logotherapy

quotes from man's search for meaning by viktor frankl

"success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it."

"there is something which seems to me to be even an even more erroneous and dangerous assumption [than pan-sexualism], namely, that which i call 'pan-determinism.' by that i mean the view of man which disregards his capacity to take a stand toward any conditions whatsoever. man is not fully conditioned and determined but rather determines himself whether he gives in to conditions or stands up to them. in other words, man is ultimately self-determining."

"fifty years ago, i published a study devoted to a specific type of depression i had diagnosed in cases of young patients suffering from what i called 'unemployment neurosis.' and i could show that this neurosis really originated in a twofold erroneous identification: being jobless was equated with being useless, and being useless was equated with having a meaningless life. consequently, whenever i succeeded in persuading the patients to volunteer in youth organizations, adult education, public libraries and the like -- in other words, as soon as they could fill their abundant free time with some sort of unpaid but meaningful activity -- their depression disappeared although their economic situation had not changed and their hunger was the same."

"as logotherapy teaches, there are three main avenues on which one arrives at meaning in life. the first is by creating a work or by doing a deed. the second is by experiencing something or encountering someone; in other words, meaning can be found not only in work but also in love. edith weisskopf-joelson observed in this context that the logotherapeutic 'notion that experiencing an be as valuable as achieving is therapeuitc because it compensates for our one-sided emphasis on the external world of achievement at the expense of the internal world of experience.'

most important, however, is the third avenue to meaning in life: even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by so doing change himself. he may turn a personal tragedy into a triumph. again it was edith weisskopf-joelson who. . . once expressed the hope that logotherapy 'may help counteract certain unhealthy trends in the present-day culture of the united states, where the incurable sufferer is given very little opportunity to be proud of his suffering and to consider it ennobling rather than degrading' so that 'he is not only unhappy, but also ashamed of being unhappy.'"

"just as life remains potentially meaningful under any conditions, even those which are the most miserable, so too does the value of each and every person stay with him or her, and it does so because it is based on the values that he or she has realized in the past, and is not contingent on the usefulness that he or she may or may not retain in the present.

more specifically, this usefully is usually defined in terms of functioning for the benefit of society. but today's society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. it virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in doing so blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. if one is not cognizant of this difference and hold that an individual's value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of hitler's program, that is to say, 'mercy' killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they suffer.

confounding the dignity of man with mere usefulness arises from a conceptual confusion that in turn may be traced back to the contemporary nihilism transmitted on many an academic campus and many an analytical couch. even in the setting of training analyses such an indoctrination may take place. nihilism does not contend that there is nothing, but it states that everything is meaningless. and george a. sargent was right when he promulgated the concept of 'learned meaninglessness.' he himself remembered a therapist who said, 'george, you must realize that the world is a joke. there is no justice, everything is random. only when you realize this will you understand how silly it is to take yourself seriously. there is no grand purpose in the universe. it just is. there's no particular meaning in what decision you make today about how to act.'

one must not generalize such a criticism. in principle, training is indispensable, but if so, therapists should see their task in immunizing the trainee against nihilism rather than inoculating him with the cynicism that is a defense mechanism against their own nihilism."