Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

1223 Words3 Pages

Life was consumed by constant orders, labor, malnutrition, disease, and murder in the concentration camps. Yet somehow the human psyche in many individuals was able to endure throughout these imprisonments. Men and women were almost completely dehumanized during this genocide, but their psyche survived it. People had to find little things to keep themselves content and to nurture their psyche. “Humor was another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation” (63). Humor allows a person to escape a situation and rise above it, even if only for a short time. Humor can never be taken away from anyone because it is naturally within us. Humor within the concentration camps allowed people, for even a split second, to feel like they were free and not in this confinement. “The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living” (64). It would be much more rigorous on the human psyche if one could not escape every so often and realize the humor in something. Humor allowed people to become more relaxed and release some stress, allowing the human psyche to stay healthier.

Viktor E. Frankl discusses how man can find meaning and a reason in his or her life. Viktor is faced with obstacles all along the way of his life, and questions arise that he has a hard time answering. The same pattern of obstacles and questions arise in my life. Although Viktor’s imprisonment in a concentration camp was far more discouraging than anything in my life, he still had to answer the same questions in life as I do. What is my meaning? Why should I ...

... middle of paper ...

...e, usually never discussed. This book does an outstanding job of talking about the subject within a great story. The reader is not only given information on logotherapy and meaning, but connects and understands the viewpoints of the writer. After what Frankl has been through in his life, the reader respects him and really focuses on what he has to say. However, I do not fully agree with everything he writes. Frankl sometimes focuses too much on organizing the ways of finding meaning in life, including the three ways to find meaning. I strongly believe everyone can find his or her own meaning in any aspect of life. One cannot organize meaning into categories because it is too personal and varies strongly on each person’s own circumstances.

Show More
Related

  • Power of Laughter in One Flew Over the Cuckoo´s Nest by Randle McMurphy

    536 Words  | 2 Pages

    Although modern science has allowed us to develop many complex medicines, laughter is still the strongest one available in the real world and in the book. Laughter proves to be a strong medicine in more ways than one and is completely free, allowing anyone to use it at anytime. It allows us to connect socially with people, it can be used as a way of overthrowing power, and it is good for your health. As Randle McMurphy showed in the novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, laughter can lighten the mood in the darkest situations.

    Read More

  • Man's Search For Meaning By Viktor Frankl

    1018 Words  | 3 Pages

    Man's Search for Meaning is a book written in 1946 by Viktor Frankl. Frankl is a holocaust survivor who elaborates on his experiences of being an Auschwitz concentration camp inmate during World War II. Being that Frankl is also a trained psychologist, he goes into detail about his psychotherapeutic method, which involved analyzing a purpose in life to feel positively about, and then imagining it being reality. According to Frankl, longevity was explained by the way a prisoner imagined how the future affected his durability of life. The book proposes to answer the question "How was everyday life in a concentration camp reflected in the mind of the average prisoner?" Part One establishes Frankl's dissection of his experiences in the concentration camps, while part two touches on his theory of logotherapy.

    Read More

  • Humor In Elie Wiesel's Night

    1558 Words  | 4 Pages

    People often shudder at the thought of the Holocaust. During this gruesome time nearly six million Jews, and an additional five million non- Jewish victims, including gypsies, homosexuals, and handicapped, were inhumanely murdered by the Nazis. There was no escape from the brutality of the German dictator, Adolf Hitler. The Holocaust was Hitler’s effort to exterminate any person he believed to be inferior. Anyone deemed fit for the title was lugged away to concentration camps, then sentenced to obligatory labor or demise. Now, imagine this as a comedy. The notion that such an event could be portrayed as a comedy seems unfathomable. However, director Robert Benigni is able to take this occurrence and apply a comedic sense in order to set the

