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WiSe 19/20: (V) Destiny, Persecution and Happiness

Silvana Greco

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Destiny, Persecution and Happiness Lecture by Prof. Dr. Silvana Greco (silvana.greco@fu-berlin.de) The course focuses on the different facets and dimensions of the concept of happiness and fulfilled life, that three Jewish authors have elaborated in their works for different biographical reasons and from different perspectives. The authors are Erich Fromm (1900-1980), Viktor Frankl (1905-1997) and Martin Seligman (1942). After Hitler's rise to power and the persecution of the Jews, Erich Fromm, the sociologist and social psychologist at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, emigrated from Germany first to Geneva and then to the United States in 1934. After his brilliant work The Fear of Freedom (1941), much of his psychosocial research focused on the core elements of a happy life: Being, authenticity and love. The perspective of his reflection is strongly intertwined with Jewish cultural tradition. The Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl was unable to escape from Austria and was deported with his wife to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, in September 1942, and to Auschwitz, in October 1944. After his liberation from Auschwitz, which he survived as the only one in his family, he wrote his world-famous autobiographical book: ... Nevertheless, say “Yes” to Life: A Psychologist experiences the Concentration Camp (1946). After the end of the World War II, he left Vienna and emigrated to the United States. A central point of his theory sees the meaning of life as the driving force of happiness. Drawing on Frankl’s Meaning Theory, the American psychologist Martin Seligman (1942), son of two Shoah survivors and founder of positive psychology, created his own model for true well-being in 2011. It is based on five pillars: positive emotions, engaging in something (engagement), experiencing being connected with other people (positive relationship), finding a meaning in our actions (meaning) and realizing that we can move and achieve something (accomplishment). close