Download EXCERPTS FROM THE WRITINGS OF VIKTOR

EXCERPTS FROM THE WRITINGS OF VIKTOR FRANKL
From Man's Search for Meaning: Frankl is found of quoting Nietzsche, "He who has a
way to live can bear with almost any how." In the concentration comp every circumstance
conspires to make the prisoner lose his hold. All familiar goals in life are snatched away. What
alone remains is "the last of human freedoms" - the ability to choose one's attitude in a given set
of circumstances (p xi) Unlike many European existentialist, Frankl is neither pessimistic nor
antireligious. On the contrary , for a writer who faces fully the ubiquity of suffering and the
forces of evil, he takes a surprisingly hopeful view of man’s capacity to transcend his
predicament and discover an adequate guiding truth. (p xii)
The religious interest of the prisoners, as far and as soon as it developed, was the most
sincere imaginable. The depth and vigor of religious belief often surprised and moved a new
arrival. Most impressive in this connection were improvised prayers or services in the corner of
a hut, or in the darkness of he locked cattle truck in which we were brought back from a distant
work site, tired, hungry and frozen in our ragged clothing. (p 54)
The truth - that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I
grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief can
impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. (p 59)
Humor was another of the soul's weapons in the fight for self-preservation. It is well
known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and
an ability to rise above any situation even if only for a few seconds. (p 68)
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. But there is also purpose in that life which is
almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of
behavior: namely, in man's attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces. A
creative life and a life of enjoyment are banned to him. But not only creativeness and enjoyment
are meaningful. If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering.
Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death
human life can not be complete.
The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which
he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity-even under the most difficult circumstances to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter
fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an
animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forego the opportunities of
attaining the values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is
worthy of his sufferings or not. Do not think that these considerations are unworldly and too far
removed from real life. It is true that only a few people are capable of reaching such high
standards. Of the prisoners only a few kept their full inner liberty and obtained those values
which their suffering afforded, but even one such example is sufficient proof that man's inner
strength may raise him above his outward fate. Such men are not only in concentration camps.
Everywhere man is confronted with fate, with the chance of achieving something through his
own suffering. (p 106-107)
I once had a dramatic demonstration of the close link between the loss of faith in the
future and this dangerous giving up. F., my senior block warden, a fairly well-known composer
and librettist, confided in me one day: "I would like to tell you something, Doctor. I have had a
strange dream. A voice told me that I could wish for something, that I should only say what I
wanted to know, and all my questions would be answered. What do you think I asked? That I
would like to know when the war would be over for me. You know what I mean, Doctor-for me!
I wanted to know when we, when our camp, would be liberated and our sufferings come to an
end." "And when did you have this dream?" I asked. "In February, I945," he answered. It was
then the beginning of March. "What did your dream voice answer?" Furtively he whispered to
me, "March thirtieth." When F. told me about his dream, he was still full of hope and convinced
that the voice of his dream would be right. But as the promised day drew nearer, the war news
which reached our camp made it appear very unlikely that we would be free on the promised
date. On March twenty-ninth, F. suddenly became ill and ran a high temperature. On March
thirtieth, the day his prophecy had told him that the war and suffering would be Over for him, he
became delirious and lost consciousness. On March thirty-first, he was dead. To all outward
appearances, he died of typhus.
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 will understand that the
sudden loss of hope and courage can have a deadly effect. The ultimate cause of my friend's
death was that the expected liberation did not come and he was severely disappointed. This
suddenly lowered his body's resistance against the latent typhus infection. His faith in the future
and his will to live had become paralyzed and his body fell victim to illness-and thus the voice
of his dream was right after all. (p 118-120)
He talked about the many comrades who had died in the last few days, either of sickness
or of suicide. But he also mentioned what may have been the real reason for their deaths: giving
up hope. (p 129)
The existential vacuum is a widespread phenomenon of the twentieth century. This is
understandable; it may b due to a twofold loss that man had to undergo since he became a truly
human being. At the beginning of human history, man lost some of the basic animal instincts in
which an animal's behavior is embedded and by which it is secured. Such security, like Paradise,
is closed to man forever; man has to make choices. In addition to this however, man has suffered
another loss in his recent development; the traditions that had buttressed his behavior are now
rapidly diminishing. Not instinct tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even
know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism)
or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism). (p 167)
Anticipatory anxiety is characteristic of this fear that it produces precisely that of which
the patient is afraid. An individual, for example, who is afraid of blushing when he enters a large
room and faces many people, will actually blush. In this context, one might transpose the saying,
"the wish is, father to the thought" to "the fear is mother of he event." (p 193)
From The Doctor and the Soul: Man lives in three dimensions: the somatic, the mental, and the
spiritual. The spiritual dimension cannot be ignored, for it is what makes us human. To be
concerned about the meaning of life is not necessarily a sign of disease or of neurosis. It may be;
but then again, spiritual agony may have very little connection with a disease of the psyche. The
proper diagnosis can be made only by someone who can see the spiritual side of man.
Psychoanalysis speaks of the pleasure principle, individual psychology of status drive.
