March 26, 1905 marked the birth of Viktor Frankl in Vienna. He was a son to Gabriel Frankl and Elsa Frankl from Marovia. He was the second born in a family of three and wanted to become a physician when he grew up. He was turned to study psychology by his liking for people. He met Freud in 1925 on his way to graduating and published an article “Psychotherapy and Weltanschauung”, which was followed by the use of the term “logo therapy” in a public lecture the following year. This led to his refining of his particular brand of Viennese psychology. He earned his doctorate in medicine in 1930 and was promoted to an assistant position in the Psychiatric University Clinic.
He left for the United States in 1939 when Hitler’s troop invaded
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His family and friends are also kept as prisoners in the prison (Frankl, 2004). They suffer so much in the prison because of the mistreatment by the prison guards. In the prison, life is harsh and many people do not cope with the conditions. In the story, the life of the prisoners is described to have three phases that include depersonalization, apathy and disillusionment. Depersonalization is experienced when the prisoners are liberated and do not seem to recognize their presence in the prison. They enjoyed their liberty in the prison as they could eat and sleep only.
Deformation comes in when they are subjected to suffering and mistreatment in the prisons. This is depicted by the fact that these prisoners are mistreated by other prisoners and the prison wardens. Disillusionment is also depicted as the life that the prisoners experienced after prison. They faced rejection from the outside world and did not face the kind of life they expected to face when in prison. The story is all about the experience Victor Frankl had in his life. It expounds on his life in prison and back to the world where he chases his dream and achieves his goal in life. He pursued his career and got married later.
Frankl arrived at the conclusion that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire when he was in prison. This was during his suffering in prison. The men in the camp were mistreated in the prison as they were beaten and assaulted
He was once kind, thoughtful, and caring of others. But, as his sufferings increased, he becomes heartless, filled with hate, and begins to abandon all that he once held dear. He stops praying early during his imprisonment, and in general becomes selfish. His only concern is himself, and how he is going to eat and survive until the next day. Once concerned about others, he is now focused on himself. Wiesel also feels “free” when his father dies, presumably because he no longer has to look out for or take care of anyone but himself. Wiesel also details another example of changing behavior in the camp, as he tells the story of a son who killed his father simply for a piece of stale bread. These and other behavioral changes describe the kind of environment Wiesel and others were exposed to in the
"Everything can be taken from man but ?the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." In this, Frankl discusses how different men chose different attitudes. Some remained descent, while others chose to become sadistic. He explains that it is the condition or the atmosphere that forces man to make this decision but that the condition or atmosphere does not make the decision. Each person has to decide what attitude to adopt. As Frankl further explains "there is also purpose in life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man's attitude to his existence restricted by external forces."
We are meant to become our truest selves by finding meaning in our lives, which, according to Frankl, can come from three places: work, love, and our attitude in the face of horrific suffering or difficulty. And at the center of this meaning is our responsibility and human right to choose. In Frankl’s theory, we all strive to fulfill a self-chosen goal, from which meaning has the potential to be found. And if no meaning is found, there is meaning yet to be found, or meaning to be drawn from the apparent lack of meaning. Whatever the case, Frankl viewed man’s lack of meaning as the greatest existential crisis, the stress of this meaninglessness giving life and shape to all of our neuroses.
After reading the book I have gained a new understanding of what inmates think about in prison. Working in an institution, I have a certain cynical attitude at times with inmates and their requests.
Hassine begins his narrative as he is entering prison but this time as an inmate. Prior to his incarceration, Hassine was an attorney (Hassine, 2011). Even then as an attorney, the high walls of prison intimated Hassine (Hassine, 2011). As Hassine was being processed into the system, he expressed how he systematically became hopeless from the very prison structure itself as well as because of the intimidation he felt by uniforms. Prisons of the past actually had a goal to aid individuals through rehabilitation by instilling new values in order to correct the wrongs that one may have committed during their lifetime but today this is no longer true. . Hassine draws colorful depictions of how dim and unfamiliar a prison can be in which instills fear in an individual soon as he or she
In this topic, Peter Malae creates a menacing mood for the audience that allows them to feel the feeling of living in jail with the fear of getting punished and tortured while also having to be conscious of his/her actions (lack of freedom) around
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl is filled to the brim with rhetorical devices from all three sections of the text. Particularly in his section about logotherapy, Frankl’s practice to find an individual’s meaning of life, he explores the three main meanings of life: accomplishment, love, and suffering. This area uses a plethora of comparison, such as parallelism and metaphor. Recurring themes are used to draw back to Frankl’s three life meanings, like word repetition and alliteration. Frankl’s use of rhetorical devices allows his audience to focus on their individual possibilities and incorporate his ideology into society.
