Those Who Have a Why to Live For

The essay opens with the methodological question of camp psychology: can an observer who lives in the camp stay impartial? Frankl shows two dangers: one looking from outside has too much distance and cannot empathise, while one «in the middle of it» has very little distance. Citing authors such as Cohen and Gilbert, it is said that one who has not lived this world cannot understand it. Frankl bases his own experience on the camps of Auschwitz, Dachau and Theresienstadt and divides the prisoner's reaction into three phases: admission shock, the character changes of long camp life and the phase of release.

In the first phase, admission shock, Cohen describes a «marked splitting of the personality», a subject–object separation: as if it were not about himself. Frankl describes the arrival of new prisoners by train at Auschwitz station: eighty people in a wagon, the cry «There is a sign here… Auschwitz!», barbed wire, watchtowers. Camp prisoners dive into the wagon laughing, looking well fed; Frankl compares this with the «delusion of reprieve» — a condemned man's hope of pardon just before execution. Then Frankl reaches the «selection» (Selektion): an SS officer points with his forefinger «to the left, to the right, much more to the left»; Frankl walks to the right and learns in the evening that about 90% of those transported had been condemned to death.

When Frankl asks where his young friend P. is, an old prisoner points to a smoking chimney: «There your friend is floating up into the sky». Then when Frankl shows an old prisoner the manuscript in his coat pocket — «the work of my life» — and says he wants to keep it, the answer comes in a single word: «Damn it!» At that moment he writes that he «drew a line under his whole former life». Helplessness and the daily danger of death lead many to thoughts of suicide («running into the wire»); but at Auschwitz there was not even the need for this. At the end of the admission shock, apathy appears as a protective armour.

The second phase — adaptation — opens with Dostoevsky's idea that «man is a being who gets used to everything». Cohen and Bettelheim note that the number of suicides is very small compared with the number of prisoners: according to Lederer, of 32,647 deaths at Theresienstadt in 1941–1944 only 259 were suicides. Frankl regards apathy as the soul's self-protection mechanism: emotional life «anchors at the lowest level», demands are limited to the most urgent needs, and the daily aim is one thing — to survive. In the evenings, returning to camp, the sigh is heard: «Well, we have survived one more day!»

• The book is not a unified narrative but a collection of articles and lectures covering sixty years; each text is read on its own with its own subject and style
• The essay is built both on personal testimony and on clinical data gathered from other researchers (Cohen, Bettelheim, Lederer)
• Frankl presents his own experience as an «experimentum crucis» (a decisive test) and uses it as proof of his theory
• The text contains many Latin, German and psychiatric terms and they are not left unexplained