Reading & the Good Life
Join the conversation; February’s theme is The Art of a Meaningful Life (Register here). We are exploring the classic Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl this Friday (10 Feb at Noon EST).
Reading & the Good Life is a space for connection, contemplation, and conversations on the art of living.
This Week’s Selected passages:
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that 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. […]
— Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
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Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him—mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp. Dostoevski said once, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.” These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost. […]
— Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
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Both I and my troubles became the object of an interesting psychoscientific study undertaken by myself. What does Spinoza say in his Ethics?—Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.
The prisoner who had lost faith in the future—his future—was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay. […]
— Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
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What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, 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 being questioned by life—daily and hourly. […]
— Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Who is Viktor Frankl?
Viktor Frankl (born March 26, 1905, Vienna, Austria—died September 2, 1997, Vienna), Austrian psychiatrist and psychotherapist who developed the psychological approach known as logotherapy, widely recognized as the “third school” of Viennese psychotherapy after the “first school” of Sigmund Freud and the “second school” of Alfred Adler. The basis of Frankl’s theory was that an individual's primary motivation is the search for meaning in life and that the primary purpose of psychotherapy should be to help the individual find that meaning.
After earning a doctorate in medicine in 1930, Frankl joined the Am Steinhof psychiatric hospital staff in Vienna, where he headed the female suicide prevention program from 1933 to 1937. He subsequently established a private practice but, being Jewish, was forced to close it after Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938. He then became chief of neurology at Vienna’s Rothschild Hospital, which served the Jewish population. Anti-Semitism was on the rise, however, and in 1942 Frankl and his family were sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where his father perished.
In 1944 the surviving Frankls were taken to Auschwitz, where his mother was exterminated; his wife died later in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. As Frankl observed the brutality and degradation around him, he theorized that those inmates who had some meaning in their lives were more likely to survive; he tried to recreate the manuscript of a book he had written before his capture.
Source: Britannica Encylopedia
If you are available on a Friday (at Noon EST), feel free to drop into one of our Reading & the Good Life meetups (Register here). It’s a highly casual space for connection and conversations on the art of living.
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Thank you for reading; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well,
P.S. Feel free to comment, ask questions, or suggest future reads!