Quotes About Frankl

Now, it is my contention that the deneuroticization of humanity requires a rehumanization of psychotherapy.

Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.

I recommend that the Statue of Liberty be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast.

Boredom exists, as Frankl (1955) argued, so that "we will escape inactivity and do justice to the meaning of our life" (p. 87).

Frankl said that he wrote the book "to convey to the reader by way of concrete example that life holds a potential meaning under any conditions, even the most miserable ones.

You have your soul—what Frankl called the last of the human freedoms, the freedom to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.

In the midst of the most degrading circumstances imaginable, Frankl used the human endowment of self-awareness to discover a fundamental principle about the nature of man: Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose.

Victor Frankl suggests that there are three central values in life—the experiential, or that which happens to us; the creative, or that which we bring into existence; and the attitudinal, or our response in difficult circumstances such as terminal illness.

Frankl observed, "In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice." *

Man's Search for Meaning has gone on to sell over twelve million copies. Frankl's message was that even in the face of unimaginable bleakness, humans can find hope. "You do not have to suffer to learn, but if you don't learn from suffering . . . then your life becomes truly meaningless." The key, he said, is to imagine a better time, to have a reason to live. He quotes Nietzsche: "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.

First was shock, second was apathy, and third was depersonalization and moral deformity. Frankl makes the point that only those who gave their life meaning did well. He points out that in every situation, there is always freedom of choice, even in extreme suffering.

Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning.

Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it.

Suffering is intended to guard man from apathy, from psychic rigor mortis.

Apathy, the blunting of the emotions and the feeling that one could not care any more, were the symptoms arising during the second stage of the prisoner's psychological reactions, and which eventually made him insensitive to daily and hourly beatings. By means of this insensibility the prisoner soon surrounded himself with a very necessary protective shell.

I think it was Lessing who once said, "There are things which must cause you to lose your reason or you have none to lose." An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.

It must be kept in mind, however, that optimism is not anything to be commanded or ordered. One cannot even force oneself to be optimistic indiscriminately, against all odds, against all hope. And what is true for hope is also true for the other two components of the triad inasmuch as faith and love cannot be commanded or ordered either.

Frankl wondered whether "there may be such a thing as autobibliotherapy—healing through reading." Frankl's

There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.

To be sure, man's search for meaning may arouse inner tension rather than inner equilibrium.

To be sure, man's search for meaning may arouse inner tension rather than inner equilibrium. However, precisely such tension is an indispensable prerequisite of mental health.

Terrible as it was, his experience in Auschwitz reinforced what was already one of his key ideas: Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life.

En aquel momento yo sabía muy poco de mí y del mundo, no tenía sino una única frase en mi cabeza: «En la angustia clamé al Señor y Él me contestó desde el espacio en libertad».

As a psychiatrist, Frankl avoided direct reference to his personal religious beliefs. He was fond of saying that the aim of psychiatry was the healing of the soul, leaving to religion the salvation of the soul.