The need to find a meaning in life. That is what Viktor E. Frankl is determined to do. He refused to surrender his heart and he refused to surrender to the cruelty of his holders, and he refused to lose hope. He would not let them break his spirit, believing that his freedom still exists. In the midst of abuse and torture, Frankl manages to mentally survive the terrors of the Holocaust. Frankl focuses of his future, instead of the present. Which allowed him to think of the main purpose of his life, and overcome the physical circumstances that he was in at the time.
Throughout the book Frankl, gives a moving story about his life and timid horrors of the Nazi death camps, hallowing his experiences that led to his discovery of logotherapy. Which is a form of psychotherapy that he developed after surviving the Nazi concentration camps in the 1940’s. After his experiences in the camps, he realized that the theory was to search for the true meaning and the main purposes in life that anyone can endure through hardship and suffering. There are three main principles of logotherapy. Freedom of will, will of meaning, and sense of life. Freedom of will means that even with all of the horrible circumstances you will still find a meaning to life. Freedom of will gives three sources of influence, your instincts, your inheritance, and the environment, anyone possesses these three types of things, but they do not determine who we are.
Everyone is free from these aspects of life. Whenever someone is free from something it is not just their luck, in my opinion, it’s mostly for a reason. A man is free to be responsible and he is free because he is responsible, responsibleness is a large aspect of Frankl’s theories because through responsibleness we take on tasks and actions that help us determine our meaning – the why in our lives. Responsibleness also balances freedom. Will of meaning, that is our main motivation of living because it’s our desire to find a meaning in life. Frankl says “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.” His opinion was based off his experiences and suffering.
In this situation Frankl believed that you couldn’t change it, you just had to live with it, and change yourself. You have to find a purpose in pain and change your attitude, to find a higher meaning of life. Even if you’re going through something bad, you just have to think about the reasoning behind what you’re going through and remember that there is a reasoning behind everything. You have to learn to accept the worst and strive for the meaning of life. The two principles we already discussed speak for a person willing to take a stand before the circumstances of life. The sense of life is the emotional evaluation of the world.
