l makes it possible for the reader to see that freedom and meaning can be discovered and/or created under any conditions. If Frankl and other camp victims can do it, then anybody can. Even in the completely dehumanized conditioning of the camps, the victims were able to love one another, to dream, to create art, to share in every sense of the word, and to thereby give meaning to the suffering they endured.
The following are passages from Frankl which deal with physiological conditioning:
1. "Even though conditions such as lack of sleep [and] insufficient food . . . may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, . . . the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision. . . . " (87).
2. Sigmund Freud's "subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz. There, the 'individual differences' did not 'blur.'. . . People
. . . unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints (178).
3. "Undernourishment . . . probably also explains the fact that the sexual urge was generally absent" (52).
These passages show how physiological conditioning reduces the ability of human beings to act in freedom in a life with meaning, although, as Frankl argues, such conditioning does not eliminate such freedom and meaning entirely.
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