Tension Is Inherent | Excerpt from “Man’s Search for Meaning”
Tension Is Inherent | Excerpt from ” Man’s Search for Meaning “
Man’s Search for Meaning is a transformative and life-affirming read. This book stands out as one of the most helpful tools you will find in your life-long search for the way to live and be useful to others despite depression. As opposed to Freud, who believed that the primary drive in man, the most urgent motivation, was pleasure, Frankl believes that it is Meaning. Now meaning for Frankl is not something abstract and airy and noble but rather something very concrete and specific to your life. What is the task that life asks of you that only you can do? Look at the circumstances of your life, look at your talents and the people that surround you. Where is the need that is calling for you to respond? For Frankl, the hope that kept him trudging on day by day in the concentration camps was the need to re-write the manuscript where he could present to the world his theory of Logo therapy.
Following excerpt from ” Man’s Search for Meaning ” advocates the fact that tension is not completely a negative thing you’re trying to avoid. It could be a constructive thing if you attach it with a worthwhile goal. Or, rather say “Meaning”.
Tension Is Inherent | Excerpt from ” Man’s Search for Meaning “
“Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being. We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. It is only thus that we evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency. I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology “homeostasis”, i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.”
― Viktor Emil Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
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