Viktor Frankl

Viktor Frankl, famed psychotherapist and a holocaust survivor, said: The spiritual dimension cannot be ignored, for it is what makes us human. Spirituality is at the core of who we are; it defines for us what is meaningful in life.

Among all living things, only we humans can envision our futures and play out mental scenarios of how we will make our visions a reality.

Viktor Frankl, survivor of the Holocaust, emphasized that the meaning of life is not what happens to us. It is what we do with that which happens to us.

Viktor Frankl while interned in sub-human conditions in a Nazi concentration camp found meaning through meditating. He would overcome these horrendous and barbaric conditions by holding a mental image of him speaking to a group of International Psychiatrists at a special dinner event.

His wife had been transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she died. On April 27, 1945, Frankl was liberated. Among his immediate relatives, the only survivor was his sister, who had escaped by emigrating to Australia. It was due to his and others' suffering in these camps that he came to his hallmark conclusion that even in the most absurd, painful and dehumanized situation, life has potential meaning and that therefore even suffering is meaningful. Meaning cannot be invented but must be discovered.

Viktor Frankl wrote "Man's Search for Meaning" after surviving the worst conditions a human can experience during his imprisonment at Auschwitz.

Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning - the classic best seller now considered to be one of the most important contributions to psychiatry since the writing of Freud. Frankl gives a moving account of his life amid the horrors of the Nazi death camps, chronicling the harrowing experience that led to his discovery of his theory of logotherapy.

Viktor Frankl, to be sure, leaves a profound legacy. He wrote many books on existentialism and Logotherapy. Throughout his life and his work, he reminds us that we all have important work to do, that whatever we do is important, and that there is meaning everywhere, all the time.

Human freedom, therefore, is the freedom of responsibility. Freedom without responsibility is something arbitrary, senseless and either leaves us directionless, or can lead to irresponsible, that is, lawless, immoral and violent, self-destructive ways of living. Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn. Because boundaries between groups overlap we must not try to simplify matters by saying that these men are angels and those others are devils.

As far as happiness is concerned Frankl, said: Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.

If you want to get better acquainted to the work of Viktor Frankl " Man's Search for Meaning" is a good place to start.