The eminent Austrian psychologist Viktor Frankl went through several death camps during World War II. The attitude helped him not to give up before the trials and not to lose himself – if I fill my life with meaning, then I will survive.
1. 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 different. 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.
2. Heredity is nothing more than the material from which a person builds himself. They are nothing more than stones that can be used or rejected by the builder. But the builder himself is not made of stones.
3. If a person wants to come to himself, his path lies through the world.
4. Motivations and instincts push, while reasons and meanings attract.
5. When a person succumbs to his instincts, he precisely succumbs to instincts; this means that he freely renounces freedom in order to find justification for his lack of freedom.
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6. Only to the extent that we forget ourselves, give ourselves, sacrifice ourselves to the world, to those of its tasks and requirements that permeate our life, only to the extent that we care about the world and objects outside of us, and not only up to ourselves and our own needs, only insofar as we fulfill tasks and requirements, realize meaning and realize values, we also realize and realize ourselves.
7. Love can be defined as the ability to say “you” to someone and also say “yes” to them.
8. Happiness is like a butterfly. The more you catch it, the more it slips away. But if you turn your attention to other things, It will come and sit quietly on your shoulder.
The Austrian philosopher and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, having gone through the school of psychoanalysis, revised his postulates and came to the conclusion that the main driving force of personality is the desire for meaning. Its absence creates an existential vacuum and leads to personality disorders. One example of an existential vacuum is the so-called “Sunday neurosis”, when at the end of the working week we experience a feeling of emptiness and a breakdown. Frankl developed a new direction in humanistic psychology – logotherapy or “treatment with meaning”. Frankl’s most famous book is Saying Yes to Life. Psychologist in a concentration camp”, about the years spent in fascist concentration camps during World War II.