It must be kept in mind, however, that optimism is not anything to be commanded or ordered. One cannot even force oneself to be optimistic indiscriminately, against all odds, against all hope. And what is true for hope is also true for the other two components of the triad inasmuch as faith and love cannot be commanded or ordered either.
Ser hombre implica dirigirse hacia algo o alguien distinto de uno mismo, bien sea para realizar un valor, bien para alcanzar un sentido o para encontrar a otro ser humano.
The fear of sleeplessness12 results in a hyper-.
By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system.
Even if things take such a good in one of a thousand cases, who can guarantee that in your case it will not happen one day, sooner or later? But in the first place, you have to survive in order to see that day dawn, and from now on the responsibility for survival does not leave you.
At the same time, logotherapy defocuses all the vicious-circle formations and feedback mechanisms which play such a great role in the development of neuroses. Thus, the typical self-centeredness of the neurotic is broken up instead of being continually fostered and reinforced.
Life is not something, it is the opportunity for something!
He would hope to find us suffering proudly – not miserably – knowing how to die.
During psychoanalysis, the patient must lie down on a couch and tell you things which sometimes are very disagreeable to tell.” Whereupon I immediately retorted with the following improvisation: “Now, in logotherapy the patient may remain sitting erect but he must hear things which sometimes are very disagreeable to hear.
But what about human liberty? Is there no spiritual freedom in regard to behavior and reaction to any given surroundings?
Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.
To say yes to life is not only meaningful under all circumstances – because life itself is – but it is also possible under all circumstances.
Thus the illusions some of us still held were destroyed one by one, and then, quite unexpectedly, most of us were overcome by a grim sense of humor. We knew that we had nothing to lose except our so ridiculously naked lives.
I could not change his fate; I could not revive his wife. But in that moment I did succeed in changing his attitude toward his unalterable fate inasmuch as from that time on he could at least see a meaning in his suffering.
In accepting this challenge to suffer bravely, life has a meaning up to the last moment, and it retains this meaning literally to the end.
In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.
Logos is a Greek word which denotes “meaning”.
Not every conflict is necessarily neurotic; some amount of conflict is normal and healthy. In a similar sense suffering is not always a pathological phenomenon; rather than being a symptom of neurosis, suffering may well be a human achievement, especially if the suffering grows out of existential frustration.
To achieve personal meaning, he says, one must transcend subjective pleasures by doing something that “points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself... by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to loved.“.
He describes poignantly those prisoners who gave up on life, who had lost all hope for a future and were inevitably the first to die. They died less from lack of food or medicine than from lack of hope, lack of something to live for. By contrast, Frankl kept himself alive and kept hope alive by summoning up thoughts of his wife and the prospect of seeing her again, and by dreaming at one point of lecturing after the war about the psychological lessons to be learned from the Auschwitz experience.