In Search of Meaning In Search of Lost Time
Man: a being in search of meaning. Plato, Philosopher of the 5th century BC. This picture was inspired by a “Man's Search for Meaning” by Viktor E. Frankl, a deeply touching, austere autobiographical narrative of a five year confinement in a number of concentration camps, including Auschwitz. Because of the author’s attempt at describing his life-and-death struggle and finding inner reasons to go on living in those heinous conditions, the book was called to be "perhaps the most significant thinking since Freud and Adler", according to the American Journal of Psychiatry. The writer’s take on things, being exceptionally humane and fascinatingly sophisticated, has more to do with Western religions rather than Freudian psychotherapy.
The second half of the book consists of two sections: "Logo therapy in a Nutshell" and "The Case for Tragic Optimism." These sections are mainly devoted to practical aspects of logo therapy. The main idea behind this therapy is that a man is basically driven by his search for a meaning of life. It was a totally different approach at the times when the major psychoanalytic doctrine claimed that men are driven by their unconscious desires (suggested by Dr. Freud). For Frankl, the meaningful existence of a person had much more value than their subconscious drives. He believed in possible negative effects of relying too much on what he described as the "existential vacuum".
Dr. Frankl's message to the reader is unconditional faith in unconditional meaning. Personal and professional experiences flow into his powerful discourse. Frankl writes: "Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary." "After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips." "We were not hoping for happiness – and yet we were not prepared for unhappiness." "Woe to him, when the day of his dreams finally came, found it to be so different from all that he had longed for!"
“We notice there are people around the world, in fact millions of them, who opted to believe in a different story, a story about another Supreme Being. And we notice also that there are many people around who don’t believe in any story. They just simply don’t believe. We don’t like it because we like to believe that our story is the correct representation of the Truth itself, and so other stories fill us with uneasy feelings. So we resent other stories and we call all these people the non-believers. Because they have chosen to believe not in “our” story, but rather in another story. We believe our story is the only correct one and we believe other stories are wrong and so the non-believers are wrong. We feel they need to be corrected, because it is just wrong to be wrong.” Quotes by Robert Krzisnik
“In Search of Lost Time” is a novel by Marcel Proust. This masterpiece is famous for its length and the flow of the subconscious as a narrative style. Funny story; this morning I got an email from my printer Zazzle “Unfortunately, it appears that your product, In Search of Meaning In Search of Lost Time, contains content that is in conflict with one or more of our acceptable content guidelines. Design contains content that is not suitable for printing on Zazzle and/or Zazzle’s brand partners” I guess I did something right since editors of morale and polit- correctness are throwing me out.
(Title Rus) В Поисках Смысла в Поисках Утраченного Времени
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George Grie, March 2011
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In Search of Meaning In Search of Lost Time