Viktor Frankl
Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor, and founder of logotherapy — the 'third Viennese school' of psychotherapy after Freud and Adler — whose 1946 book Man's Search for Meaning, written in nine days after his liberation from Nazi concentration camps, has sold more than sixteen million copies and is regularly named among the most influential books of the twentieth century. Born in Vienna in 1905, Frankl survived Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Kaufering, and Türkheim; his wife Tilly, mother, and brother were killed. From the camps he distilled a single conviction: that human beings can find meaning even in unavoidable suffering, and that the last of human freedoms is the freedom to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances. He went on to write more than thirty books, hold professorships at Harvard and Stanford, and lecture at over two hundred universities. Frankl died in Vienna in 1997.
quotes in library
Quotes by Viktor Frankl
110 quotes“In the past, nothing is irretrievably lost but everything irrevocably stored.”
“Having been is the surest kind of being.”
“Logotherapy regards its assignment as that of assisting the patient to find meaning in his life.”
“Inasmuch as logotherapy makes him aware of the hidden logos of his existence, it is an analytical process.”
“The first, the way of achievement or accomplishment, is quite obvious.”
“To this extent, logotherapy resembles psychoanalysis. However, in logotherapy's attempt to make something conscious again, it does not restrict its activity to instinctual facts within the individual's unconscious.”
“Logotherapy considers man as a being whose main concern consists in fulfilling a meaning, rather than in the mere gratification and satisfaction of drives and instincts.”
“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal.”
“What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.”
“Mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become.”
“If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load that is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together.”
“So if therapists wish to foster their patients' mental health, they should not be afraid to create a sound amount of tension through a reorientation toward the meaning of one's life.”
“I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium.”
“What man needs is not equilibrium but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.”
“What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled.”
“This existential frustration is in itself neither pathological nor pathogenic.”
“A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.”
“It may well be that interpreting the first in terms of the latter motivates a doctor to bury his patient's existential despair under a heap of tranquilizing drugs.”
“It is his task, rather, to pilot the patient through his existential crises of growth and development.”
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