The Art and Science of Tragic Optimism

Do we manufacture hope? Is hope a flexible muscle?

In September 1942, Viktor Frankl, a prominent psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna, was arrested and transported to a Nazi concentration camp with his wife and parents. In his bestselling book, Man's Search for Meaning, which he wrote in nine days about his experiences in the camps, Frankl concluded that the difference between those who had lived and …