Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning and the Big Five

Viktor Frankl survived the camps and built a psychology around the one thing he decided could not be taken: the freedom to choose your response. In a 1972 lecture he put the idealist's case sharply, warning that "if we take man as he really is, we make him worse," and that we become what we are treated as capable of being.

Meaning in the Big Five

Frankl is not describing a trait, but the capacity he points to leans on two of them. Low Depression (N3) on the Big Five is the facet that keeps despair from becoming the whole horizon, which is the ground his method needs to work on. Openness to values (O6) is the willingness to organize a life around something larger than comfort, which is where meaning lives.

What makes Frankl worth reading alongside the trait model is that he refused to treat either facet as fixed. His claim is that meaning can be built by someone whose N3 runs high, and his line for it is the one people carry out of the book: "When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves." The Big Five gives you the starting position. Frankl is arguing about the range of movement from there.

If your own scores lean toward despair, Frankl's whole point is that the direction you take from there is still the part under your control.

Read the book: Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

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