Man's Search for Meaning

Existential frustration is in itself neither pathological nor pathogenic. A man’s concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.

Logotherapy deviates from psychoanalysis insofar as it considers man a being whose main concern consists in fulfilling a meaning, rather than in the mere gratification and satisfaction of drives and instincts, or in merely reconciling the conflicting claims of id, ego and superego, or in the mere adaptation and adjustment to society and environment

Logotherapy regards its assignment as that of assisting the patient to find meaning in his life.

The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom.

the categorical imperative of logotherapy, which is: “Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!”

Man is not fully conditioned and determined but rather determines himself whether he gives in to conditions or stands up to them.

“Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!”

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.

fell victim to the camp’s degenerating influences. The question now arises, what could, or should, have constituted this “inner