Logotherapy and Life Meaning: Insights from Viktor Frankl

1349 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Reflection on viktor frankl's sources of the meaning of life

The book “Man’s Search For Meaning” by Viktor Frankl has many different associations with the meaning of life and his life in Nazi concentration camps. He has an accurate theory that he writes about called logotherapy; logotherapy is a way to show that humans are not always looking for pleasure, but the meaning they get from items in their lives. Frankl gives multiple instances of his time in the Nazi concentration camps where he finds ways to figure out his meaning of life. Different times throughout the book, Viktor Frankl slyly explains his theory on the meaning of life by using his developed method of logotherapy. He also gives specific explanations of his life in the camps and writes in a way that gives his readers a vivid description of the horrible instances that he overcame. One will learn that in Frankl’s book, “Man’s Search For Meaning,” there are hidden interpretations within the words of the story that have alternative meanings and how those words can verbalize one’s meaning of life. …show more content…

In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.” Frankl conveys his feelings toward the thought of people questioning what the meaning of life is. He comments that one should not question this, but realize that they are the ones being questioned on the topic. He wants the reader to understand that life itself challenges each person in life and they must answer by doing the tasks that are responsible and necessary. It seems that this topic is important to Frankl’s life. Also, it appears that he may have questioned what the meaning of life is and he realized how to answer that question correctly

Show More
Related

  • Elie Wiesel's Night

    880 Words  | 2 Pages

    The tragedies of the holocaust forever altered history. One of the most detailed accounts of the horrific events from the Nazi regime comes from Elie Wiesel’s Night. He describes his traumatic experiences in German concentration camps, mainly Buchenwald, and engages his readers from a victim’s point of view. He bravely shares the grotesque visions that are permanently ingrained in his mind. His autobiography gives readers vivid, unforgettable, and shocking images of the past. It is beneficial that Wiesel published this, if he had not the world might not have known the extent of the Nazis reign. He exposes the cruelty of man, and the misuse of power. Through a lifetime of tragedy, Elie Wiesel struggled internally to resurrect his religious beliefs as well as his hatred for the human race. He shares these emotions to the world through Night.

    Read More

  • Brians Search For The Meaning Of Life In W.o. Mitchells Who Has Seen

    818 Words  | 2 Pages

    the great minds of our times: the meaning of life. He is able to somewhat

    Read More

  • Man's Search For Meaning By Viktor Frankl

    1018 Words  | 3 Pages

    Viktor Frankl, the author of the novel Man’s Search For Meaning, a holocaust survivor and also known for his theory of locotherapy, explains the hardships that the holocaust brings while living in a concentration camp. Throughout his experience, he confesses that it is hard to have hope and faith in order to live. He gave strongly worded advice to other inmates and was also a doctor to the victims. He is seen as a powerful, bold, and courageous character towards everyone he meets. His stories and incidents that occur throughout the novel portray locotherapy, which is described as the search for meaning in life. By setting goals and looking toward the future can help to push through hardships such as the holocaust.

    Read More

  • Summary Of Man's Search For Meaning

    1053 Words  | 3 Pages

    One of the most important points in this book is that no matter what you’re going through you have to find your meaning to life. If you don’t have a meaning to life or something to live for then there’s no chance of you surviving whatever you may be going through. You have to find whatever positive thing in your life to make it through any time of your life. In the book, he wrote this, “For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a

    Read More

  • Ethos, Pathos, and Logos

    831 Words  | 2 Pages

    Strength of Argument: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos. Bell Hooks’s essay, "Keeping Close to Home", uses three important components of argument (ethos, pathos, and logos) to support her claim. Hooks develops her essay by establishing credibility with her audience, appealing to the reader’s logic, and stirring their emotions. She questions the role a university should play in the life of a nation, claiming that higher education should not tear a student away from his roots, but help him to build an education upon his background. Bell Hooks gains the trust and credibility of readers through knowledge of the topic at hand, establishing common ground with the audience, and demonstrating fairness.

    Read More

  • Survival In Auschwitz And The Drowned And The Saved Analysis

    1102 Words  | 3 Pages

    A crucial concept developed throughout Survival in Auschwitz and The Drowned and the Saved is the process of “the demolition of a man” through useless acts of violence. In order for the Nazis to control and murder without regard or guilt, they had to diminish men into subhumans. Those who entered the camps were stripped of their dignity and humanity, devoid of any personal identity. Men and women were reduced to numbers in a system that required absolute submission, which placed them in an environment where they had to struggle to survive and were pitted against their fellow prisoners. The purpose of the camps were not merely a place for physical extermination, but a mental one as well. Primo Levi exposes these small and large acts of deprivation and destruction within his two texts in order for readers to become aware of the affects such a system has on human beings, as well as the danger unleashed by a totalitarian system.