When we do research on daily prison life, we come across two typical but less than ideal situations: either social imaginaries cloud our judgment or information provided by the prisons themselves hide certain weak or bad aspects that they do not want to make public. We can also find information on TV, but most of the time it either exaggerates or minimizes the facts. In order to obtain more reliable information, we have to have access to people who are working or have worked in this institution, and such will be the sources of this essay. We will be describing and giving examples of prison violence according to three types of violence: sexual, physical and psychological violence.
Man’s Search For Meaning details Viktor Frankl’s horrifying experiences in Nazi concentration camps during the holocaust, and during that time he found meaning in his life. And he describes three things that were the most important factors that contributed to his and some prisoners survival: love, work, and suffering. It was because of those three things that they were able to survive. Many found hope in the thought that a love one was waiting , others were so preoccupied with work they were un able to think, and most effective was
Gresham M. Sykes describes the society of captives from the inmates’ point of view. Sykes acknowledges the fact that his observations are generalizations but he feels that most inmates can agree on feelings of deprivation and frustration. As he sketches the development of physical punishment towards psychological punishment, Sykes follows that both have an enormous effect on the inmate and do not differ greatly in their cruelty.
In his book “Man’s Search for Meaning”, Viktor E. Frankl presents the total reconstruction of his own mind due to the catastrophic experiences in a concentration camp. Through the time of reading this story a person would expect it would be an average novel about how someone survived, but Viktor presented what it really takes to survive and the phases of how it completely changes a person. This book made me really wonder what ‘switches’ turn on and off in each person’s head; whether it is the SS, or the Capos/foreman, and even the basic prisoner. To me is a feudalistic system in which the highest level is the SS who have leisure to do as they please (the king/ emperor), the second level would be the capos and foreman’s which were twice as brutal as the SS (the nobles), and finally the prisoner/ slaves (servants/ serfs) that would have to work to stay alive by providing labor.
Life was consumed by constant orders, labor, malnutrition, disease, and murder in the concentration camps. Yet somehow the human psyche in many individuals was able to endure throughout these imprisonments. Men and women were almost completely dehumanized during this genocide, but their psyche survived it. People had to find little things to keep themselves content and to nurture their psyche. “Humor was another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation” (63). Humor allows a person to escape a situation and rise above it, even if only for a short time. Humor can never be taken away from anyone because it is naturally within us. Humor within the concentration camps allowed people, for even a split second, to feel like they
The routines they adopt are imprinted on them so much so that they feel like they aren’t able to function outside the prison’s walls. They then begin to feel as if they are an important part of this new
Viktor Frankl and Sigmund Freud, are two of the most significant psychological philosophers of our time. They, have formed powerful perceptions concerning the role of culture, humanity, and the healing method. Even though Frankl and Freud jointly experienced misery within their own existences and equally observed dramatic socio‐political alterations within the premature twentieth century, they eventually came to adopt completely different psychological concepts.
Viktor Emil Frankl was born on March, 26th 1905, at Czeringassa 7, in Leopoldstadt, in Vienna Austria, where Sigmund Freud and Alfred Alder also grew up (Klingberg, 2014). He was the middle child out of three children. His older brother, Walter was two and a half years older, and his younger sister, Stella, was four years younger. His mother was Elsa Frankl, was a polish woman from Prague with a gentle manner. His father, Gabriel Frankl, had been a hard working man who was the Director of Social Affairs (Redsand, 2006). By the time Frankl was four years old he knew he wanted to be a doctor and he pursued that interest while into high school. He took classes focused on psychology and philosophy. He began corresponding with Freud when he was