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Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl's memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Between 1942 and 1945 Frankl labored in four different camps, including Auschwitz, while his parents, brother, and pregnant wife perished. Based on his own experience and the experiences of those he treated in his practice, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. Frankl's theory—known as logotherapy, from the Greek word logos ("meaning")—holds that our primary drive in life is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but the discovery and pursuit of what we personally find meaningful.
At the time of Frankl's death in 1997, Man's Search for Meaning had sold more than 10 million copies in twenty-four languages. A 1991 reader survey by the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club that asked readers to name a "book that made a difference in your life" found Man's Search for Meaning among the ten most influential books in America.
Born in Vienna in 1905 Viktor E. Frankl earned an M.D. and a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna. He published more than thirty books on theoretical and clinical psychology and served as a visiting professor and lecturer at Harvard, Stanford, and elsewhere. In 1977 a fellow survivor, Joseph Fabry, founded the Viktor Frankl Institute of Logotherapy. Frankl died in 1997.
Harold S. Kushner is rabbi emeritus at Temple Israel in Natick, Massachusetts, and the author of several best-selling books, including When Bad Things Happen to Good People.
William J. Winslade is a philosopher, lawyer, and psychoanalyst at the University of Texas Medical School in Galveston.
A Phenomenal Book
| Customer Rating:  | Let me share part of the first paragraph of Harold S Kushner's introduction:
"Typically, if a book has one passage, one idea with the power to change a person's life, that alone justifies reading it, rereading it, and finding room for it on one's shelves. This book has several such passages."
There's nothing more to add to that, really. You can read the other reviews to get an indication of why I say that passage is accurate, but it most assuredly is. Maybe I should've bought the hardback... |
A man that has contributed greatly to my knowledge of the world.
| Customer Rating: | | There are few men that can absolutely compare to Viktor Frankl when it comes to groundbreaking thoughts on the human experience. His ideas on the existential vacuum and its effects are simply amazing. He paints a picture of his time in a concentration camp that is simply spell binding to say the least. If this weren't enough he goes on to show how that singualar moment in his life has impacted his work. Absolutely a tour de force do yourself a favor and read this book when you can. The Kindle edition is formatted a bit awkwardly but not unreadable. |
This is the one.
| Customer Rating: | | Beautiful. Disturbing. Transcendent. If you read only one book on your own "search for meaning" -- though let's hope for at least two or three -- this is the one. |
A must read classic
| Customer Rating: |
For Frankl, if life has a meaning, it has to be found in suffering. And he knows what suffering is.
A brilliant student who writes essays on Schopenhauer, Psychology and Philosophy when he is still in high school, reduced to a beggar child in WWI and excluded from Alfred Adler's circle, without any reason at the age of 19.
At 23 he already enjoys international recognition for his free work with suicidal youth in Vienna.
In 1938, already a respected psychiatrist, he is invited to live in the US, but prefers to stay close to his old parents, only to be deported, 4 years later to a Jewish ghetto in Prague, where his wife is forced to abort their child and where his father dies from exhaustion 6 months later. Sister Stella manages to escape to AUS. In 1944 the whole family is separated and send to different concentration camps. Only when freed by US troops in April 45, he comes to know that all were killed, including his brother and sister in law. He is kept alive to take care, as a doctor, of other sick prisoners. "Man's search for meaning" was written in 9 days in 1946, and sold 9 million books until his death in 1997, and is considered one of the ten most influential books among lifetime readers in America today.
"Man's search for meaning" makes an analysis of the psyche of a concentration camp prisoner.
What becomes of man when everything is taken from him? To Frankl what one becomes is the result of an individual choice, the choice of weather to behave with dignity and according to moral values or renounce to his freedom of choice, dignity and self respect and behave and become like a scum and an animal.
Suffering is part of life as much as death. The meaning and purpose of life lies in making use of suffering to exercise our freedom of choice, to chose how to take and accept suffering and in this way grow as a human being. Unavoidable, unescapable suffering is in fact a blessing. We must be worth our suffering. Man is free to chose to transform suffering into growth, guilt into change and life's transitoriness into action.
Just as life has a meaning, even under the most miserable of conditions, so does a human being have value independently of its usefulness to society.
The meaning of life in general is less important than the specific meaning of one's life at a specific moment, because that meaning may change every moment. We have to decide every moment what we want to be.
Logotherapy, the psychoanalytical method he devised, concentrates on the responsibility one has for his own life. Responsibility to one's conscience or to society. It identifies the what and the who, one's responsible for. And no one can be responsible for someone else's acts.
Man is free to chose to transform suffering into growth, guilt into change and life's transitoriness into action.
No 2 persons can be compared, No 2 lives are the same.
Sometimes we have to take action, sometimes, we have to accept things the way they are. We all have to suffer, no one can suffer for us. We are alone in the Universe for this task. We have to face suffering bravely and don't cry more than is necessary. Those who see us in our suffering (family, friends or God) expect us to do it with pride and not miserably.
The meaning of life lies outside man. Lies in the people s/he loves and the causes s/he serves.
We cannot know someone completely but through love. Only love sees the potentialities and is able to help realize them.
Sex is only an expression of that love.
A person that has fulfilled the meaning of his life, actualised his potentialities and suffered with dignity, is a person that looks back on his life with pride and does not envy youth. |
A masterpiece of great dignity
| Customer Rating: | While I have never really warmed up to the second part of Frankl's book, the "Experiences in a Concentration Camp" section has to be one of the finest examinations of meaning under terrible circumstances ever written. Frankl is insightful, unpretentious, incisive, elegant, brilliant. The first section is an existential masterpiece.
I guess my difficulty with logotherapy is that meaning as experienced and conveyed by Frankl feels like it gets reduced down when put forth as a psychiatric theory.
But part one is just brilliant beyond any attempt to review it. |
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