A Holocaust survivor shows that even inside the worst suffering, life can still hold meaning.
Frankl saw prisoners keep this inner freedom in the worst place on earth — walking through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread.
Frankl broke with Freud (pleasure) and Adler (power): the 'will to meaning' — a task, a cause, a person — is what actually pulls a human life forward.
Nietzsche's line, made the motto of Frankl's book: prisoners who still had someone waiting, or a work to finish, kept their inner hold on life.
Do a deed or create something significant; experience something fully or love someone; and when pain cannot be changed, take a worthy attitude toward it.
Frankl is blunt: if pain can be removed, remove it; suffering needlessly is masochistic, not heroic. What truly cannot be avoided can be transformed into an achievement.
Frankl: both ensue as side effects of self-transcendence — forgetting yourself by giving yourself to a cause greater than you, or to a person you love.
The rest of this summary — and the one thing to do this week — is in the PDF.
Download the free PDFViktor Frankl was a psychiatrist in Vienna when the Nazis deported him in 1942. Over three years he survived four concentration camps, including Auschwitz. He lost his parents, his brother, and his pregnant wife, and the manuscript of his life's work, sewn into the lining of his coat. Liberated in 1945, he wrote this book in nine days. Part one tells what the camps were really like. Part two explains the therapy he built from it, called logotherapy. A postscript added later makes the case for what he called tragic optimism.
The camp chapters are not mainly about cruelty. They are about the inner life of prisoners: the shock, then the numbness, and the strange small freedoms that remained - a sunset, a joke, the memory of a wife's face. Frankl noticed that the prisoners most likely to survive were not always the strongest. They were the ones who still had a reason: someone waiting, a task unfinished.
