Outstanding Austrian psychologist Victor Frankl passed several death camps during World War II. Not to surrender to the tests and not to lose myself was helped by the installation – “If I fill my life with meaning, then I will survive”.
“Sigmund Freud once said:“ Let’s try to put a certain number of various people in the same hunger conditions. With an increase in hunger, all individual differences will be extended, and instead of them there will be a monotonous expression of indomitable motivation “. In concentration camps, however, the opposite was true. People have become different. Masks were torn from animals – and from saints. Hunger was the same, but people were different. Not calories went on the expense “.
“Heredity is nothing more than the material from which a person builds himself. These are nothing more than stones that can be used, or can be rejected by the builder. But the builder himself is not from stones “.
“If a person wants to come to himself, his path lies through the world”.
“Upon -income and instincts push, and the foundations and meanings attract”.
“When a person succumbs to his drives, he lends itself to drives;This means that he freely renounces freedom in order to find an excuse for his lack of freedom. “.
“Only to the extent that we forget ourselves, give ourselves, we sacrifice ourselves to the world, the tasks and the requirements that our life is permeated with, only to the extent that we are to the world and objects outside of us, and not onlyBefore us and our own needs, only to the extent that we fulfill the tasks and requirements, we make meaning and implement values, we carry out and realize ourselves ”.
“Love can be defined as an opportunity to tell someone“ you ”and still tell him“ yes ”.
“Happiness is like a butterfly. The more you catch it
, the more it slips away. But if you transfer your attention to other things, it will come and quietly sit on your shoulder “.
About Victor Frankl
The Austrian philosopher and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, having passed the school of psychoanalysis, revised his postulates and came to the conclusion that the main driving power of the personality is the desire for the meaning.
Its absence gives birth to an existential vacuum and leads to personality disorders. One of the examples of the existential vacuum is the so -called “Sunday neurosis” when at the end of the labor week we experience a feeling of emptiness and a breakdown. Frankl has developed a new direction in humanistic psychology – logotherapy, or “treatment”.
Francla’s most famous book is “Say life“ Yes!”. A psychologist in a concentration camp ”, about the years spent in fascist concentration camps during the Second World War.