Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist and neurologist who was also a survivor of a concentration camp. This book describes his experiences and the philosophy/analysis he developed, partly based on his experiences, called logotherapy. It's like two short books in one.

I loved the first half. He doesn't write much about his arrest or his family, but he does describe the emotional and mental state of those who had been arrested. He came to see that those who survived - at least survived the starvation and disease - were the ones who had something to live for, who found a meaning in their lives. Those who gave up hope didn't last long.

The second part of the book was harder to understand, but what I got out of it is that logotherapy is designed to help people find meaning in their own lives. Once they have discovered their own meaning, their problems become much easier to bear. It also emphasizes that people must take responsibility for their own actions and their own lives.

This is a tremendous book. I wanted to share a couple of quotes:

"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms--to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

"Man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips." ( )

Very interesting account of life as a prisioner in nazis's concentration camps. The author is a psychiatrist who argues for an existentialist view of human nature. ( )

This is an important book if you are interested in human psychology, particularly in logotherapy. The book consists of three parts, the first is Dr. Frankls personal account of his survival at Auschwitz and other concentration camps. In the second part the author gives a concise summary of logotherapy (Def: It focuses on the meaning of the human existence and assists its patients to find meaning in their life.) and in the third and last chapter Frankl discusses "Tragic Optimism" and its usefulness.

I found Dr. Frankls account of his time in Auschwitz very interesting, yet not as emotionally moving as accounts by other authors. I believe that's because the author focused his writings on the psychological aspect of the whole experience, thus giving it a more clinical and detached feeling. This actually proved to be helpful to the reader in understanding the theories of logotherapy.

There were some really good insights in this book and I would like to quote the ones that I found to be most important:

"Don't aim at success- the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's dedication or a cause greater than oneself or as a by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it."

"Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!"

I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the meaning of life and how to live a meaningful life. ( )

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl is divided into two parts. The first deals with the author's experiences in German concentration camps during World War II. As he says in his opening paragraph Dr. Frankl is not interested in writing about the great horrors but about the every day life he experienced and in how these experiences led him to develop logotherapy, a school of psychoanalysis based on the idea that man's primary motivational force is his search for meaning. To be honest, I am skeptical of this idea as I am of psychoanalysis in general, but when an author can back up his theories with experiences from Auschwitz it is difficult to remain a non-believer.

Man's Search For Meaning does not go to extremes depicting life in the camps; it does not have to. As Mr. Frankl says we all know the horrors and those who are going to believe they took place already do. His focus in on the day to day issues such as how did a prisoner get enough food to survive, specifically how did he convince the man who ladled out the soup to go to the bottom of the pot and give him some of the peas that could be found there instead of just skimming broth off of the surface. When one's life is reduced to this, how can it possibly have any meaning? Dr. Frankl provides this answer:

We who walked in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They many have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing; the last of the human freedoms--to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way...

...Dostoevski said once, "There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings." These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those marytrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom--which cannot be taken away--that makes life meaningful and purposeful.

This is certainly not an easy path to follow. Of late the word "purpose" has been cheapened, at least here in America. Dr. Frankl survived the worst experience the 20th century could summon, and he found people there who still maintained a life the meant something and had purpose. He also found their antithesis, men whose lives had lost meaning, men who had seized on all that is dark, who wanted nothing but survival. The thing that is a little hard to accept is that he found both groups of men among the prisoners and among the guards. Only recently have writers begun to widely discuss the role of the Capos in the concentration camps. I suspect many people don't realize how important they were. The guards ran the camps, but the Capos ran the barracks, did the real day to day grunt work of keeping all the prisoners in line and working on rations and sleep well below what is needed to stay alive for long. The Capos were prisoners themselves, chosen by the guards because they were bullies enough to be willing to beat their fellow prisoners into submission when the guards weren't around to do it themselves. Dr. Frankl says the Capos enjoyed a level of power and prestige in the camps that none of them would have experienced outside them.

Some of the guards were better than others. Dr. Frankl describes one who used his own money to purchase medicine for the prisoners in his camp and another who was hidden by three former prisoners when liberation came until the prisoners could convince the American soldiers that he should not be harmed.

Dr. Frankl writes: From all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only these two--the "race" of the decent man and the "race" of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people. In this sense, no group is of "pure race" --and therefore one occasionally found a decent fellow among the camp guards.

The second part of Man's Serach for Meaning is "Logotherapy in a Nutshell" a brief overview of Dr. Frankl's theory. (The term comes from the Greek "logos" or meaning.) It suffers from being a brief overview of what took 20 volumes in German to fully explain, as Dr. Frankl admits. I'm not qualified to comment on logotherapy's effectiveness, I'm still skeptical of it frankly, but I did find much to admire in this section along with a great deal of food for thought. Man's Search for Meaning is a book that stays with the reader long after it is finished. It just may be one that stays with me for life. ( )

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl is a book that is at once the account of man's survival under horrific circumstances, and one man's vision of how to remove himself from existential anxiety. Through the memoirs of Frankl's survival of concentration camps in WWII, we are introduced to the psychotherapeutic theories of logotherapy—the "third Viennese school of psychotherapy" after Freud's psychoanalysis ('will to pleasure') and Adler's individual psychology ('will to power').

An incredible achievement, Man's Search for Meaning is a profound work that is required reading for all those wondering their place in the world. ( )