    Read More

  • Theme Of Survival In Night By Elie Wiesel

    1467 Words  | 3 Pages

    The best teachers have the capabilities to teach from first hand experience. In his memoir, Night, Elie Wiesel conveys his grueling childhood experiences of survival to an audience that would otherwise be left unknown to the full terrors of the Holocaust. Night discloses mental and physical torture of the concentration camps; this harsh treatment forced Elie to survive rather than live. His expert use of literary devices allowed Wiesel to grasp readers by the hand and theatrically display to what extent the stress of survival can change an individual’s morals. Through foreshadowing, symbolism, and repetition, Wiesel’s tale proves that the innate dark quality of survival can take over an individual.

    Read More

  • man's search for meaning

    1180 Words  | 3 Pages

    As World War II occurred, the Jewish population suffered a tremendous loss and was treated with injustice and cruelty by the Nazi’s seen through examples in the book, Man’s Search for Meaning. Victor Frankl records his experiences and observations during his time as prisoner at Auschwitz during the war. Before imprisonment, he spent his leisure time as an Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna, Austria and was able to implement his analytical thought processes to life in the concentration camp. As a psychological analyst, Frankl portrays through the everyday life of the imprisoned of how they discover their own sense of meaning in life and what they aspire to live for, while being mistreated, wrongly punished, and served with little to no food from day to day. He emphasizes three psychological phases that are characterized by shock, apathy, and the inability to retain to normal life after their release from camp. These themes recur throughout the entirety of the book, which the inmates experience when they are first imprisoned, as they adapt as prisoners, and when they are freed from imprisonment. He also emphasizes the need for hope, to provide for a purpose to keep fighting for their lives, even if they were stripped naked and treated lower than the human race. Moreover, the Capos and the SS guards, who were apart of the secret society of Hitler, tormented many of the unjustly convicted. Although many suffered through violent deaths from gas chambers, frostbites, starvation, etc., many more suffered internally from losing faith in oneself to keep on living.

    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

  • Holocaust

    3103 Words  | 7 Pages

    The delineation of human life is perceiving existence through resolute contrasts. The difference between day and night is defined by an absolute line of division. For the Jewish culture in the twentieth century, the dissimilarity between life and death is bisected by a definitive line - the Holocaust. Accounts of life during the genocide of the Jewish culture emerged from within the considerable array of Holocaust survivors, among of which are Elie Wiesel’s Night and Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower. Both accounts of the Holocaust diverge in the main concepts in each work; Wiesel and Wiesenthal focus on different aspects of their survivals. Aside from the themes, various aspects, including perception, structure, organization, and flow of arguments in each work, also contrast from one another. Although both Night and The Sunflower are recollections of the persistence of life during the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel and Simon Wiesenthal focus on different aspects of their existence during the atrocity in their corresponding works.

    Read More

  • Faith Destroyed in Eliezer Wiesel’s Night

    981 Words  | 2 Pages

    At first glance, Night, by Eliezer Wiesel does not seem to be an example of deep or emotionally complex literature. It is a tiny book, one hundred pages at the most with a lot of dialogue and short choppy sentences. But in this memoir, Wiesel strings along the events that took him through the Holocaust until they form one of the most riveting, shocking, and grimly realistic tales ever told of history’s most famous horror story. In Night, Wiesel reveals the intense impact that concentration camps had on his life, not through grisly details but in correlation with his lost faith in God and the human conscience.

    Read More

  • Imagery Used In Night By Elie Wiesel

    575 Words  | 2 Pages

    “What do you expect? That’s war…” Elie Wiesel, young teenage boy sent to work in a concentration camp with his family near the end of WW2. Author of his own autobiography, Night recounting his struggles during that time. This book is about a boy named Elie Wiesel who was captured by the Nazi’s and was put into a concentration camp, and got disconnected from God, and was very close to his mom, dad, and family. Throughout Night Elie Wiesel addresses the topic of genocide through the use of imagery, simile, and personification.

    Read More

  • Materialism In The Holocaust

    346 Words  | 1 Pages

    Viktor Frankl knows that without meaning, people will rely on something like power, materialism, and hatred to define who they are as a human being. The kid to grew up with a dream to be a doctor, lived that dream with more knowledge that he thought he would have. He was a man who survived the Holocaust, but he was never a Christian or anything like that. He was someone who relied on his own beliefs and on self enlightenment. Like people who are buddhists. He did not rely on something greater that him. But somehow he found a way to be happy. When he was in the holocaust he realized that the people who knew who they were survived longer. The people who had no idea about who they were lived a shorter amount of time. Then he discovered Logotherapy.

    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

  • 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

More about Logotherapy and Life Meaning: Insights from Viktor Frankl

Open Document