Finding Your Purpose: Lessons from Viktor Frankl (1of3)
March 26 is Dr. Viktor Frankl's birthday so I wrote this piece to commemorate his life and work.
You may know him as the author who wrote Man's Search for Meaning, and you'd be right! He was a holocaust survivor, a brilliant neurologist, psychologist, and philosopher.
Finding Your Purpose: Lessons from Viktor Frankl (2of3)
Have you ever wondered what gives life meaning? Viktor Frankl, a doctor who survived the horrors of the Holocaust, learned a lot about this. His story can teach us powerful things about finding meaning, even when life gets really tough.
Viktor Frankl's Big Idea: Logotherapy
Frankl created a type of therapy that says people need to find meaning in their lives to feel good; he called this logotherapy
He believed that what drives us most is our wanting to find purpose or what he identified as the "will to meaning”
What He Learned in Tough Times
1. Frankl wrote a book called "Man's Search for Meaning" about his time in concentration camps. He wrote 38 other books
2. He noticed that people who found a reason to keep going were more likely to survive
3. Even when things were terrible, people could still choose how they reacted
Finding Your Purpose: Lessons from Viktor Frankl (3of3)
How to Find Meaning, According to Dr. Frankl
Frankl said there are 3 ways to find meaning:
1. Doing something creative
2. Loving someone or something
3. Choosing how you feel about tough times
Goodness in Bad Places
1. Even though he saw and experienced really bad things, Frankl still believed people could be good
2. He saw people being kind and helpful, even in the camps
3. He believed that people can always choose to be good, no matter what
Why This Matters
His message is that even when life is hard, we can still find meaning and hope. We can choose how we react to what happens to us.
Your Turn: What do you believe gives your life meaning?
Recommended Reads
PubMed entry from the European Journal of Psychology titled Searching for Meaning in Chaos: Viktor Frankl’s Story on https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8763215/
Logotherapy on Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logotherapy
Viktor Frankl’s book “Man’s Search For Meaning.” Reading it has changed my life! https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4069.Man_s_Search_for_Meaning
The existential psychiatrist Viktor Frankl (1905–1997) lived an extraordinary life. He witnessed and experienced acts of anti-Semitism, persecution, brutality, physical abuse, malnutrition, and emotional humiliation. Ironically, through these ...
@Crissy
#PostOfTheWeek (season 3):
Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl (Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, philosopher, and Holocaust survivor)
His memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Based on his own experience and the stories of his patients, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose.
Sun Kitty ☀️
Alexa Fontanilla