The Personal Optimism of Viktor Frankl

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The power of mankind is only as strong as his internal being. While held captive within the confines of one of history’s most brutal constraints, Viktor Frankl reached within himself to transcend the hellish reality he could not escape. His module for existence can be summed up by Nietzsche's epitomic phrase “He who has a ‘why’ to live for can bear almost any ‘how’.” In the beginning of the book, he emphasizes that his purpose in writing the book is not at all to prove factual events, since there are already many available, but to apply meaning to the experiences he was forced to cope with. In the book, he states that the fate of a person is the result of inner decisions and is not the result of outside influences alone. In other words, the fate of prisoners in Nazi death camps depended ...

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