Books by Viktor Frankl had been lying around the house for years, but I had never opened one. Their titles in translation (e.g. Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything) – seeming to capture banality pure, unalloyed and fully platitudinous – did not attract me. 

One time I had in fact been advised, by a well-intentioned therapist, to “say yes to life.” The advice came at a time when all the vectors that to me carried meaning were colliding and cancelling each other out. What vectors – what motivations – were those? The study of philosophy, the preservation of femininity, and the then-prevailing concept of women as essentially dependent on and secondary to men. As a result, there was nothing in my life that I could say yes to – without at the same time and in the same respect saying “no.”

So I associated Frankl with the kind of advice-giving that would be upbeat but shallow and of no earthly use to a person in despair.

That being the background, it was a great surprise to me when recently I happened to pick up a book by Viktor Frankl and found it dense with insights! His views, derived from professional psychiatric practice, predated the Second World War but got toughened and honed by his experience as a Jewish prisoner in a Nazi death camp. Contrary to the more well-known views of Hannah Arendt in her Origins of Totalitarianism prisoners – in the deepest hell that had yet been devised in human history – were not inwardly dehumanized. Nor were they rendered incapable of moral choice. 

Right after the War, Frankl described the effect on his fellow prisoners of being deliberately dehumanized. These were the people who hadn’t been selected for immediate murder but instead deemed well enough to be worked to death on meagre rations, while guarded on all sides by Nazis of terrifying brutality. This life, under a dark sky, with no end foreseeable, tested the sufferers. Pushed to limits none could have imagined, some rose to inner heights; others despaired and collapsed utterly.

Frankl emerged from his own trial-by-fire clearly ennobled and determined to do good. Being trained in psychiatry, he remained in his native Vienna and devised a novel type of psychotherapy which he called logotherapy. It differed from the Freudian therapy, then still dominant, which he deemed incomplete since its delvings into the unconscious retrieved only those repressed drives found at the most primitive psychic levels. As to the rival Jungian therapy, with its collective unconscious: that seemed to Frankl to take in higher levels but also to rest on a mistake. Jung was wrong to hold that the contents of a person’s unconscious are collective – shared by the generality of humankind. The truth is subtler than that. It’s rather that, in each man or woman, the contents of his or her unconscious are unique.

In addition to instinctual drives and emotional contents, there is one further level to the psyche: the spiritual unconscious. In each of us, this would be a part of the psyche that cannot be mapped because it’s the source of all the mappings of our lives, that we devise and draw, for all our complex purposes. 

What specific work does the spiritual unconscious do? It tells us what, on the highest level, we are called to do in our lives.

Here is Frankl, in Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, writing on the topic of “conscience.” What is conscience for him? Not the recourse to a general rule as certain recent philosophers – like Kant (with his universalizability), or the Utilitarians (with their greatest happiness for the greatest number) – would have it. Not even the Ten Commandments suffice to tell each of us, personally, what must be done or not done in the unique case that we confront.

“Only conscience is capable of adjusting the ‘eternal,’ generally agreed-upon moral law to the specific situation in which a concrete person is engaged. Living one’s conscience always means living on a highly personalized level, aware of the full concreteness of each situation.”

I recall describing to Hannah Arendt the precise circumstances that led to my firing and subsequent seven-year fight (ultimately successful) to be reinstated in the Philosophy Department of the college where I taught. 

Here’s what I told her: The senior professor who had just observed my teaching hour – and had yet to write the Teaching Observation Report that would decide my professional fate – had just asked me why I thought he was supporting a candidate for Department chairman whom I believed unqualified for that leadership position. 

This gave me a consequential choice between two paths: the first path, to tactfully evade the senior professor’s question or the second path, to reply candidly. 

I replied candidly: 

I believe you back him

because he’s weak –

and you think you can use him.

When I retold that story to Arendt, instantly she reproached my impolitic and gratuitous tactlessness!

But no. Precisely in that consequential context, tactful dodging, harmless in other contexts, would have been – for me then and there – dishonest and cowardly.

To teach philosophy is both a privilege and a job. But in this case the two were in conflict. Teaching philosophy required truth-telling. And truth-telling would cost me my job.

I would say that I “knew it.” But how did I know it? The way one knows such things.

It was the price of remaining myself.

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