The Meaning of Love

It is a reason to stay human inside reality.

Frankl places love on his second road to meaning — the experiential one — and defines it with a precision that strips away both cynicism and sentimentality: love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one, he says, can become fully aware of the essence of another person without loving him. The lover sees what mere observation cannot: not just the traits the beloved has, but the potentialities they carry — who they could still become.

That seeing is causal, not decorative. By recognizing what the beloved can be, the lover helps make it true: love enables the other to actualize the potentialities the lover sees. This is the chapter's working mechanism, and it generalizes beyond romance — the teacher, the parent, the friend who sees more in someone than the evidence yet supports is performing the same act. Frankl had lived its extreme case, sustained on ice-field marches by contemplation of a wife who, unknown to him, was already dead; the love still functioned, because its object was her essence, not her availability.

Against Freud, Frankl reverses the standard reduction: love is not a mere side effect or sublimation of the sexual drive. Sex, rightly ordered, is love's vehicle — a way of expressing the experience of that ultimate togetherness — not its cause. The reduction runs the other way around.

The chapter's test is applicable within the hour: think of someone you claim to love and ask what unrealized possibility in them you are actively helping become real. In Frankl's account, that — not intensity of feeling — is what the word love actually names.

Frankl adds the corollary the camps taught him: love is not defeated by absence or even by death, because what it grasps — the essence of the beloved — is not a body's availability. The prisoner sustained by a dead wife's remembered face was not deceived; he was, in Frankl's strict sense, still loving accurately.