Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
Man's suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. Suffering completely fills the human soul, no mater whether the suffering is great or small.
Bismarck: Life is like being at the dentist. You always think that the worst is still to come, and yet it is over already. -- most men in the camps believed that the real opportunities of life had passed. yet in reality, there wan opportunity and a challenge.
We need to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioend by life -- daily and hourly.
Some authors contend that meanings and values are "nothing but defense mechanisms, reaction formations and sublimations." But as for myself, I would not be willing to live merely for the sake of my "defense mechanisms," nor would I be ready to die merely for the sake of my "reaction formations."
Logotherapy deviates from psychoanalysis insofar as it considers man a being whose main concern consists in fufilling a meaning, rather than in the mere gratification and satisfaction of drives and instincts, or in merely reconciling the conflicting claims of id, ego, and superego.
I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, "homeostasis," i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless states but rather the striving and struggling ofr a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.
Sometimes the frustrated will to meaning is vicariously compensated for by a will to power, including the most primitive form of the will to power, the will to money. In other cases, the places of frustrated will to meaning is taken by the will to pleasure.
Ultimately, a man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recongize that it is HE who is asked.
The true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche. . . by creating a work or doing a deed, by experiencing something or encountering someone, by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.
Burden of unavoidable unhappiness is increased by unhappiness about being unhappy.
Pleasure is, and must remain, the side-effect or by-product, and is destroyed or spoiled to the degress to which it is made a goal in itself.
Life's transitoriness: For in the past, nothing is irretrievably lost but everything is irrevocably store. Thus the transitoriness of our existence in no way makes it meaningless. But it does constitute our responsibleness; for everything hinges upon our realizing the essentially transitory possibilities. Man constantly makes his choice concerning the mass of present potentialities; which of these will be condemned to nonbeing and which will be actualized? Which choice will be made an actuality once and forver, an immortal "footprint in the sands of time"? At any moment, man must decided, for better or for worse, what will be the monument of his existence. Usually, man consider only the stubble field of transitoriness and overlook the full granaries of the past, wherein he had salvaged once and for all his deeds, his joys and also his sufferings. Nothing can be undone, and nothing can be done away with.
Paraxodical intention: as soon as the patient stops fighting his obsessions and instead tries to riducle them by dealing with them in an ironical way -- by applying paradoxical intention -- the vicious circle is cut.
Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of dengenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.
posted by tom 11:04 AM