There’s More to Life Than Being Happy

The Atlantic, from Washington DC, EMILY ESFAHANI SMITH,  worte about Victor Frankl,  a jew in the 20th century ,who survive the KZ Theresienstadt in Germany.

The article show you thougths about live meaning.

I know Victor Frankl from my work in grief supervision. Frankl was realy sicnificant in his attitudes. Maybe Frankl was the first psychiatrist, who was in ervery case positive and no aggravating circumstances give him cause to despair. A realy great idea for postive thinking und postive psychology in reference of mental resillience.

Qutation of THE ATLATNIK

„In his bestselling 1946 book, Man’s Search for Meaning, which he wrote in nine days about his experiences in the camps, Frankl concluded that the difference between those who had lived and those who had died came down to one thing: Meaning, an insight he came to early in life. When he was a high school student, one of his science teachers declared to the class, „Life is nothing more than a combustion process, a process of oxidation.“ Frankl jumped out of his chair and responded, „Sir, if this is so, then what can be the meaning of life?“

As he saw in the camps, those who found meaning even in the most horrendous circumstances were far more resilient to suffering than those who did not. „Everything can be taken from a man but one thing,“ Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning, „the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.“ Klick here to read more

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Wikipedia wrote about Victor Frankl:

Viktor Emil Frankl (26 March 1905 – 2 September 1997)^[1][2] was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist as well as a Holocaust survivor. Frankl was the founder of logotherapy, which is a form of existential analysis, the „Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy“. His best-selling book Man’s Search for Meaning (published under a different title in 1959: From Death-Camp to Existentialism, and originally published in 1946 as Trotzdem Ja Zum Leben Sagen: Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager, meaning Nevertheless, Say „Yes“ to Life: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp) chronicles his experiences as a concentration camp inmate, which led him to discover the importance of finding meaning in all forms of existence, even the most brutal ones, and thus, a reason to continue living. Frankl became one of the key figures in existential therapy and a prominent source of inspiration for humanistic psychologists.

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Quotaton Frankl

We stumbled on in the darkness, over big stones and through large puddles, along the one road leading from the camp. The accompanying guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles. Anyone with very sore feet supported himself on his neighbor’s arm. Hardly a word was spoken; the icy wind did not encourage talk. Hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly: „If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don’t know what is happening to us.“That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which Man can aspire. 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. In a position of utter desolation, when Man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way – an honorable way – in such a position Man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, „The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.“^[9]

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