Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being. We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. It is only thus that we evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency.
What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life – daily and hourly.
And yet is not this transitoriness a reminder that challenges us to make the best possible use of each moment of our lives? It certainly is, and hence my imperative: Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now. In.
To escape into the mass is to disburden oneself of individual responsibility. As soon as someone acts as if her were a mere part of the whole, and as if only this whole counts, he can enjoy the sensation of throwing off some of the burden of his responsibility. This tendency to flee from responsibility is the motif of all collectivism. True community is in essence the community of of responsible persons; mere mass is the sum of depersonalized entities.
What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him? “No, thank you,” he will think. “Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy.
What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.
In psychiatry there is a certain condition known as “delusion of reprieve.” The condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute.
One may demand heroism only of a single person and that is oneself.
We are reminded again of that remark of Goethe’s which we have already quoted, and which we called the finest maxim for any kind of psychotherapy: “If we take people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat them as if they were what they ought to be, we help them to become what they are capable of becoming.
Logotherapy deviates from psychoanalysis insofar as it considers man a being whose main concern consists in fulfilling a meaning, rather than in the mere gratification and satisfaction of drives and instincts, or in merely reconciling the conflicting claims of id, ego and superego, or in the mere adaptation and adjustment to society and environment.
We give life meaning not only through our actions but also through loving and, finally, through suffering. Because how human beings deal with the limitation of their possibilities regarding how it affects their actions and their ability to love, how they behave under these restrictions – the way in which they accept their suffering under such restrictions – in all of this they still remain capable of fulfilling human values.
One of the prisoners, who on his arrival marched with a long column of new inmates from the station to the camp, told me later that he had felt as though he were marching at his own funeral. His life had seemed to him absolutely without future. He regarded it as over and done, as if he had already died.
Every situation is distinguished by its uniqueness, and there is always only one right answer to the problem posed by the situation at hand. 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.
All psychotherapy is ultimately something of an art. There is always an irrational element in psychotherapy. The doctor’s artistic intuition and sensitivity is of considerable importance. The patient, too, brings an irrational element into the relationship: his individuality.
But Frankl’s concern is less with the question of why most died than it is with the question of why anyone at all survived.
All this came to my mind when I saw the photographs in the magazine. When I explained, my listeners understood why I did not find the photograph so terrible: the people shown on it might not have been so unhappy after all.
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.
It was, therefore, in an attempt to save one’s own skin that one literally tried to submerge into the crowd.
Freedom is not something we “have” and therefore can lose; freedom is what we “are.
A man who let himself decline because he could not see any future goal found himself occupied with retrospective thoughts.