    Read More

  • Man's Search For Meaning Rhetorical Analysis

    1928 Words  | 4 Pages

    Existentialists believe that “to live is to suffer; to survive is to find meaning in the suffering”. Despite all the horrific experiences in the concentration, Viktor Frankl is determined to not lose the significance of his life and succumb to the cruelty of his situation. With the use of three literary techniques- argumentation, rhetoric, and style- Frankl gives his proposition warrant that a man will not find meaning in his life by searching for it; he must give his life significance by answering questions life asks him.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Steve Almond's Funny Is The New Deep

    892 Words  | 2 Pages

    Steve Almond’s “Funny is the New Deep” talks of the role that comedy has in our current society, and most certainly, it plays a huge role here. Namely, through what Almond [Aristotle?] calls the “comic impulse”, we as a people can speak of topics that would otherwise make many of uncomfortable. Almond deems the comic impulse as the most surefire way to keep heavy situations from becoming too foreboding. The comic impulse itself stems from our ability and unconscious need to defend and thus contend with the feeling of tragedy. As such, instead of rather forcing out humor, he implies that humor is something that is not consciously forced out from an author, but instead is more of a subconscious entity, coming out on its own. Almond emphasizes

    Read More

  • The Practical Disengagement Of Humor Analysis

    360 Words  | 1 Pages

    “The practical disengagement of humor…helps explain the opposition between amusement and negative emotions.” (530) There are three effects of humor; irresponsibility, blocking compassion, and promoting prejudice. Humor can take away what we are/should be doing in life and sometimes there isn’t anything wrong with that. Sometimes when we hear a hateful thing we just laugh it off as if it was no big deal when it really was. “An

    Read More

  • Humor In The Things They Carried

    1635 Words  | 4 Pages

    As inappropriate as it sounds, humor was used in an attempt to cheer up the soldiers. Humor is a way to temporarily relieve the pain or stress of an ongoing issue. Laughter, or even just smiling can have positive effects on the body. O’Brien explains in an interview with Patrick Hicks on why he used humor in his story as part of a coping mechanism. He stated, “It 's very important to me when I 'm writing tragedy to have humor in it, and vice-versa. The world is not uni-dimensional. It 's not all sad or all happy. I remember reading Man 's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl 's book, and Primo Levi on the concentration camps, and even their humor was a way of coping and dealing with the world--it 's called gallows humor. It was rampant in Vietnam (Hicks, 2005).” Being in Vietnam and fighting this whole war was unpleasant, so he used humor in hopes of making things somewhat

    Read More

  • Rick Warren: An Excellent Example of Protestant Leadership

    3305 Words  | 7 Pages

    Warren, Richard. The Purpose-driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002. Print.

    Read More

  • Humor In Alexander Weinstein's Saying Goodbye To Yang

    1003 Words  | 3 Pages

    Humor is more than just amusing entertainment to pass the time. Though jokes and witty banter can be shallow, humor can go deeper than surface level to convey messages to audiences who would otherwise be close-minded about certain ideas. Humor is a great tool to get audiences to change the way they think, feel, and act. In “Saying Goodbye to Yang,” Alexander Weinstein uses humor to criticize some of society’s faults such as the way it has become heavily reliant on technology, racially insensitive, and judgmental.

    Read More

  • A Comparison Of Mans Search For Meaning In Toni Morrison's Beloved

    985 Words  | 2 Pages

    In Viktor Frankl’s essay “Man’s Search For Meaning,” he recounts his experiences surviving the holocaust. Frankl shows how traumatic experiences shape people and force them to change in accordance with what is happening to them. Furthermore, he argues that adaptation was the only way he could survive. To prove this, he describes how he learned to shut himself off from certain aspects of his life and pay more attention to aspects of life that gave him hope, such as nature. Similarly, adaptation is also an important concern of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. In Beloved, Morrison explores Frankl’s idea about how people adapt differently to trauma, some love more than they previously had because they are finally free to do so, some try to find a shaky balance between independence and love and others rely too heavily on the love of a few.

