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The great 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, as Frankl held on to the image of his wife through the darkest days in Auschwitz), and in courage in difficult times.
Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it.
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 feel and do about what happens to you.
“Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.
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.
Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.
The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action. There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed. Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress. We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing:
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And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make
a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freed...
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An active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity to realize values in creative work, while a passive life of enjoyment affords him the opportunity to obtain fulfillment in experiencing beauty, art, or nature.
Everywhere man is confronted with fate, with the chance of achieving something through his own suffering.
often it is just such an exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself.
Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.
connection is between the state of mind of a man—his courage and hope, or lack of them—and the state of immunity of his body will understand that the sudden loss of hope and courage can have a deadly effect.
any attempt to restore a man’s inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal.
“He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,”
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.
When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.
I told them of a comrade who on his arrival in camp had tried to make a pact with Heaven that his suffering and death should save the human being he loved from a painful end. For this man, suffering and death were meaningful; his was a sacrifice of the deepest significance.
He did not want to die for nothing.
no one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them.
According to logotherapy, this striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man.
Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a “secondary rationalization” of instinctual drives.
main concern consists in fulfilling a meaning, rather than in the
mere gratification and satisfaction of drives and instincts, or in merely reconciling the conflicting claims of id, ego and superego, or in the mere adaptation and adjustment to society and environment.
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.
The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom.
mankind was apparently doomed to vacillate eternally between the two extremes of distress and boredom.
meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.
question posed to a chess champion: “Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?” There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one’s opponent. The same holds for human existence.
As each situation in life represents a challenge to man and presents a problem for him to solve, the question of the meaning of life may actually be reversed.
man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.
“Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!”
In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning,
anticipatory anxiety has to be counteracted by paradoxical intention; hyper-intention as well as hyper-reflection have to be counteracted by dereflection; dereflection, however, ultimately is not possible except by the patient’s orientation toward his specific vocation and mission in life.17
Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.
the human capacity to creatively turn life’s negative aspects into something positive or constructive.
In other words, what matters is to make the best of any given situation. “The best,”
an optimism in the face of tragedy and in view of the human potential which at its best always allows for: (1) turning suffering into a human achievement and accomplishment; (2) deriving from guilt the opportunity to change oneself for the better; and (3) deriving from life’s transitoriness an incentive to take responsible action.
happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue.
a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.
This need for a reason is similar in another specifically human phenomenon—laughter.
even if each and every case of suicide had not been undertaken out of a feeling of meaninglessness, it may well be that an individual’s impulse to take his life would have been overcome had he been aware of some meaning and purpose worth living for.
weeks, months, years later, they told me, it turned out that there was a solution to their problem, an answer to their question, a meaning to their life.
in the first place, you have to live to see the day on which it may happen, so you have to survive in order to see that day dawn, and from now on the responsibility for survival does not leave you.”
there are three main avenues on which one arrives at meaning in life. The first is by creating a work or by doing a deed. The second is by experiencing something or encountering someone; in other words, meaning can be found not only in work but also in love.
third avenue to meaning in life: even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by so doing change himself. He may turn a personal tragedy into a triumph.
the priority stays with creatively changing the situation that causes us to suffer.
Live
