A reflection on the meaning of life

I remember the year I was six, once I asked her: "Mom, I live to do it?". That question haunts transparent appearance and a long time in my young mind. Then, for me, things are sure to have a single correct answer.

I did not know that it was one of the biggest questions for centuries of philosophy, religion, art, psychology ..., and in this world there are a lot of questions will never be answered, or in other words, we have a multitude of answers.

The meaning of our existence is what? I must live like? In an article in the Journal of Adam Szostkiewicz Poliktyka I read recently, the author introduces the doctrine of Viktor Frankl (1905-1997), doctor of psychology world famous Austrian, who was nominated for Nobel peace prize.

Viktor Frankl said that people need a sense of life. Life will make us painfully if people feel empty in existence. His life was the best proof for this, his extraordinary biography is what ensures reliability for what he wrote, that his books became bestsellers in many countries around the world, from America to Japan , from west to east.

Like Sigmund Freud, Dr. Frank was Jewish. After graduating from college, he opened a room for free psychiatric counseling for youth, working with illustrious names like Freud and Alfred Adler. In 1938, the Nazis who came to power in Austria. Frank could escape, he had a visa to the US, but he did not want to leave behind elderly parents. He is admitted to practice psychiatrist to 1942, but only in the hospital for Jews in Vienna. He said Hitler's troops would kill mentally ill people should have to make a false diagnosis to their patients in order to save them.

In 1942, he and his parents, wife and brother were arrested Nazis and sent to Auschwitz (Poland) and then the Dachau camp (Germany). They confiscated books on the position of a doctor before the pain of existence that he began writing before the arrest. The thought that one day they would be reunited with their families and rewrite the entire book helped him survive. He was the Americans liberated from Dachau camp, returned to Vienna, believed parents, brother and pregnant wife died in the concentration camps. He worked in a mental hospital, to recover the book was destroyed and wrote the following: "Psychologists in concentration camps," the book has brought his name to the world. Two years after the war ended, he remarried. Writing, work and love - he found meaning in life there after the tragedy of war.

Viktor Frankl opened Tuesday sect of the Vienna branch of psychotherapy which he called technical meaningful therapy (logotherapy) - besides Freud's psychoanalysis and individual psychology of Adler. Logos means speech, religion, meaning. According to Freud, man towards pleasure. According to Adler - people towards power, to balance their inferior inferiority (people seeking strength in life, to free themselves from dependence that his emotions experienced during childhood). Frankl also affirmed the human search for meaning first and foremost in his life. He wanted to help people living in pain, those suffering from a sense of emptiness in existence. He wants psychotherapy industry brought a mirror face.

As a physician and philosopher, Frankl struggle with what he called nihilism (nihilism). Here, nihilism means that the shortened towards human reality of a certain factor - psychological factors, physical or social. Frankl said that man is a being richer, we should not make that the poor can go. Humans also are a spiritual being, not just a product structure and physical, psychological or social. Therefore, people are not puppets manipulated from inside or outside. Humans have the ability to do something bigger than just the struggle for existence. Human beings find meaning in life and towards values. Frankl's experience and the people he met in the extreme difficult conditions allowed him to have another vision of Freud or Adler humans.

From spiritual experiences in concentration camps was Frankl described, people found themselves beyond the lesson to the world of totalitarian evil. What to do with the existence of black holes? What is really important in life? What helps us to find the strength of spirit and mentality to ourselves and others? How to live and live to do?

Frankl's lessons are not easy lessons in the culture of mass consumption and lightning today. But Frankl did not want to preach morality, he just wants to help people through spiritual stalled. He warned two excesses: one is to remember too much, remember all what ever happened to me; two too want that life to this place without another.

He encouraged a life towards values, towards the future, because he saw in the camps who have a chance of survival than those who believe in something: religious people, thinkers, political activists and society, who do not only think for themselves but trying to help others, they believe they have a future ahead, they live for someone or for that something, who when deprived of all the conditions of life of a normal person, always try to behave in a dignified manner, not allowing destructive sense of freedom and their dignity.

Unable to produce, invent or given the meaning of life, only to find it, because the meaning of life exists outside of us, they exist in the spiritual values ​​of human support, the price treatment that prisoners of other concentration camps wanted to serve.

Psychology and Modern culture often reduce human freedom, pulls out every form of his dependence. Frankl came back: he pointed out that people always can choose between the deserving and behaving unworthy, and thereby enforce his freedom. Despite the restrictions, people still at large and it is important that he benefited from that freedom.

In addition to love, work and creativity, Frankl put in the list of all the distressed values ​​- when it does not destroy the people that make them grow up mentally. This happens when people begin to understand that we can not achieve everything, and that the paralytic was able to serve for something nice.

Modern culture teaches us the opposite: that we have the right, even the obligation, set out the conditions and demands of life. But it does not teach us what to do if life is not for me to achieve that. The value of the suffering has no place in the medicine cabinets of pop culture emergency. According to Frankl, the meaning of life is not something you can buy, book, or directly towards. The meaning is the result of the implementation of the external value of human existence, beyond the purpose and needs of his single. The actions he performed, he works creatively, love that he experienced and the suffering that he endured with courage and dignity - all forms of human values who, beyond the limited benefits and the human.

According to the psychologists of schools Frankl, strong sense of the meaning of life is one of the components of a healthy psychology. Happiness is only a secondary consequence of the feeling that our lives have meaning. So people do not seek happiness that seeks to create value and will find happiness more quickly.

Signs of the emptiness of existence is boredom, when people do not know what to do with their free time and kill time as killing enemies, working in any public activity or entertainment. It seems simple, but sometimes it is very difficult to cut off from the world of conformism (conformism) did. According to the University Jagiellonski Opoczynska dr, Frankl was one of the greatest masters of the twentieth century and distance limits. Not everything is possible, everything is not necessary, not everything is permitted.

Instead of asking why I am unhappy - Frankl says - ask your life waiting for something in you, and embarked on the go.