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Unknown Binding
First published January 1, 1995
This is the third book I read for Viktor Frankl and the more I read, the more I respect him. He developed this school of thought “logotherapy” and made the meaning of his life to help others find the meaning of theirs. What made Viktor develop logotherapy was “the compassion [he felt] toward the victims of today’s cynicism, which has also infested psychotherapy.” He “attacks the cynicism for which nihilism is to blame, and the nihilism for which cynicism is responsible.” In order to break this cycle, we need to unmask the unmaskers – those practitioners of “depth psychology,” which prides itself on its power to unmask the unconscious mystery in persons. “The unmasking has to stop somewhere, and the place to stop is where “unmasking psychologist��� is confronted with something that cannot be unmasked for the simple reason that it is genuine.” That’s why “[he] tried to forget what [he] had learned from psychoanalysis and individual psychology so that [he] could learn from listening to [his] patients.”
It was Wolfgang Soucek who dubbed logotherapy “the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy.” And “when the first two schools fight with each other, the third “Viennese school” rejoices.” However, despite his opposition to Freud’s ideas, he always respected him.
As a person, he achieved his accomplishments by adhering to:
1. He gives the smallest things the same attention as the biggest, and to do the biggest as calmly as the smallest.
2. He tries to do everything as soon as possible, and not at the last moment.
3. He does the unpleasant tasks before he does the pleasant ones.
In order to answer the question “what is the meaning of life?” Viktor, at a young age, developed two ideas:
1. It is not we who should ask for he meaning of life, since it is we who are being asked.
2. Ultimate meaning, is, and must remain, beyond our comprehension. This suprameaning we cannot comprehend; we can only have faith in it.
And then he answers the question “does the transitory nature of life destroy its meaning?” It does not because “nothing from the past is irretrievably lost. Everything is irrevocably stored.”