How to account for the fact that mental and spiritual health was, in many ways, superior for camp prisoners living in inconceivable conditions of deprivation than it is for most modern Westerners, who have access to every comfort and luxury? That is largely the subject of Frankl’s renowned book, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” in which he tells of his experiences and observations in the concentration camps and how they helped him develop his therapeutic methods.
In the camps, Frankl observed humanity stripped of all accessories, accoutrements, and masks—humanity in its bare essence, laid open before his scrutinizing clinical eye. What he discovered was profound. He witnessed that the mental health of the prisoners depended not on scraping together a few odd comforts, desperately pursuing scarce pleasures, living out delusional fantasies, or even convincing themselves that their sufferings would soon end. Rather, their mental and spiritual health—and sometimes even their physical survival—stemmed from their ability to find meaning and purpose in their suffering. And in his book, Frankl emphatically argues that such a feat is possible, that meaning can be found even in the most extreme of circumstances, lending dignity and even honor to the sufferer. The more complete the surrounding darkness, the brighter the soul can be.
These experiences in the camp led Frankl to develop his psychological treatment method known as “logotherapy.” In “Man’s Search for Meaning,” Frankl defines logotherapy in this way:
“'Logos’ is a Greek word which denotes ‘meaning.’ Logotherapy … focuses on the meaning of human existence as well as on man’s search for such a meaning. … Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a ‘secondary rationalization’ of instinctual drives.”
When the Cry Is Almost Heard
Like Frankl, the novelist and essayist Walker Percy was keenly attuned to “the unheard cry for meaning”; he treated the topic in his fiction, including in his 1961 National Book Award-winning novel, “The Moviegoer.” “The Moviegoer” taps into this “unheard cry” like a radio latching onto an obscure and elusive frequency.
The novel tells of young stockbroker Jack “Binx” Bolling, living in postwar New Orleans, and suffering from a heavy dose of ennui and estrangement from his own life due to family problems, relationship struggles, the decline of tradition in the South, a sense of disconnection from time and place, and Korean War trauma.
At Mardis Gras, Binx begins an attempt to break through the “malaise” that haunts his life—he begins a somewhat ambiguous “search.” “But things have suddenly changed,” says the protagonist narrator early in the novel. “My peaceful existence in Gentilly has been complicated. This morning, for the first time in years, there occurred to me the possibility of a search.” Later, he adds a few cryptic details:
“‘What is the nature of the search?’ you ask. Really it is very simple; at least for a fellow like me; so simple that it is easily overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.”
The everydayness that Binx refers to is, in part, the soulless routine, the daily grind without sense of purpose or direction that lulls one into an almost dream state, disconnected from one’s surroundings and even one’s own soul. “Everydayness is the enemy. No search is possible,” Binx says, on edge.
This everydayness is tied to “the malaise,” another enigmatic motif that runs through the novel. The malaise is boredom, superficiality. The malaise is the evasiveness of full satisfaction in life, rearing its ugliness just at the moments when Binx thinks he’s coming to a high point and is expecting total fulfillment (perhaps through some form of pleasure).
The malaise is also modern mundanity, the loss of wonder, and even the loss of a sense of the real. In Binx’s own words: “What is the malaise? you ask. The malaise is the pain of loss. The world is lost to you, the world and the people in it, and there remains only you and the world and you no more able to be in the world than Banquo’s ghost.”
These haunting words underscore Binx’s alienation from life, an alienation that seems to be a peculiarly modern malady. His search, then, is, at least in part, a search for reconnection, a search for grounding, a search for meaning. That search makes him perhaps the most sane person in the novel, despite his eccentricities.
As G.K. Chesterton writes in “Orthodoxy,” in a line that Frankl would likely nod assent to, “Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.” For a mystery, by definition, is something with a meaning behind it—though one that is, as yet, partly undiscovered. Hence the need to search it out.
Binx recognizes that waking up from the dream of the mundane and living out “the search” often requires a shock. “Perhaps there was a time when everydayness was not too strong and one could break its grip by brute strength. Now nothing breaks it—but disaster. Only once in my life was the grip of everydayness broken: when I lay bleeding in a ditch.”
One of Binx’s love interests, Kate, asks the question, “Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?” The observation aligns with Frankl’s findings in the concentration camps: In this extreme situation, this calculated disaster, the masks were torn off, the prisoners and guards alike were what they were, for better or worse. They had certainly escaped “everydayness.” What they found was raw, but real, humanity—with all its potential for demonic or angelic behavior.
In the end, Binx does not elaborate much on his search or its results. He says only, “As for my search, I have not the inclination to say much on the subject. ... I am a member of my mother’s family after all and so naturally shy away from the subject of religion. ... Reticence, therefore, hardly having a place in a document of this kind, it seems as good a time as any to make an end.”
To which I can only concur, and follow suit.
