Definition
Hope, in Frankl's account, is the orientation of a person toward a meaningful future — the sense that something or someone still waits ahead, and that one's continued existence is therefore required. It is not optimism about odds. It is the conviction that the future holds a task, a person, or a purpose addressed specifically to oneself.
Frankl's testimony on this point is clinical, not consoling. In the concentration camps he documented that prisoners who lost their hold on a future to live for did not merely become sad. They declined physically, often with startling speed.
Why it matters
How it works
Frankl observed that a prisoner stripped of any future orientation entered a state of inner surrender. The will to live, no longer anchored to anything ahead, gave way; resistance to disease and exhaustion fell with it. He described prisoners who simply stopped — refused to rise, lay still, and were dead within days.
The reverse also held. A prisoner who could fix on a reason for the future — unfinished work, a person waiting beyond the wire — could draw on that reason as a source of endurance. Hope, in this grave sense, was not a comfort. It was a condition of physical survival, and its absence was a documented danger.