If it were avoidable, however, the meaningful thing to do would be to remove its cause, be it psychological, biological or political. To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.
The fear of sleeplessness12 results in a hyper-intention to fall asleep, which, in turn, incapacitates the patient to do so. To overcome this particular fear, I usually advise the patient not to try to sleep but rather to try to do just the opposite, that is, to stay awake as long as possible.
Though it may afford momentary psychological relief, it is an illusion which physiologically, surely, must not be without danger.
He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,” could be the guiding motto for all psychotherapeutic.
The neurotic who learns to laugh at himself may be on the way to self-management, perhaps to cure.
As we said before, any attempt to restore a man’s inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal.
We must never forget that we may also find meaning in life even when confronted with a hopeless situation, when facing a fate that cannot be changed.
It was in the nature of this sacrifice that it should appear to be pointless in the normal world, the world of material success.
In actual fact, boredom is now causing, and certainly bringing to psychiatrists, more problems to solve than distress.
The logotherapist’s role consists of widening and broadening the visual field of the patient so that the whole spectrum of potential meaning becomes conscious and visible to him.
A statement once made by Edith Weisskopf-Joelson: “Although traditional psychotherapy has insisted that therapeutic practices have to be based on findings on etiology, it is possible that certain factors might cause neuroses during early childhood and that entirely different factors might relieve neuroses during adulthood.
Not every conflict is necessarily neurotic; some amount of conflict is normal and healthy.
At other times it is more advantageous for him to make use of an opportunity for contemplation and to realize assets in this way.
Doesn’t the final meaning of life, too, reveal itself, if at all, only at its end, on the verge of death? And doesn’t this final meaning, too, depend on whether or not the potential meaning of each single situation has been actualized to the best of the respective individual’s knowledge and belief?
Disgust, horror and pity are emotions that our spectator could not really feel anymore. The sufferers, the dying and the dead, became such common place sights to him after a few weeks of camp life that they could not move him anymore.
Logotherapy is neither teaching nor preaching. It is as far removed from logical reasoning as it is from moral exhortation. To put it figuratively, the role played by a logotherapist is that of an eye specialist rather than that of a painter. A painter tries to convey to us a picture of the world as he sees it; an ophthalmologist tries to enable us to see the world as it really is.
Man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life. That is why man is even ready to suffer, on the condition, to be sure, that his suffering has a meaning.
I said that each of us had to ask himself what irreplaceable losses he had suffered up to then. I speculated that for most of them these losses had really been few. Whoever was still alive had reason for hope. Health, family, happiness, professional abilities, fortune, position in society – all these were things that could be achieved again or restored.
Frankl approvingly quotes the words of Nietzsche, “He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.
Whatever we had gone through could still be an asset to us in the future. And.