Man’s
Search for Ultimate Meaning
Viktor E. Frankl
About the Book
Viktor E. Frankl, in his book, examined the
ways of thinking which thinking which helped him find and understand the
meaning of life, despite all its oddities. He has touched upon the concepts of
life and death, suffering and faith. He believes if one finds the ultimate meaning
of life, then the life has much more to offer than one can actually perceive.
Notable ideas of the Book
Frankl tells how we can deal with three inevitable
elements of life by using them: turn suffering into achievement, using guilt to
improve ourself and use the knowledge that life is short as a prompt to action.
Instead of teaching children to have high esteem,
children should be taught about strength of character to handle any setbacks in
life and to achieve success.
This brings us to the question, what should be the goal
of psychotherapy? The goal of psychotherapy no longer consists of making
something conscious at any price. Becoming conscious is only considered a
temporary stage in the psychotherapeutic process. It has to make conscious the unconscious—including
the spiritual unconsciousness —only in order to allow it finally to recede back
to unconsciousness.
What therapy seeks to achieve is to convert an unconscious potential
into a conscious action, but only to restore it eventually as an
unconscious habitus again.
It will be hard to believe that man is a sublimated animal once
it can be shown that within him there is a repressed angel.
The unconscious is not divine, and neither does it possess any
attribute of the divine and thus, lacks divine omniscience as well.
There is a “negative correlation between the collective neurosis
and responsibility” apparently. Thus, the search originally characterized by
“search for meaning” rather than “search for himself.” The more one forgets
oneself—giving oneself to a cause or another person—the more human one gets. The
more one is engrossed in something or someone other than oneself the more one
is likely to identify one’s own self.
To Abraham H. Maslow the will to meaning is more than “an
irreducible need”—he sees it as “Man’s primary concern.”
Viktor is reminded of a concept called crabbing. He describes it
as, ‘if there is a cross wind, say, from the north and the airport where he wishes
to land lies east and he flies east, he will miss his destination because his
plane will drift to the southeast; so to compensate for this drift, he have to
fly his plane in a direction north of his destination, and this is called
“crabbing.” But isn’t it the same with man? Don’t we, too, get wind up?’
He inferred, if he takes man as he is, he make him worse; if he
takes him as he is ought to be, he helps him become what he can be. But this is
not what his flight instructor told him, but, rather, a literal quotation from
Goethe.
Happiness is a pursuit. It should not be ensued. The more we
chase behind the aim, the more we miss it.
A man is not a literal animal and is not told by drives and
instincts about what he must do. And in contrast to an old man, he is no longer
told by traditions and values what he is supposed to do. Not knowing what he
must do or what he should do, he sometimes is clueless about what he really wishes
to do. So, instead, he falls prey to either conformism (starts wishing to do
what other people do) or totalitarianism (he starts doing what other people
wish for him to do).
The need to rehumanize psychotherapy is dire, unless we want to
reinforce the damage.
The meaning is always found and not given. But if it is to be
given, in this case, it can only be given by psychologists.
And if we have to find the ultimate meaning, we have to do it
ourselves.
If a man wants to go on search of the meaning, there are three
avenues that may lead him: First, to act or create a work; second, to
experience something or to encounter someone. Most important, however, is the
third path: Facing a fate we cannot change, we can do it by rising above and
growing beyond ourselves, simply, by changing ourselves. And this also holds
for the three components of the “tragic triad”—pain, guilt, and death.
It is impossible to know intellectually whether everything is
ultimately meaningless or whether there is some ultimate meaning behind
everything. But if we cannot answer the question using intellect, we may well
do so existentially. Where an intellectual perception fails an existential
decision may work. Thus the fact that everything is absolutely meaningful and
vice-versa is equally believable.
Ruchika
Verma
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