Cancer and Man's Search for Meaning
Writer Alice Hoffman in an interview with Mamm magazine verbalizes how she feels as a survivor of the big C:
I'm in good health, and it's been eight years now, and they say after five years you're safe. But I'm not sure anyone ever feels safe. I think I do have more ability to block things out, but deep inside it's still the same. Deep inside you know: Once you get that kind of bombshell, you know there can always be a bombshell.
...when I was sick I read a book called Man's Search For Meaning, and it made me understand that these horrendous things that you go through are the things that really define you, they make you who you are.
The author's [Viktor Frankl] family had perished in the concentration camps, and he struggled to make sense of a world in which there's so much pain and sorrow. His theory is that it's the sorrow that defines you. Not the happiness, but the sorrow. It's sorrow - and the way you deal with it - that makes you the person that you are.
And I believe that. I don't believe that's a good thing; I just believe it's the state of the world. That's what life is: Good things happen and bad things happen. But the sorrow shows who you are deep inside, I think it shows it to yourself, and sometimes it's a shocker.
If you haven't read Man's Search for Meaning, I highly recommend it:
Viktor Frankl’s theory and therapy grew out of his experiences in Nazi death camps. Watching who did and did not survive (given an opportunity to survive!), he concluded that the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had it right: “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how. " (Friedrich Nietzsche, quoted in 1963, p. 121) He saw that people who had hopes of being reunited with loved ones, or who had projects they felt a need to complete, or who had great faith, tended to have better chances than those who had lost all hope.
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Like Freud a citizen of Vienna and a practicing psychotherapist, Dr. Viktor Frankl also became a university professor and prolific author. His most widely read work is Man's Search For Meaning, a keenly observed account of his experiences in the Nazi death camps during Word War II. Originally intended for limited private circulation, the slim book has since been translated into 24 languages....Frankl first ponders the mystery of transcendent experience amid extreme suffering, then explores the true nature of human moral freedom. Frankl's concentration camp experiences profoundly influenced his life's work after the war, leading to his development of logotherapy, a new clinical approach to helping patients rediscover meaning in their lives.
A Viktor Frankl quote:
I recommend that the Statue of Liberty be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast.
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