Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor E. Frankl
Preface
- "He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How" - Nietzche
- Will to pleasure, Freud. Will to Power, Alfred Alder.
- Suffering in itself is meaningless. We give meaning to suffering.
- External forces can talk away everything except our freedom to respond to any situation.
Possible sources to meaning
- In work (doing something significant)
- In love (caring for another person)
- In courage
Logotherapy
- What man needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.
- Sunday neurosis: the kind of depression which afflicts people who become aware of the lack of content in their lives when the rush of the busy week is over and the void within themselves manifests.
- Do not pity old people. In fact, youth should envy them. Their have potentilities they have actualized, meaning they have fulfilled and values they have realised. Nothing can remove those from their past.