quest for meaning

Man's Search for Meaning (International Edition) (Paperback) - 『죽음의 수용소에서』원서
Viktor E. Frankl / Beacon Press / 2019년 4월

It is very difficult for an ousider to grasp how very little value was placed on human life in camp.

One literally became a number. 

He lost the feeling of being an individual, a being with a mind, with inner freedom and personal value. 

With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold. he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay.

Sudden loss of hope and courage can have a deadly effect.

He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.

Man should make his own choice and have hope for the future. 

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.

Love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.

The salvation of man is through love and in love. 

This intensification of inner life helped the prisoner find a refuge from the emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty of his existence, by letting him escape into the past. 

Humor was another of the soul's weapons in the fight for self-preservation. 

We were grateful for the smallest of mercies. 

It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to thinking of ourselfves as those who were being questioned by life. Our asnwer must consist, in right action and in right conduct. Life ulitmately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.(p.77)  

Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in flie, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you. 

there was a point to their suffering. Whether it was a family milestone they wanted to live long enough to share or the prospect of doctors finding a cure by studying their illness, having a Why to live for enabled them to bear the How.

We must learn to see life as meaningful despite our circumstances. 

Don't aim at success-the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued. it must ensue, and it only does so as the uninteded side-effect of one's dedication to a cuase greater than oneself of as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself.

The authour wrote this book in 1945 anonymously in nine successive days. 

His number was 119,104 and most of the time he was digging and laying tracks for railway lines. 

Abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior. 

Reality dimmed, and all efoorts and all emotions were centered on one task: preserving one's own life and that of the other fellow. 

Politics wre talked about everywhere in camp. 

The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action. There was enought examples, ofen of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed. Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.

They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

And there were alwyas choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers w hich threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate. (p.66)

Man's inner strength may raise him above his outward fate. 

This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meanign to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love. 

"There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings."

"That which does not kill me, makes me stronger." - Nietzsche

emotional death. mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonalbeness of all.
indignation not about cruelty or pain, but about the insult connected with it.
cultural hibernation. Capo, freedom from suffering. depersonalization