Book: Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl
Commemorating being in print for 75 years., Man’s search for meaning is truly a must read for all, a classic on love, hope, responsibility and inner freedom - path to purposeful and meaningful living even in the darkest time by Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl who founded Logotherapy based on his experiences surviving Nazi concentration camps.
Logotherapy is the third school of Psychotherapy after being established by Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler. It created the foundational principles for Positive psychology. He describes search for a life’s meaning as the central human motivational force, and even in darkest times humans have the ability to choose their attitude to any given situation and that is what drives life forward. Looking for purpose and meaning, as he describes, is the '“mass neurosis of modern times.”
Grateful for my positive psychology teacher at UCLA, Emily Van Sonnenberg, M.A.P.P, who had included this book as a must read and a part of the curriculum of the course ‘Happiness: Theory, Research and Application in Positive Psychology “ On every page there is advice and lesson that we can take with us and work on applying to our everyday life.
In today’s world, when we feel everyday we face obstacles and adversities as well as witness darkness in the corruption of governance of the countries as well as human behaviour in harming innocent lives and our living habitat,; Viktor Frankl certainly reminds us as a survivor of holocaust that even in the most undeniable sufferings that is beyond our imagination, there is a path to light and we as humans have the power to seek it and more importantly keep it alive. There is so much to be grateful for and focus on positive thoughts rather than the soul diminishing thoughts that we are pushed into. Not to be blind to darkness, but to enlighten it.
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”
Some of his LIFE teachings include:
Having control over one’s actions and thoughts is the ultimate freedom - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way
Most distinct human qualities are: Spirituality, Freedom and Responsibility
Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone's task is unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.
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 being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must 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 individual.
The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest
For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.
Thank you