Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning is a timeless guide for survival. This remarkable book, with its genuine psychiatric insights, offers advice in the face of great suffering. Viktor E. Frankl was a Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Vienna Medical School. He founded logotherapy, known as the third Viennese school of psychotherapy.
During World War II, he spent three years in concentration camps, enduring immense mental and physical suffering. He shares the wisdom he gained from these harrowing experiences through the lens of psychiatry, his area of expertise.
Man’s search for meaning:
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.
A person’s freedom to think is something that can never be taken away:
Everything can be taken from 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.
Never downplay someone else’s suffering:
To draw an analogy: a man’s suffering is similar to the behaviour of gas. If a certain quantity of gas pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus, suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore, the size of human suffering is absolutely relative.
Just accept what happens:
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 sufferings or suffer in his place. His Unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.
You need to figure out and solve your problems:
Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfil the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.
Meaning of life can never be answered in sweeping statements:
Meaning of life differ from man to man, and from moment to moment. Thus it is impossible to define the meaning of life in general way.
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Let your tears flow:
But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest courage, the courage to suffer.
Even your suffering has some meaning in it:
Human life, under any circumstances, never ceases to have a meaning. And this infinite meaning of life includes suffering, dying, privation and death.
Love that goes beyond the world:
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.
Survivors of terrible experiences need counselling to help them recover:
Apart from the moral deformity resulting from the sudden release of mental pressure, there were two other fundamental experiences which threatened to damage the character of liberated prisoner; bitterness and disillusionment when he returns to his former life.
