What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.

Viktor E. Frankl (1905–1997) was an Austrian psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and professor. The best-known of his many books, Man’s Search for Meaning, conveys his personal experience and professional observations as a doctor imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. His belief that the quest to find meaning is a driving force of human life was the basis for logotherapy, his revolutionary approach to psychotherapy.