MSFM

Question 1

According Frankl, “An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal.” What is the paradox of this statement? How can you relate it to a time in your own life?

Answer 1

• Grim humor
• Helps people find meaning in conflict
• Giving meaning to the suffering or creating value
• Felix’s equation
• result of inner decision

Question 2

Why do you think that cigarettes & smoking were the last pleasures enjoyed before death?
Why or how would they signal imminent death to other prisoners?

Answer 2

• Cigarettes were normally used to bargain for soup.
• A privilege reserved for the Capo or a prisoner who had a dangerous job.
• exception to those who had lost the will to live and to “enjoy” their last days. So when a comrade smoked his own cigarettes, he had given up the faith in his strength to carry on(lost will to live) pg.22

Question 3

How does Frankl’s wife give his life meaning?

Answer 3

• Love is the ultimate & the highest goal to which man can aspire.
• Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved.
• Finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self, allowing the prisoner to find refuge from emptiness, desolation & spiritual poverty of his existence, by letting him escape to the past.

Question 4

Explain Frankl’s theory of logo therapy?

Answer 4

Logo=meaning

• It focuses on the meaning of human existence as well as on man’s search for such a meaning.
• Striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man.

Question 5

How is responsibility a crucial component of logo therapy?

Answer 5

• He who has the “why” to live, can figure out the “how”.

- Themes(big pictures) help. Something you can anchor thoughts too.

Question 6

How does Frankl explain survival in the camps with regard to logo therapy?

Answer 6

-He gave meaning to certain tasks, which allowed him to continue to push through adverse situations

Question 7

How do suffering and death complete life and give it meaning?

Answer 7

• Suffering is a part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.
• pg.76

Question 8

What were the “phase 2” reactions to being well-entrenched in the concentration camp routine.

Answer 8

-Phase 1: Shock, did not fear death. “Even the gas chambers lost their horrors for him after the first few days-after all, they spared him the act of committing suicide.”

-Phases 2:a necessary mechanism of self-defense. Relative apathy, in which he achieved a kind of emotional death.
“At first the prisoner looked away if he saw the punishment parades of another group; he could not bear to see fellow prisoners march up and down for hours in the mire. Days or weeks later things changed.