Imagine losing everything that shapes your identity, your name, your profession, your possessions, your affections, and becoming just a cold number on a prisoner's record. What is left of your humanity when only cold, hunger and fear remain? It was this question that a man answered with his own life, in the most inhumane place that the twentieth century has produced.
Who was Viktor Frankl
Viktor Frankl was born in Vienna in 1905 and died in 1997. A neurologist and psychiatrist, he survived four Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, where he received the number 119,104. He grew up in Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century, a city that at the same time generated one of the greatest intellectual flourishings in history (Freud, Adler, Schnitzler, Mahler, Wittgenstein) and incubated one of its greatest horrors, Nazism. It was from this fertile and dangerous soil that the question that would guide Frankl's entire life was born: if human beings are capable of producing Mozart and also Auschwitz, what are we after all?
Pleasure, power or meaning
Before Frankl, Vienna already had two famous answers to what moves human beings. Freud said that man seeks pleasure, driven by instincts and unconscious desires. Adler said that man seeks power, in a constant struggle to overcome inferiority. Frankl disagreed with both: "the will to meaning is the deepest motivation of the human being." Neither pleasure nor power, the true engine of the soul is meaning, and it is this meaning that survives even when everything else is destroyed.
The concentration camp as a laboratory of the spirit
In the camp, Frankl observed that those prisoners who had a reason to live for survived better, inside, and not those who were physically stronger. He describes the countryside as a "high sea without shores", an existence reduced to the bare bones of life, where only the essential remains: the choice of one's own attitude in the face of suffering. From this practical observation came the three psychological phases that he identified in prisoners, from the initial shock to the reaction of those who are finally released.
Logotherapy
After the war, Frankl did not return to the world as a victim, but as the founder of a new psychotherapy, logotherapy, “sense therapy”. The central finding is this: meaning is not something that one invents on one's own, it is something that one discovers, always facing outside oneself, in a work to be carried out, in the love for a specific person, or in the attitude with which one carries suffering that cannot be avoided. "Whoever has a why to live can bear almost any how", he repeats, taking up a phrase from Nietzsche. This is not naive optimism, it is a clinical discovery, tested at the most extreme limit of human pain.
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What is the book In Search of Meaning about?
It is Viktor Frankl's account of the years he was imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and the theory he built from this experience, logotherapy: the discovery that those who have a why to live can endure almost any how.
Who was Viktor Frankl?
Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist (1905, 1997), survived four Nazi concentration camps as prisoner 119,104. He created logotherapy, the "therapy of meaning", the third school of psychotherapy in Vienna after Freud's psychoanalysis and Adler's individual psychology.
What is logotherapy?
It is psychotherapy created by Frankl from the Greek word logos, meaning. Unlike Freud (man seeks pleasure) and Adler (man seeks power), Frankl argues that the true engine of the human soul is the search for meaning.
Continue: What is Logotherapy · Freud, Adler and Frankl: pleasure, power or meaning? · The three psychological phases in concentration camps
Home class (Community NousCast): Em Busca de Sentido, de Viktor Frankl