In order to participate in a seminary promoted by my university professor of marketing, I was requested to read this book called “Man's Search for Meaning” By Viktor Frankl. These book is a kind of book that deserves a profound thinking after reading it.
Viktor Frankl was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist as well as a Holocaust survivor. This book is his account on the days being an inmate on concentration camps. Far from denouncing the atrocities that was made in these camps, frankl changed the perspective and wrote a kind of essay on how the events were perceived from the prisoners and how the prisoners handled with the overwhelming situation and with all the suffering that they were faced to live.
The author managed to show his point of view on existentialism, the struggle for surviving and how to live is always the only option. These points are the roots for the author´s logotherapy, which is considered the "Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy" (the first one is the Freud's psychoanalysis and the second one is the Adler's individual psychology).
Logotherapy is an existential analysis that brings forward the “will to meaning” and says that life has meaning under all circumstances, even the most miserable ones and our main motivation for living is our will to find meaning in life.
The author himself experienced this meaning while working in an extreme situation where he happened to think in his wife. He said he understood in that occasion what many thinkers and poets had proclaimed that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.
Full of emotion, this book is amazing. Despite the dark and heavy background, the book is a quite optimist account. The author´s position of not showing revenge thoughts give us a sense that we can change things and for changing the world we need stop looking at the other´s faults and start shape our thoughts and acts up to find meaning to our existence.
After reading the “Man's Search for Meaning” I was full of thoughts and ready to talk about them on my marketing class. I was thinking that it is quite hard to accept what happened and what men are capable to do with each other; that the worst is that even today after too much suffering there are many people in many places in the world passing through situations like that. I started to think how is meaningless many aspects of our reality and how there are so many things to be changed, to be transformed in our world. There are so many things to be done and first of all we need to know and understand ourselves; and find a positive meaning of our life; a meaning that could be match with the transformation of this reality in a better one.
For my disappointment, the discussion in our class was poor. We didn´t talk about the meaning of life or other philosophic issue. We didn´t even talk about our position or about our role in the society. We didn´t talk about the weakness of the system or the necessity of thinking better on our acts. We talked about marketing, about branding, about propaganda and how get position in the market to sell our products and make profit. What was supposed to be a great opportunity to have a good conversation, was in fact, a bored time spent together and a frustrated meeting.
We had a little brief on Second World War and about Nazism Propaganda. The professor explained how Hitler invented many tools on mass communications and through these tools he managed to make a whole nation to follow him in his politic vision. We didn´t get on human nature or others facts on History to understand what was going on. I believe that despite the fact we are grown and attending university, many people are still confused about many things on Second World War, and that would have been a good occasion to talk a little about it. But I have to say that not so many people were thinking like me in that moment.
We came on talking about some topics from the book, which the students were asked to write them down separately and then put all together to be read by some chosen ones in order to make the presentation of the topics more organized. Every single topic were presented to the class and then opened to be discussed. Every single topic had to be related with organizational environment and nothing more profound than it.
Well, actually it was my fault to believe that we could have some philosophic moment in an administration course. In addiction, we are going to the final laps of our graduation; this kind of feeling must have died some time ago, after the first year course.
I could say that I should have expected that, but the fact is that I feel myself a little bit strange for using this meaningful account in our so market directed discussion without feeling.
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