Reading & the Good Life
Join the conversation; every Friday at Noon EST, Perennial Meditations readers are welcome to gather for casual conversations on the art of living. February’s theme is The Art of a Meaningful Life (Register here). We are exploring selected passages from the classic Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.
Reading & the Good Life is a space for connection, contemplation, and conversations on the art of living.
This Week’s Selected Passages:
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. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden. […]
— Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
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They must not lose hope but should keep their courage in the certainty that the hopelessness of our struggle did not detract from its dignity and its meaning. I said that someone looks down on each of us in difficult hours—a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or a God—and he would not expect us to disappoint him. He would hope to find us suffering proudly—not miserably—knowing how to die. […]
— Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
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What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him. […]
— Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
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Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. […]
— 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!