Viktor E. Frankl explores how life can be affirmed despite mortality, aging, loss and suffering. He argues that finite time makes responsibility urgent, that realized possibilities remain safely preserved in the past, and that meaning can be found through action, experience and one’s attitude to unavoidable suffering. Clinical examples lead to a defense of unconditional human dignity against measures of usefulness or productivity.
Viktor E. Frankl — 1 recording in the archive.
Related reading: Ärztliche Seelsorge by Viktor E. Frankl.
Dr. [Köpp?], ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your warm welcome. Let me make clear at the outset that the subject, or title, is not coming to terms with the past, but coming to terms with transience. We shall not be discussing how to overcome the past, or even one's own past, but how a person can cope with the transience of existence, of human existence, of life. That means coming to grips with the fact that life, and essentially human life, is transient. More pointedly: how can someone reach the point of saying yes to life despite its transience? How can we affirm our lives despite our own mortality? We have to come to terms with life in the face of death. But we must not forget that life itself is a continual dying: the continual loss of something, or someone, that has become dear to us. One could say that human life is a continual taking of leave. And this is not merely a question of the two great goals Freud assigned to his own theory and therapy, psychoanalysis: the capacity to work and the capacity for enjoyment. We must also confront the human capacity to suffer. Death is only the final point in this continual taking of leave, this continuing process of something like dying away. The fundamental question is whether this transience, this mortality, retrospectively makes life unworthy of being lived, long before the final point is reached. Does it devalue life, deprive it of meaning, rob it of all its meaning? That is the first question we must ask ourselves. I would like to begin with the thesis that death is not only incapable of taking meaning away from life: it also gives life meaning. Just imagine, ladies and gentlemen, what would happen, what life would look like, if there were no death. Imagine what it would mean if you could postpone absolutely everything, and postpone it indefinitely. You would have to do or attend to nothing today or tomorrow. Everything could just as well happen in a week, a month, a year, a decade, a hundred or a thousand years. Only in the face of death, only under the pressure of the finite duration of human existence, does it make any sense to act. And not merely to act, but to experience; not merely to experience, but to love, and courageously endure and live…