Meaning and optimism in extreme adversity.

The ability to find meaning, even in the most inhumane and desolate circumstances, can stand as a fundamental source of optimism and survival.

Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl's experience during his internment in Nazi concentration camps, such as Auschwitz, poignantly illustrates how the search for purpose can sustain hope in the midst of extreme suffering.

The Last Human Freedom

Frankl observed that while prisoners were stripped of virtually everything-their possessions, their identity, and often even their dignity-there was one fundamental freedom that their captors could not take away from them: the freedom to choose one's own attitude and response to imposed suffering.

This capacity for internal choice became a pillar of psychological resilience.

Attitudes towards Suffering

Within the camps, Frankl identified different attitudes among the prisoners.

One group maintained a superficial optimism, believing that everything would soon work out, and they tended to be the first to succumb when those hopes failed to materialize.

Another group clung to specific dates of promised deliverance; when these were not met, they also lost the will to live.

However, the group that demonstrated the greatest likelihood of survival was the one that, while recognizing the extreme hardship of their situation, held on to the determination to survive, finding or projecting meaning for their existence.

The Power of Purpose and Visualization

For many of those who survived, the key was to have something or someone to live for, a purpose that transcended their immediate suffering.

Some were clinging to the idea of reuniting with loved ones, others to the completion of a job or personal project.

Visualizing a meaningful future was a powerful tool; for example, Frankl mentions a prisoner who mentally built his house day by day, brick by brick, which gave him a reason to keep going.

Frankl himself clung to the idea of reconstructing his work on logotherapy, which had been taken from him.

Logotherapy. The Search for Meaning

Logotherapy, the school of psychotherapy developed by Frankl, is based on the idea that the main motivating force of the human being is the search for meaning in life.

This meaning can be found through work or creation, through love and care for others, or through the attitude one adopts in the face of inevitable suffering. The ability to find a "why" to live allows one to endure almost any "how".

This search for meaning, even in the worst circumstances, is a profound manifestation of an optimism grounded in the inner freedom of the human being.