How sorry I was for that fellow and how glad not to be in his skin at that moment, but instead to be sick and able to doze on in the sick quarters! What a lifesaver it was to have two days there, and perhaps even two extra days after those! All.
Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: 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.
He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” I can see in these words a motto which holds true for any psychotherapy. In the Nazi concentration camps, one could have witnessed that those who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfill were most apt to survive. The same conclusion has since been reached by other authors of books on concentration camps, and also by psychiatric investigations into Japanese, North Korean and North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camps.
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. 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.
Having been is the surest kind of being.
No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny.
All that oppressed me at that moment became objective, seen and described from the remote viewpoint of science. By this method I succeeded somehow in rising above the situation, above the sufferings of the moment, and I observed them as if they were already of the past.
In particular, it is the challenge of youth to question the meaning of life. However, the courage to question should be matched by patience. People should be patient until, sooner or later, meaning dawns on them. This is what they should do, rather than taking their lives – or taking refuge in drugs.
Nietzsche: “He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.” He.
In the past, nothing is irretrievably lost but everything irrevocably stored.
Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions. Our.
In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that 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.
Apart from that strange kind of humor, another sensation seized us: curiosity.
Let us consider, for instance, “Sunday neurosis,” that kind of depression which afflicts people who become aware of the lack of content in their lives when the rush of the busy week is over and the void within themselves becomes manifest. Not a few cases of suicide can be traced back to this existential vacuum.
And what about man? Are you sure that the human world is a terminal point in the evolution of the cosmos?
It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future – sub specie aeternitatis. And this is his salvation in the most.
There was neither time nor desire to consider moral or ethical issues. Every man was controlled by one thought only: to keep himself alive for the family waiting for him at home, and to save his friends. With no hesitation, therefore, he would arrange for another prisoner, another “number,” to take his place in the transport.
As soon as the patient stops fighting his obsessions and instead tries to ridicule them by dealing with them in an ironic way – by applying paradoxical intention – the vicious circle is cut, the symptom diminishes and finally atrophies.
That is why existential frustration often eventuates in sexual compensation. We can observe in such cases that the sexual libido becomes rampant in the existential vacuum.