# Man's Search for Meaning  ## Metadata - Author: [[Viktor E. Frankl]] - Full Title: Man's Search for Meaning - Category: #western-philosophy ## Highlights - Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it. ([Location 28](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=28)) - Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you. ([Location 35](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=35)) - “Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. ([Location 80](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=80)) - The prisoner passed from the first to the second phase; the phase of relative apathy, in which he achieved a kind of emotional death. ([Location 310](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=310)) - The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. ([Location 521](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=521)) - Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance. ([Location 532](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=532)) - As the inner life of the prisoner tended to become more intense, he also experienced the beauty of art and nature as never before. Under their influence he sometimes even forgot his own frightful circumstances. ([Location 544](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=544)) - A rich and mighty Persian once walked in his garden with one of his servants. The servant cried that he had just encountered Death, who had threatened him. He begged his master to give him his fastest horse so that he could make haste and flee to Teheran, which he could reach that same evening. The master consented and the servant galloped off on the horse. On returning to his house the master himself met Death, and questioned him, “Why did you terrify and threaten my servant?” “I did not threaten him; I only showed surprise in still finding him here when I planned to meet him tonight in Teheran,” said Death. ([Location 747](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=747)) - Is there no spiritual freedom in regard to behavior and reaction to any given surroundings? Is that theory true which would have us believe that man is no more than a product of many conditional and environmental factors—be they of a biological, psychological or sociological nature? Is man but an accidental product of these? Most important, do the prisoners’ reactions to the singular world of the concentration camp prove that man cannot escape the influences of his surroundings? Does man have no choice of action in the face of such circumstances? ([Location 854](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=854)) - everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. ([Location 862](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=862)) - Dostoevski said once, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.” ([Location 871](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=871)) - If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete. ([Location 879](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=879)) - The Latin word finis has two meanings: the end or the finish, and a goal to reach. ([Location 917](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=917)) - The unemployed worker, for example, is in a similar position. His existence has become provisional and in a certain sense he cannot live for the future or aim at a goal. Research work done on unemployed miners has shown that they suffer from a peculiar sort of deformed time—inner time—which is a result of their unemployed state. ([Location 920](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=920)) - A man who let himself decline because he could not see any future goal found himself occupied with retrospective thoughts. ([Location 933](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=933)) - Instead of taking the camp’s difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised it as something of no consequence. They preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past. Life for such people became meaningless. ([Location 939](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=939)) - Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it. ([Location 963](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=963)) - The prisoner who had lost faith in the future—his future—was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay. ([Location 964](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=964)) - Nietzsche’s words, “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,” ([Location 992](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=992)) - Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual. ([Location 1000](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=1000)) - When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden. ([Location 1009](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=1009)) - Noögenic neuroses do not emerge from conflicts between drives and instincts but rather from existential problems. Among such problems, the frustration of the will to meaning plays a large role. It is obvious that in noögenic cases the appropriate and adequate therapy is not psychotherapy in general but rather logotherapy; a therapy, that is, which dares to enter the specifically human dimension. ([Location 1250](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=1250)) - What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. ([Location 1295](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=1295)) - Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism). A statistical survey recently revealed that among my European students, 25 percent showed a more-or-less marked degree of existential vacuum. Among my American students it was not 25 but 60 percent. ([Location 1311](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=1311)) - The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. ([Location 1362](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=1362)) - “our current mental-hygiene philosophy stresses the idea that people ought to be happy, that unhappiness is a symptom of maladjustment. Such a value system might be responsible for the fact that the burden of unavoidable unhappiness is increased by unhappiness about being unhappy.”4 And in another paper she 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.” ([Location 1399](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=1399)) - A realistic fear, like the fear of death, cannot be tranquilized away by its psychodynamic interpretation; on the other hand, a neurotic fear, such as agoraphobia, cannot be cured by philosophical understanding. However, logotherapy has developed a special technique to handle such cases, too. To understand what is going on whenever this technique is used, we take as a starting point a condition which is frequently observed in neurotic individuals, namely, anticipatory anxiety. It is characteristic of this fear that it produces precisely that of which the patient is afraid. An individual, for example, who is afraid of blushing when he enters a large room and faces many people will actually be more prone to blush under these circumstances. In this context, one might amend the saying “The wish is father to the thought” to “The fear is mother of the event.” ([Location 1495](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=1495)) - “The neurotic who learns to laugh at himself may be on the way to self-management, perhaps to cure.” ([Location 1529](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009U9S6FI&location=1529))