Man's Search for Meaning: Important People

There are no recurring characters in Frankl’s book. This may be partly due to the transient nature of human relationships in an environment where inmates were regularly shifted from one work party to another, or moved from one camp to another. However, there are occasional hints of deep friendships among the prisoners, and it is striking that Frankl completely omits from his narrative the fact that he spent some time in the same camp as his father, and cared for his father as he was dying. Clearly, Frankl made a choice to de-emphasize his own personal relationships in his narrative. He may have wished to keep the focus on what was common to all inmates.

That said, certain people are important to the narrative.

Frankl’s father and mother

It was for the sake of his parents (unnamed in the book) that Frankl decided to remain in Vienna and face eventual arrest and deportation.

Frankl’s wife

In a moving passage, Frankl describes having an almost mystical vision of his wife (who is also unnamed in the book) while marching in a work party: “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.” He took away from this vision the conviction that “The salvation of man is through love and in love.” After the war, Frankl learned that his wife was already dead when he had his vision of her.

Sigmund Freud

The most famous of all psychiatric practitioners, Freud (1856–1939) left Vienna in 1938 and took up residence in Britain. Near the end of his book, Frankl remarks (with perhaps a touch of bitterness) that Freud’s patients “lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz.” Freud’s thesis that human beings seek pleasure, and the avoidance of pain is associated by Frankl with the tag “the will to pleasure.”

Alfred Adler

Alder (1870–1937) was the founder of what is now known as the second Viennese school of psychotherapy (after Freud’s and before Frankl’s own school). He emphasized the importance of social relationships for a person’s self-image and developed the now-familiar concept of the inferiority complex. Adler took over the phrase “the will to power” from the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The German philosopher Nietzsche (1844–1900) comes into Frankl’s book in two ways. First, he was a source of ideas for Alfred Adler, whose ideas (along with those of Freud) Frankl contrasts with his own. But second, he is the source of an aphorism that Frankl quotes at least three times: “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”

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