The pleasure principle might be termed the will-to-pleasure the status drive is equivalent to the
will-to power. But where do we hear of that which most deeply inspires man; where is the innate
desire to give as much meaning as possible to one's life, to actualized as many values as
possible--what I should like to call the will-to-meaning?
This will-to-meaning is the most human phenomenon of all, since an animal certainly
never worries about the meaning of its existence. Yet psychotherapy would turn this will-tomeaning into a human frailty neurotic complex. A therapist who ignores man's spiritual side,
and is thus forced to ignore the will-to-meaning, is giving away one of his most valuable assets.
For it is to this will that a psychotherapist should appeal. Again and again we have seen that an
appeal to continue life, to survive the most unfavorable conditions, can be made only when such
survival appears to have a meaning. That meaning must be specific and personal, a meaning
which can be realized by this one person alone. For we must never forget that every man is
unique in the universe. (p xvi) Men can give meaning to their lives by realizing what I call
creative values, by achieving task. But they can also give meaning to their live by realizing
experiential values, by experiencing the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, or by knowing one
single human being in all his uniqueness. And to experience one human being as unique means
to love him. But even a man who finds himself in the greatest distress, in which neither activity
nor creativity can bring values to life, nor experience give meaning to it - even such a man can
still give his life a meaning by the way he faces his fate, his distress. By taking his unavoidable
suffering upon himself he may yet realize values.
Thus, life has a meaning to the last breath. For the possibility of realizing values by the very
attitude with which we face our unchangeable suffering - this possibility exists to the very last
moment. I call such values attitudinal values. (p xix)
When it comes to evaluating people, collectivism leads us astray. For in place of
responsible persons, the collectivist idea substitutes a mere type, and in place of personal
responsibility, substitutes conformity to norms. (p 73) Destiny appears to man in three principal
forms: (1) natural disposition or endowment, what Tandler has called "somatic fate"; (2) as his
situation, the total of his external environment; (3) disposition and situation together make up
man's position. Toward this he "takes a position"--that is, he form an attitude. This "position
taken" or attitude is - in contrast I basically destined "position given" matter of free choice.
Proof of this is the fact that man can "change his position," take a attitude (as soon as we include
the time dimension in our scheme, since a change of position means an alteration of attitude
course of time). Included under change of position in this is, for example, everything we call
education, learning and self-improvement, but also psychotherapy in the broadest sense of the
word, and such inner revolutions as religious conversion. (p 80)
From The Will to Meaning: A person is free to shape his own character, and man is
responsible for what he may have made of himself. What matters is not the features of our
character or the drives and instincts per es, but rather the stand we take toward them. And the
capacity t take such a stand is what makes us human beings. (p 17)
Suffering is only one aspect of what I call "The Tragic Triad" of human existence. This
triad is made up of pain, guilt, and death. There is no human being who may say that he has not
failed, that he does not suffer, and that he will not die.
The reader may notice that here the third "triad" is introduced. The first triad is
constituted by freedom of will, will to meaning, and meaning to life. Meaning of life is
composed of the second triad - creative , experiential, and attitudinal values. And attitudinal
values are subdivided into the third triad - meaningful attitudes to pain, guilt, and death.
Speaking of the "tragic triad" should not mislead the reader to assume that logotherapy is
as pessimistic as existentialism is said to be. Rather logotherapy is an optimistic approach to life,
for it teaches that there are no tragic and negative aspects which could not be by the stand one
takes to them transmuted into a positive accomplishment. (p 73)
From Psychotherapy and existentialism: Logotherapy exceeds and surpasses existential
analysis, ...to the extent that it is essentially more than analysis of existence, of being, and
involves more than a mere analysis of its subject. Logotherapy is concerned not only with being
but also with meaning; not only with ontos but also with logos; and this feature may well
account for the activistic, therapeutic orientation of logotherapy. In other words, logotherapy is
not only analysis but also therapy. (p 1)
A good sense of humor is inherent in this technique. This is understandable since we
know that humor is a paramount way of putting distance between something and oneself. One
might say as well, that humor helps man to rise above his own predicament by allowing him to
look at himself in a more detached way. So humor would also have to located in the noetic
dimension. After all, no animal is able to laugh, least of all at himself.. (p 4)
In fact, it is my conviction that man should not, indeed cannot, struggle for identity in a
direct way; he rather finds identity to the extent to which he commits himself to something
beyond himself. No one has put it as cogently as Karl Jaspers did when he said, "What man is,
he ultimately becomes through the cause which he made his own." (p 9)
Man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes - within limits of endowment and
environment - he has made himself. In the living laboratories of the concentration camps we
watched comrades behaving like swine while others like saints. Man has both these
potentialities within himself. Which one he actualizes depends on decision, not on conditions. It
is time that this decision quality of human existence be included in our definition man. Our
generation has come to know man as he really is: the being that has invented the gas chambers
of Auschwitz, and also the being who entered those gas chambers upright, the Lord's Prayer or
the Shema Yisrael on his lips. (p 35)
To this extent man is not only responsible for what he does but also for what is, inasmuch as
man does not only behave according to what he is but also becomes what he is according to how
he behaves. In the last analysis, man has become what he has made of himself. Instead of being
fully conditioned by any conditions, he is constructing himself. (p 61)