Three elements
The tragic triad comprises:
- suffering - pain, illness, loss,
- guilt - awareness of the wrong one has done,
- death - the transience and finitude of life.
No one can avoid them. Logotherapy does not promise to remove them, but shows that each of them can become an occasion to realise meaning.
Transformation
Frankl wrote that the tragic triad can bring out the best in a person:
- turning suffering into a human achievement and maturity,
- deriving from guilt the motivation to change oneself for the better,
- finding in the transitoriness of life an incentive to act responsibly.
This attitude is tragic optimism.
The mass neurotic triad
It should be distinguished from the contemporary mass neurotic triad - depression, aggression and addiction - which Frankl linked with the existential vacuum.
Sources
V. E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning - postscript “The Case for a Tragic Optimism” (1984).