I bought Viktor E. Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" about 3 years back and it was sitting on the shelf patiently ever since. It is a fairly small book of about 160 pages. Frankl was a psychiatrist in Austria, captured by the Nazis and placed in concentration camps for 5 years before he got out and eventually published several books including this one. First half of the book talks about life in the concentration camps during the second world war. While he describes the horrors of people being put to death, the showers, lack of any kind of nourishment, sleeping next to dead bodies and so forth, he is not trying to describe things just for shock value, limiting himself saying enough has been written now that describes these camps, and so there is no need.
I remember reading a while back as to how our minds adapt themselves to any given situation filling themselves with the task of analyzing what is in front. Thus, a cut in our pinky may look much more important to us taking up our whole thought process though we might have read about/seen on TV an ongoing famine in another part of the world killing thousands of people. But if we are in the midst of a famine, a cut in a pinky won't even register. By the same token, even in as abject a situation as in a concentration camp where you see people dying and put to death daily, our elastic mind adjusts itself to focus on finding some sort of meaning to one's existence so that one can live on. As the author quotes Nietzsche, "He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How." Getting some peas with the soup (instead of just broth water), cracking jokes about the SS guards, thinking about the nice life one is going to lead after getting out of the camp one day, making up stories about how one's friends & family must be getting along outside and one will meet them soon, etc. all provide causes/reasons for hope that makes one survive the camp day by day. Of course when this hope is lost, author says he saw human beings in the camp simply giving up, not getting up one day to go to mindless work one is forced to do, knowing fully well that not getting up will lead to one's death in the hands of the guards. He argues that those prisoners who gave up on life were the first to die. The main cause for their death is the lack of a reason to live for rather than lack of food or medicine. These realizations/observations got him to develop his ideas for logotherapy, discussion of which forms the second half of the book.
Contrary to Freudian and other conventional psychiatry ideas that human mind is driven by its pursuit of happiness, Frankl's Logotherapy claims that human beings are driven by a search for a meaning in their lives. This seems to explain as to why even when your existence is reduced to such misery as in a concentration camp, people are able to live on and survive. Where pursuit of happiness doesn't stand a lot of chance to keep you going in such extreme situations, search for a meaning can.
After he got out of the camps, he had setup a successful practice and had treated depression, loss of hope, bi-polar and other range of psychiatric disorders using this model. He describes his approach by discussing several case studies. For example, a mother who had a mentally disabled child that eventually dies and a remaining one that is crippled. While this situation will be extremely depressing to the mother pushing her towards suicide and pursuit of happiness beyond that point in her life will be very difficult, figuring out a meaning as to how/why it happened appears to work better. In this example, asking the mother, would she have not had the child at all rather than going through this pain always makes the mother realize that her love for the child trumps the pain and so as painful as it may be, she still treasures the experience. The child that died early lived though short a life filled with her love rather than a long life that is bereft of love while the second one is surviving thanks to her. One can view these as nothing more than clever arguments or tricks. But viewing the same scenario from a totally different perspective does change one's view and if that makes you happy/satisfied giving you a reason to go on with life even under extenuating circumstances, then there is all the more reason to embrace such arguments. Reading such books/ideas periodically should help us realize how blessed we are in our lives and how silly the things we keep worrying/fighting about on a daily basis be it a silly ego tiff with our spouses or some work related issues not going right temporarily. Frankl's genuine tone of humility in his writing is humbling.
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Also read a novel titled "The Sunshine when she is gone" by Thea Goodman.
It is a story of a rich young couple living in NYC with a small baby. The city/career oriented life they lead, with a nanny to look after the baby, gets under their skin. So, one day the husband just takes the baby and gets on a plane going to Barbados for a weekend without telling his wife. Of course he flies back after two days and gets back with his wife. While the idea is interesting, execution is not that interesting. To balance out husband's this heinous "crime" violating the wife's confidence, wife cheats on the husband in a contrived scenario and so when they find out what the other did, they are even and they move on. I bought the book after hearing about it in the radio thinking Maya might enjoy the novel. She gave up halfway and I was the one who read the whole book. You can skip this one. :-)
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My son Arjun is on summer vacation. Just to keep him engaged, I get him books to read that should be just above his level. I have commented about Malcolm Gladwell's books before, saying he usually has a grain of a good idea worth writing a Newyorker article about but then adds a lot of fluff and builds a book around it. So, thought they should be good choices for a kid that had just finished elementary school. :-) So, got him The Tipping Point and Outliers from the public library. He loved them and finished reading them in one day each..!
I had read Gladwell's "The Tipping Point" and "Blink" before and since then swore off Gladwell books. But, Arjun finishing these books one per day put me to shame as I usually take months to finish "Collapse" type books I pick up. I had to convince myself that it is indeed the dense content that slows me down. So, decided to pick up Outliers and I am relieved to report that I could finish it in a day too. I knew the outline since I had read Gladwell's related articles. This might have accelerated my phase. But I could certainly zip through the pages since this book also follows the same model of some simple good observations/ideas written out elaborately in a news paper article style. Gladwell keeps churning out these "academic lite" books that people like to clutch and talk about in dinner parties making him popular and rich. If you agree and haven't read this book, you can just read his articles at http://www.gladwell.com/archive.html on Canadian ice hockey players and Christopher Langan or read the book synopsis posted at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book).
Phew.. I feel vindicated and eligible to retain my snobbish notions for some more time, that is until my kids put me back in my place once again. :-)
-sundar.
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