Logotherapy says that mental health arises when we learn how to close the gap between what we ARE and what we COULD BECOME. Viktor Frankl, a survivor of concentration camps of Nazi Germany, discovered, that even in the most terrible circumstances, people still have the freedom to choose how they see their circumstances and create meaning out of them.
But how would we do it?
1 Creating a work or doing a deed. > this is a classic source of “life purpose” in the self-help literature. Happiness is a by-product of forgetting ourselves in a task that draws on all our imagination and talents.
2 Experiencing something or encountering someone (love). > this makes experience ( inner an outer ) a legitimate alternative to achievement in a society built around achieving.
3 The attitude we take to unavoidable suffering. > Frankl says: “only the unfulfillment of potential is meaningless, not life itself.”
Freedom is only one half of the equation. The other half is responsibility to act on it.
Born in 1905 in Vienna. Before Second World Woar he graduated with two doctorates in medicine and philosophy from the University of Vienna. During the war he spent three years at Auschwitz, Dachau, and other concentration camps. *Man’s search for meaning* (1959) was written on Frankl’s return to Vienna after liberation, and was dictated over nine years.
The ensuing years years were spent as chief of the neurology department of the Policlinic Hospital, Vienna, but in the 1960s he moved to the United States. He held visitng professorships at Harvard and other US universities and did over 50 American lecture tours. Throughout his life he was a keen mountain climber.
Frankl wrote more than 30 books. And there have been at least 145 books and more than 1400 journal articels written about Frankl and logotherapy. Frankl himself received 28 honorary degrees.
Viktor Frankl died in 1997, in the same week as Mother Teresa and Princess Diana.
