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Viktor Frankl, Man in search of meaning, M., Progress, 1990, source vikent.ru
“Sigmund Freud once said: “Let’s try to put a number of very different people in the same conditions of hunger. With the increase of hunger, all individual differences will be erased, and instead of them there will be a uniform expression of indomitable impulse.
In the concentration camps, however, the opposite was true. People have become more diverse. The masks were torn from the animals — and from the saints. The hunger was the same, but the people were different. Calories didn’t count.
For example, one of the resulting groups was
“Here I mean that minority of prisoners who are, so to speak, important people in the camp — elders and cooks, storekeepers and “camp policemen”. All of them successfully compensated for the primitive feeling of inferiority; they did not feel declassed in any way, like most ordinary prisoners, on the contrary: they finally succeeded. At times, they literally had delusions of grandeur in miniature. The reaction of the angry and envious majority to the behavior of this minority was expressed in various ways, sometimes in angry anecdotes. Here is one of them. Two prisoners are talking to each other about a third, who belongs to the “successful” group, and one of them remarks: “I knew him when he was still just the president of the largest bank in …, but now he is already aiming for the post of headman!” .
On the inner life of prisoners in a concentration camp
“Usually a person lives in the realm of life; in the concentration camp, people lived in the realm of death. In the realm of life, one can end life by committing suicide; in a concentration camp one could go only to the spiritual life. Only those could leave the realm of death who could lead a spiritual life, writes Cohen. — If someone stopped appreciating the spiritual, there was no salvation, and he was finished. A strong attraction to life in the absence of spiritual life led only to suicide. “Many authors,” Cohen continues, “consent that it matters a great deal whether a prisoner lives a spiritual life in any form.” […] If a prisoner found that he could no longer bear the reality of camp life, he would spiritual life, the possibility of an exit, which is difficult to overestimate, the possibility of going into the spiritual realm, which the SS is not able to destroy … The spiritual life of the prisoner strengthened him, helped him to adapt, and thereby greatly increased his chances of survival.
Who survived the concentration camp?
“Einstein once remarked that one who feels his life is devoid of meaning is not only unhappy, but also hardly viable. Indeed, the desire for meaning has what in American psychology has been called «survival value.» Not the least of the lessons I learned from Auschwitz and Dachau was that The greatest chances of surviving even in such an extreme situation were, I would say, those who were sent to the future, to the work that awaited them, to the meaning that they wanted to realize. Later, American psychiatrists received confirmation of this on the material of prisoners of war who were in Japanese, North Korean and North Vietnamese camps.
Shouldn’t what is true of individuals be true of humanity as a whole? And should we not, within the framework of so-called peace studies, pay attention to the question: does not the only chance of mankind for survival lie in a common task for all, in one common striving for one common meaning?
Let’s remember where we started. Each time has its own neuroses, and each time needs its own psychotherapy. Now we know more: only a rehumanized psychotherapy is able to understand the signs of the times — and respond to the demands of the times. Only a rehumanized psychotherapy can deal with the depersonalizing and dehumanizing tendencies that are taking over everywhere. So can we give today’s existentially frustrated man a meaning? After all, we should rejoice already if it is not taken away from today’s person, introducing reductionist schemes into his consciousness. Can we make sense? Is it possible to revive lost traditions or even lost instincts?”
It is characteristic that in his publications V. Frankl repeatedly quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche: «Those who have something to live for can endure almost any how.»