But the prisoner who had passed into the second stage of his psychological reactions did not avert his eyes any more. By then his feelings were blunted, and he watched unmoved.
The destiny a person suffers therefore has a twofold meaning: to be shaped where possible, and to be endured where necessary.
Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth.
Lessing who once said, “There are things which must cause you to lose your reason or you have none to lose.
The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity – even under the most difficult circumstances – to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal.
Frankl wondered whether “there may be such a thing as autobibliotherapy – healing through reading.” Frankl’s.
I called to the Lord from my narrow prison and He answered me in the freedom of space.
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?
Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost. The typical reply with which such a man rejected all encouraging arguments was, “I have nothing to expect from life any more.” What sort of answer can one give to that? What.
Gordon W. Allport’s book, The Individual and His Religion:.
Gordon W. Allport’s book, The Individual and His Religion: “The neurotic who learns to laugh at himself may be on the way to self-management, perhaps to cure.
We had to strive to lead them back to this truth, or the consequences would have been much worse than the loss of a few thousand stalks of oats.
He was the only man I ever encountered in my whole life whom I would dare to call a Mephistophelean being, a satanic figure.
El humor es otra de las armas del alma en su lucha por la supervivencia.
A man who let himself decline because he could not see any future goal found himself occupied with retrospective thoughts. In a different connection, we have already spoken of the tendency there was to look into the past, to help make the present, with all its horrors, less real. But in robbing the present of its reality there lay a certain danger. It became easy to overlook the opportunities to make something positive of camp life, opportunities.
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.
Having shown the beneficial impact of meaning orientation, I turn to the detrimental influence of that feeling of which so many patients complain today, namely, the feeling of the total and ultimate meaninglessness of their lives. They lack the awareness of a meaning worth living for. They are haunted by the experience of their inner emptiness, a void within themselves; they are caught in that situation which I have called the “existential vacuum.
If someone had seen our faces on the journey from Auschwitz to a Bavarian camp as we beheld the mountains of Salzburg with their summits glowing in the sunset, through the little barred windows of the prison carriage, he would never have believed that those were the faces of men who had given up all hope of life and liberty. Despite that factor – or maybe because of it – we were carried away by nature’s beauty.
An American woman once confronted me with the reproach, “How can you still write some of your books in German, Adolf Hitler’s language?
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. We, too, clung to shreds of hope and believed to the last moment that it would not be so bad.