Man’s Search for Meaning: Viktor Frankl’s Account of Survival and Hope in the Concentration Camps
A psychiatrist who survived the horror of the Second World War tells, in the first person, what life was like as a prisoner in the concentration camps, and what it taught him about the human mind when life and death are separated by the thinnest of lines.
Author: Viktor E. Frankl (1905–1997)
Title: Man’s Search for Meaning (1946)
Format: English hardcover (Rider), introduction by Martin Gilbert
Scope: Memoir and psychology (logotherapy)
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/1846042844 (ASIN 1846042844)
Inside the Camps
Frankl describes, from the perspective of a prisoner, the situation and the experiences he lived through at first hand: the inequality, the suffering, the hunger and the poverty that war brings. Ethics are put to the test when people you know suffer misfortune and help cannot reach everyone.
Who Held On
The mentality of those who survived was very different from that of those who gave up. Apathy, brought on by lack of sleep and scarcity of food, led to disaster. Those who could see some opportunity even in misfortune, the most optimistic, were better able to deal with the horror, to recover and to hold on until the end.
The Psychiatrist’s Conclusions
Frankl analyses the differences in the prisoners’ attitudes and draws conclusions about how the human psyche works in extreme situations, and about how reason and logic are sometimes defeated by the most extreme ignorance. From these observations he developed his idea that the search for meaning is the deepest human drive.
Viktor Frankl
Viktor Frankl (1905–1997) was a Viennese psychiatrist and neurologist who had already begun developing his theories about meaning before the war. In 1942 he was deported with his family to the Theresienstadt ghetto, and later he passed through Auschwitz and camps attached to Dachau. His parents, his brother and his young wife, Tilly, all died. He survived, returned to Vienna and in 1946 wrote this book, reportedly in just nine days.
Logotherapy
The second part of the book explains logotherapy, the school of psychotherapy Frankl founded, often called the "third Viennese school" after Freud’s psychoanalysis and Adler’s individual psychology. Where Freud stressed the will to pleasure and Adler the will to power, Frankl argued that the deepest human drive is the will to meaning. He believed meaning can be found in three ways: through work or creating something, through love and experience, and through the attitude we take towards unavoidable suffering.
"He Who Has a Why"
Frankl often quoted Nietzsche: "He who has a why to live can bear almost any how." In the camps, he observed that prisoners who held on to a purpose, a person waiting for them, a task to complete, were more likely to keep going. He himself held on to the hope of seeing his wife again and of rewriting the manuscript of a book that had been taken from him on arrival at Auschwitz. His conclusion, that the last of human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any set of circumstances, is among the most quoted lines of the century.
A Lasting Influence
The book has been translated into dozens of languages and has sold millions of copies. In a survey carried out for the Library of Congress in the early 1990s, readers named it one of the ten most influential books in the United States.
How to Read It
It can be read in an afternoon, but most readers return to it many times, often at difficult moments in their own lives.
Why Read It
A short book that stays with the reader for a long time. It is at once a historical testimony and a practical reflection on how to face suffering.
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