening, when we were already resting on the floor of our hut, dead tired, soup bowls in hand, a fellow prisoner rushed in and asked us to run out to the assembly grounds and see the wonderful sunset . . . after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another, ‘How beautiful the world could be!’

Frankl’s wife died in Belsen, but he survived. He went on to study philosophy, founded a new school of psychotherapy – logotherapy – and wrote many books. He died at the age of 92. Among his ideas was the invention of the term ‘Sunday neurosis’, referring to the anxiety and depression felt by those who find their lives to be empty and meaningless on the one day of the week when work and domestic chores don’t dominate. Frankl said the difference between traditional psychotherapy and logotherapy was that while in the former the patients must lie down on a couch and tell things that are sometimes very disagreeable to tell, in logotherapy ‘the patient may remain sitting erect but he must hear things which sometimes are very disagreeable to hear’. He said that was a facetious answer but that logotherapy’s real distinction is that it is less retrospective and introspective and instead focuses on the future. You don’t have to buy into the whole theory behind Frankl’s logotherapy to see that he has a point. Life is not all about happiness (whatever that might be) but it might well be based on finding a purpose, a meaning. Why else do Samuel Beckett’s plays – profoundly brilliant as they are – resonate so powerfully? Because they depict a universe for individuals in which all meaning has been washed away. Frankl believed that ‘Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a “secondary rationalization” of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning . . .’ Frankl’s book, while infinitely distressing in many ways, is also astonishingly uplifting. My bout of depression bore no resemblance to the scarcely imaginable cruelties he endured, but I took great comfort from his example, and his book. They encouraged me not to be afraid any more, not to fear people or situations, so long as I could discover meaning, which I have – in family, friends, writing, thinking, and working with people I respect and who respect me. As Frankl says: ‘The crowning experience of all, for the homecoming man, is the wonderful feeling that, after all he has suffered, there is nothing he need fear any more – except his God.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 50 © Gary Mead 2016