Man's search for meaning

By Viktor E. Frankl

 

<Preface>

 

Several times in the course of the book, Frankl approvingly quotes the words of Nietzche: "He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How."

 

He describes poignantly those prisoners who gave up on life, who had lost all hope for a future and were inevitably the first to die. They died less from lack of food or medicine than from lack of hope, lack of something to live for.

 

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 tast for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. 

 

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 ensure, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself or a s the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commans you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run-in the long run, I say!-success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it. "

 

---

 

Those who know how close the 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 wil understand that the sudden loss of hope and courage can have a deadly effect. The ultimate cause of my friends's death was that the expected liberation did not come and he was weverly disappointed. This suddenly lowered his body's resistance against the latent typhus infection. His faith in the future and his wil to live had become paralyzed and his body fell victim to illness.

 

It was simply that the majority of the prisoners had lived in the naive hope that they would be home again by Christmas. As the time drew near and there was no encouraging news, the prisoners lost courage and disapointment overcame them. This had a dangerous influence on thier powers of resistence and a great number of them died. 

 

Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. 

 

What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and further more, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life and instead to think of ourselves as those who were consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. 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 individaul. 

 

Sometimes man may be required simply to accept fate, to bear his cross. 

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. 

His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.

 

---

One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. 

 

To life he can only respond by being responsible. Thus, logotherapy sees in responsibleness the very essence of human existence.