Hello, what a community @Reflections. Today I wanted to share with you an analysis of a book that I just read, it is a classic book that you have probably heard or heard about at some point in your life, it is the book, Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist. A little context. The book was written analyzing the experiences of Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who was imprisoned in the concentration camps in World War II, it is a quite interesting, quite strong book, which practically addresses the question: what makes a person decide that their life is worth living? How is it possible that these people living in the worst conditions ever imagined could decide that their lives were still worthy?
As I mentioned before, Viktor Frankl was a prisoner for 3 years in the concentration camps, here he faced terrible and extreme conditions such as forced labor, poor nutrition, many many problems, however, even living through one of the most catastrophic events in the history of humanity, both Frankl and many other prisoners continued to say that life was still worth living, and we will ask ourselves HOW WAS THIS POSSIBLE? Frankl realized that many had something that still encouraged them to live, as those who had found a reason to live were more likely to survive, while those who had not were more susceptible to contracting diseases and dying. Frankl said that the prisoner who lost faith in the future was doomed.
To develop this idea Frankl tells the story of a colleague of his and the story was the following, his friend had a dream in February 1945, in this dream a voice granted him the wish that the friend had to know when he was going to be liberated from the concentration camp, the voice answered March 30, the friend really had a strong hope and was genuinely convinced that his dream was real, he really believed that he was going to be freed on March 30 and when the date approached the war got worse and The truth was that freedom was extremely unlikely
On March 29, this sick friend, on March 30, the day of the supposed liberation, lost consciousness and on March 31 he finally died. Frankl said that the ultimate cause of his friend's death was that the expected liberation did not come, this caused his body's resistance to decrease, his faith in the future was paralyzed and his body finally fell ill, after all the voice of his dream was not wrong.
Likewise, one of the doctors in the concentration camps witnessed an increase in the deaths of prisoners between Christmas 1944 and the New Year. The doctor believed that this was due to the prisoners' hope that they would be home by those dates, that is, for Christmas and New Year.
The problem is that as the date approached, many lost hope of being able to be home, and as Frankl says, when they lost hope they finally died. It is clear that for Frankl, those who have a reason to live have a greater will to live, but now another question arises: What gives life meaning? For Frankl there are three main sources of meaning.
The first is love, according to Frankl love is the ultimate goal and the highest goal to which man can aspire, for him it was the love for his wife that kept him standing, says Frankl (I did not know if my wife was alive nor did I have any way of knowing but by then I stopped caring, I did not need to know because nothing could alter the strength of my love, my thoughts or the image of my beloved).
A second source of meaning for Frankl is an unfinished task and for this he tells the story of a prisoner who contemplated suicide but never executed it because he found a reason to continue which was to finish the scientific books he had started, think that there are many times in which we have a responsibility to carry out a task, we think that only we can finish the way in which we can do it and this makes sense with respect to responsibility
The third source of meaning for him was sacrifice, he said that suffering stops being in a certain way suffering at the moment in which it finds a meaning, in many occasions this meaning can be sacrifice, what is sacrifice? We can say that sacrifice is sacrificing yourself and assuming a cost for yourself by offering it for a cause or for another person and to detail this Frankl tells that he had a client since he was a psychiatrist, well he had a client who could not overcome the loss of his wife, he asked what would have happened if you had died first and his wife had survived, the patient answered, surely for her it would have been terrible and she would have suffered a lot, and to this Frankl replied, you see, you have saved her all that suffering, but now you have to pay for it by surviving and crying her death, he saw it as a sacrifice so that his wife would not suffer when he was not there, it is a way of sacrificing himself for her and it is a way for Frankl to give meaning to suffering
Summary
Love, an unfinished task or sacrifice are the main sources of meaning for Frankl. Accepting the challenge of suffering bravely, life has meaning even at the last moment When we are no longer able to change a situation as in the example of the death of the client's wife, we are faced with the challenge of changing ourselves, you cannot change the death of a loved one, that is why I decide to change the way I respond, I decide to change myself. We are willing to suffer as long as the suffering has meaning. Life is not made by circumstances as we have observed in these people who lived in the worst conditions, but it is only made unbearable by the lack of meaning and purpose. And finally the meaning of life infers from one person to another and from one moment to another, what gives you meaning today may not be so tomorrow and tomorrow you can find different sources of meaning that do not have to be the same as today.
If you made it to the end, I thank you very much and leave me your opinion about the book and the analysis. I took the images from Google and you can read it at shortform.com