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A book of two halves. The first half (it's really about two thirds) details life in the concentration camp in Auschwitz. It's as brutal and horrendous and probably worse than I expected. It's incredible what the human body can do even in those conditions. Incredibly appalling. Viktor Frankl serves as an inspiration for everyone stuck in prison, be it a real prison or the prison of their mind or body. He shows there is a way to rise above the suffering.
The second half deals with his own psychological theories he named Logotherapy. Now to be honest I don't really like this part of the book at all. The therapy and theory is dated, there are much better and easier ways to explain and to help people these days. I found it overly complicated, also an unnecessary addition to the book. He could have just continued with his own story and how he found meaning, a sense of responsibility in his existence, and shared those insights with us. The same way as the first part was written. Anyway, maybe at the time of publication it was more impactful and current so I am certainly not going to criticize it.
Anyway onto the story and my favourite quotes and lessons:
"To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering." - Gordon W. Allport
"He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how." - Nietzsche. Viktor uses this quote and others from Nietzsche many times.
In the concentration camp every circumstance conspires to make the prisoner lose his grip. All the familiar goals in life are snatched away. What alone remains is 'the last of human freedoms' - the ability to 'choose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances.'
Success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success : you have to let it happen by not caring about it.
Part One : Experiences in a Concentration Camp
"We were unable to clean our teeth, and yet, in spite of that and a severe vitamin deficiency, we had healthier gums than ever before." Why is this I wonder? I highlighted this sentence as it reminds me of a section in Christopher Ryan's wonderful book 'Civilized to Death', where he discovered that our ancestors had better teeth than we did as well as much stronger jaws. However his reasoning is because we no longer chew our food as it's all soft and processed and the Jews in the camps didn't have anything to chew on at all. So this that remain a mystery to me for now.
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.
Like a quantity of gas being pumped into an empty chamber, suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. It also follows that a very trifling thing can cause the greatest of joys.
"No man should judge (others actions) unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same." - Viktor E. Frankl.
It is often the case that an exceptionally difficult external situation gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself. You can't grow when life is all pink, fluffy clouds.
Any attempt to restore a man's inner strength in the concentration camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal.
Part Two : Logotherapy in a Nutshell
A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease. It may well be that interpreting the first in terms of the latter motivates a doctor to bury his patient's existential despair under a heap of tranquilizing drugs. It is his task, rather, to pilot the patient through his existential crises of growth and development.
Existential frustration often eventuates in sexual compensation. We can observe in such cases that the sexual libido becomes rampant in the existential vacuum.
Suffering brings meaning, but let me make it perfectly clear that in no way is suffering necessary to find meaning. I only insist that meaning is possible even in spite of suffering - provided, certainly, that the suffering is unavoidable. If it were avoidable, however, the meaningful thing to do would be to remove its cause, be it psychological, biological or political. To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.
If one cannot change a situation that causes suffering, one can still choose a different attitude.
Fear is the mother of the event and brings to pass what one is afraid of. For example, the more a man tries to demonstrate his sexual potency or a woman her ability to experience orgasm, the less they are able to succeed. Pleasure is, and must remain, a side-effect or by-product, and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it is made a goal in itself.
When a person's attention was refocused toward the proper object, i.e., the partner, orgasm established itself spontaneously.
The more a patient, instead of forgetting himself through giving himself, directly strives for orgasm, i.e., sexual pleasure, the more this pursuit of sexual pleasure becomes self-defeating.
The neurotic who learns to laugh at himself may be on the way to self-management, perhaps to cure.
Paradoxical intention can also be applied in cases of sleep disturbance. The fear of sleeplessness is, in the majority of cases, due to the patient's ignorance of the fact that the organism provides itself, by itself, with the minimum amount of sleep really needed. This fear of sleeplessness results in a hyper-intention to fall asleep, which, in turn, incapacitates the patient to do so. To overcome this particular fear, I usually advise the patient not to try to sleep but rather to try to do just the opposite, that is, to stay awake as long as possible. In other words, the hyper-intention to fall asleep, arising from the anticipatory anxiety of not being able to do so, must be replaced by the paradoxical intention not to fall asleep. Sleep will surely follow.
Anticipatory anxiety has to be followed by paradoxical intention (trying the opposite).
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