    Read More

  • Man's Search for Meaning

    614 Words  | 2 Pages

    Viktor Frankl's concept regarding survival and fully living was developed through his observations and experiences in the concentration camps. He used his psychiatric training to discern the meanings of observations and to help himself become a better person. He uses analysis to develop his own concepts and describes them in steps throughout the book. When the prisoners first arrived at the camp most of them thought they would be spared at the last moment. The prisoners believed they had a chance of surviving, but this belief was eventually eliminated and it was at this time when the prisoners began to learn how to survive by using their internal strength. A sense of humor had emerged among the prisoners. This humor helped to get through some difficult situations they faced. Viktor also observed how much a person could really endure and still live. Even though the prisoners could not clean their teeth and were deprived of warmth and vitamins, they still were able to survive. The sores and abrasions on their hands did not suppurate despite the dirt that gathered on them from the hard labor. The challenge of staying alive under these wretched conditions was to have and maintain strong internal strength. During the time he spent in the camps, Viktor learned what was needed to survive and how to keep his internal strength despite his weakening external strength. During the second stage of Viktor's psychological reaction, prisoners lost their sense of feeling and emotion toward events that would be emotional to people outside the camps. This was a result of the violent environment, which consisted of beatings of prisoners and the death of many others. The prisoners could no longer feel any disgust or horr...

    Read More

  • The Great Dictator: Mocking Evil For The Good Of Humanity

    839 Words  | 2 Pages

    Humor can make evil people feel inferior or see how ridiculous his or her actions are. Charlie Chaplin’s film, The Great Dictator, mocks Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Throughout the film, he mocks the German lifestyle and language and the actions of the dictator. The speech Chaplin delivers at the end of the film is very encouraging to spread love and peace and not the hatred that was stirred up by Hitler. Chaplin, starring as a Jewish

    Read More

  • Existentialism: The Kafkaesque Study Of The Human Condition Essay

    715 Words  | 2 Pages

    Philosophy, a construct of rich, educated, and, frankly, intoxicated navel-gazers has been a persistent companion of humanity throughout the ages. The most eccentric school of thought, popularized by figures such as Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus, became known as Existentialism. Holding that all of reality itself was absurd, existentialists sought meaning in their own chaotic lives as part of the shared “human condition”, which Franz Kafka demonstrates in “The Metamorphosis”, which eventually became the staple diet for grumpy literature majors and angsty college freshmen alike. “The Metamorphosis”, together with Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat”, reveals the ephemeral and absurd nature of mankind, and also demonstrates the power in discovering meaning in one’s life.

    Read More

  • The Meaning of Life According to Victor E. Frankl

    1423 Words  | 3 Pages

    The meaning of life, defined by Victor E. Frankl, is the will to find your meaning in life. It is not the meaning of life in general, but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment. He believes that if you are approached with the question of “what is the meaning of my life” or in this case, “life is meaningless,” then you should reverse the question to that person asking the question. For example: What are you bringing to me? What are you as an individual contributing to this life? This forces the person in question to take a look at themselves and to ultimately be responsible. Frankl says that if you are a responsible member of society than the meaning of life transcends from yourself rather from your own psyche. He also says that if we for some reason cannot find meaning within ourselves it has to be from some outside source. This is referred to as service. And an example of this is love. Victor Frankl describes three ways in which we can discover the meaning of life; Creating work-doing a deed, experiencing something-someone, and by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.

    Read More

  • Essay About Comedy

    1048 Words  | 3 Pages

    If there is one way to bring a smile to someone’s face, it is laughter. Funny jokes, comical stunts, sarcasm- Every person is different when it comes to what makes them laugh. Some find dry humor comical. Others think sarcasm or joke-filled ranting are the best. ‘Comedy’ is such a broad term, broad enough to allow everyone to find something they find comical. In fact, ‘comedy’ includes a specific type of drama, one where the protagonist is joyful and happy endings are expected. Comedy is like a drug; it allows you to escape reality. When we say the word ‘comedy’ in the present, we are generally referring to a type of performance which provides humor. However, in its broadest sense, comedy has only one purpose: comedy makes people smile and

    Read More

More about Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

Open Document