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Viktor Frankl's wife, father, mother and brother died in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Enduring extreme hunger, cold and brutality, first in Auschwitz then Dachau, Frankl himself was under constant threat of going to the gas ovens. He lost every physical belonging on his first day in the camps, and was forced to surrender a scientific manuscript he considered his life's work.
A favorite quote of Frankl's was Nietzsche's 'He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how'. The men who decided they could go on no longer could be recognised by the smoking of their last cigarettes, which could otherwise have been traded for a scrap of food. These men had decided life held nothing more for them. Yet this thinking strikes Frankl as a terrible mistake. We are not here to judge life according to what we expected from it and what it has delivered - rather, he realises, we must find the courage to ask what life expects of us, day by day. Our task is not merely to survive, but to find the guiding truth specific to us and our situation, which can sometimes only be revealed in the worst suffering. Indeed, Frankl says that '...rather than being a symptom of neurosis, suffering may well be a human achievement'.
Man's Search for Meaning has sold over nine million copies and has been translated into 24 languages. It was voted one of America's ten most influential books by the Library of Congress. Yet Frankl, who originally wanted the book to be published with only his prisoner number on the cover, states that he does not see the book as a great achievement. Its success is 'an expression of the misery of our time', revealing the ravenous hunger for meaningful existence.
Frankl's experiences helped provide the basis for the development of a new school of psychotherapy, logotherapy, following Freud's psychoanalysis and Adler's individual psychology. Whereas psychoanalysis requires a person's introspection and self-centredness to reveal the basis of their neurosis, logotherapy tries to take the person out of themselves and see their life in a broader perspective. Where psychoanalysis focuses on the 'will to pleasure', and Adlerian psychology on the 'will to power', logotherapy sees the prime motivating force in human beings to be a will to meaning.
In logotherapy, existential distress is not neurosis or mental disease, but a sign that we are becoming more human in the desire for meaning. In contrast to Freud or Adler, Frankl chose not to see life simply as the satisfaction of drives or instincts, or even in becoming 'well-adjusted' to society. Instead, he believed that the outstanding feature of human beings is their free will.
Frankl says that although we can statistically work out the likelihood of change, self-fulfilment or mental health amongst the population, and draw generalities about the human psyche, we can never predict the behaviour of an individual. Humans are human because they live for ideals and values.
Aware that most of us would never even come close to such a horrible fate as the gas chambers, Frankl used it as a reference point, a symbol of personal responsibility that could guide the decisions we make in our everyday lives. No matter what the circumstances, his book says, we can be free.
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