This perhaps has nothing ostensibly to do with literature, and shouldn't be on a literary blog... But no matter. In fact, I think it does, and should, because our search for meaning - those blessed moments of life, when we connect with something deep and fulfulling - leads us to the poets, playwrights and novelists, because they can disclose the deeper meanings to existence. This of course was the official or unofficial manifesto of the Romantics, and of most evolutions in literary production.
So here is an extract by a remarkable man, Victor Frankl, who was a psychologist and psychoanalyst, practising in Vienna before the second world war, and because of his Jewish background, found himself, along with his family, in several concentration camps. He survived, incredibly, and this experience, as he recounts in his bestselling work Man's Search for Meaning, which I strongly recommend, did not leave him in despair, but reinforced his conviction of the ultimate meaning of our lives. It is a powerful message he translated into a new school of therapy called 'logotherapy' which he mentions in this extract of Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning. Frankl is not concerned with clever-sounding theories, but our actual lives. It is an existential approach. I think the examples he gives here are powerful. In this time of upheaval and deeply disturbing political, social and ecological developments in a more and more mechanically organised, purely profit-based society, when it is all to easy to lose sight of hope and meaning, it is salutary to consider this extraordinary voice.
Click on the link below to access the document:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UxSbdi11XajMp5L2O_lkYtjD5fZUh8qA/view?usp=sharing
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