Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
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Viktor Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor. In 1946 he published Man’s Search for Meaning, describing his experience as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps during World War II.
The book details the psychotherapeutic principles he used to persevere, and his teaching of logotherapy—the idea that striving to find meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force of man.
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
Viktor Frankl
Foreword
Terrible as it was, his (Frankl’s) experience in Auschwitz reinforced what was already one of his key ideas: Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it.
—(Foreword by Harold S. Kushner)
I. Concentration Camp Hell
I shall never forget how I was roused one night by the groans of a fellow prisoner, who threw himself about in his sleep, obviously having a horrible nightmare. Since I had always been especially sorry for people who suffered from fearful dreams or deliria, I wanted to wake the poor man. Suddenly I drew back the hand which was ready to shake him, frightened at the thing I was about to do. At that moment I became intensely conscious of the fact that no dream, no matter how horrible, could be as bad as the reality of the camp which surrounded us, and to which I was about to recall him.
II. Frankl’s Principles
Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual. These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment. Thus it is impossible to define the meaning of life in a general way.
Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will do about what happens to you.
The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire…The salvation of man is through love and in love.
Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.
In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way—an honorable way—in such a position a man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, “The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.”
III. Logotherapy & Psychological Insights
Mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being.
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.
There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
Man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes—within the limits of endowment and environment—he has made out of himself.
Great thoughts this week.
WONDERFULLY STATED-JIM