This is one of the few books that I truly intend to reread, again and again. Frankl's writing is straight forward, well balanced and totally relatableThis is one of the few books that I truly intend to reread, again and again. Frankl's writing is straight forward, well balanced and totally relatable. For some reason, it made me think of Reich's Listen, Little Man, and honestly, I'd rather reread this one a thousand times that read the other to the end (yes, I dnf it). Frankl's approach is much more to my taste: “No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.”
We live in an age when the feeling that one's life is meaningless is rampant even compared to the recent past. Many compensate by drowning themselves in their career, others escape into religion, alcohol and/or drugs etc as a response to a sense of life's meaninglessness or futility.
Frankl writes that our struggle -even our despair -over finding meaning in our lives is not an psychiatric illness, or even a precursor to one. Potential readers of this book will not find "The Meaning of Life". What they will find is the story of a man who was compelled to develop the tools to find his own meaning, his 'why'. His method, logotherapy, manages an incredible balance. It does not put man himself at the center of the universe, thus avoiding the kind of narcissistic self-reflection common to much of the therapeutic literature today. Yet, it does not sweep man aside as irrelevant. Instead, Frankl argues that we have an incredible power to shape our attitudes and responses to the challenges life presents us and that we inevitably grow thanks to these challenges. "Every freedom may be taken away from a man but one; the freedom to choose what attitude he will take towards his conditions."
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. He 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. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him.
Is suffering indispensable to the discovery of meaning? In no way. I only insist meaning is available in spite of - nay, even through suffering, provided . . . that the suffering is unavoidable. If it is avoidable, the meaningful thing to do is to remove its cause, for unnecessary suffering is masochistic rather than heroic. If, on the other hand, one cannot change a situation that causes his suffering, he can still choose his attitude.
I loved the analogy towards the end of the book. Think of your life as a movie consisting of thousands upon thousands of pictures, each one carrying a meaning. In order to understand the whole film, you first have to take into account each of those individual pictures. Frankl encourages us to deal with our lives in the same way....more
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