Does having a reason to live help you endure suffering? Viktor Frankl's answer

Having a reason to live may not make suffering vanish, but Viktor Frankl argued that it changes whether a person can bear it. Frankl was a Viennese psychiatrist who spent three years in four concentration camps, and he wrote about what he saw in a book called Man's Search for Meaning. His conclusion was that life never ceases to have meaning, even in suffering and death.

Frankl's own story is hard to read. In 1942, just nine months after his wedding, he and his family were sent to the Theresienstadt camp. His mother and brother were murdered at Auschwitz, and his wife Tilly died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen. Frankl lived through it, and in the camps he noticed what kept some prisoners going. According to him, the way a prisoner imagined the future affected how long he lived.

He also argued that people are never entirely at the mercy of their circumstances. A prisoner's reactions, he wrote, did not come only from the conditions of his life but from the freedom of choice he always has, even in severe suffering. That is why he liked a line from Nietzsche: anyone who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.

Frankl named three ways to find a purpose: completing tasks, caring for another person, or facing suffering with dignity. He called his approach logotherapy, a school of psychotherapy built on the idea that the search for meaning is the central human motivational force.

Not everyone accepts his account without question. The historian Timothy Pytell argues that Frankl spent only a few days in Auschwitz, though the book can suggest months, and the critic Richard Middleton-Kaplan worries that stressing attitude can sound as if those who died simply gave up. Frankl's defenders dispute Pytell's research. It is a powerful testimony, but also a contested one.