Knowing that our district is paying big bucks for this is disappointing...it does not correct spelling erros and the Dictionary and Encyclopedia are decidedly American in their leanings. I used the word colour and it said ' There is no exact match to colour.' It gave a list of closely spelled words of which color was one...This I discovered is because the Dictionary is 'The American Heritage Children's Dictionary' and the encyclopedia is Funk & Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia. If I were in America I would favour(not favor) this data base more, but I'm not and I don't!  

Viktor Frankl was more than an Austrian born Holocaust survivor—he was a natural born philosopher equipped to both experience an event, and to stand outside of it, pulling meaning from within.

Logotherapy, which is a sort of existentialist analysis, places the driving force of all human nature in finding meaning and purpose in life. Logotherapy concludes that:

• Life has meaning under all circumstances, even the most miserable ones.
• Our main motivation for living is our will to find meaning in life.
• We have freedom to find meaning in what we do, and what we experience, or at least in the stand we take when faced with a situation of unchangeable suffering.

( )

I was required to read this for a philosophy 102 course, and did not expect to enjoy it nearly as much as I did. Frankl does an excellent job of weaving his philosophical points seamlessly into the story he tells, and the result is poignant and thought-provoking. I sold my copy back to my school bookstore at the end of the semester, and have been regretting it ever since. ( )

This story touched me more than any other Holocaust story I have read to date. No doubt this was in part due to the authors ability to stand outside the situation and observe and later relate his thoughts and emotions from the 3rd person. ( )

Although only short, this is effectively two books in one. The first half deals with the author's intensely harrowing experiences in various concentration camps in the Second World War, while the second deals with his particular brand of psychotherapy, which was partly inspired by his earlier tragic experiences.

The description of his wartime sufferings is told with great honesty and style, and is fascinating for its relatively distanced psychological observations. One important lesson that comes out of all this is how vital it is to maintain a sense of meaning or purpose to one's life, and that this is somehow more important for survival than any physical characteristic.

The second half, where Frankl outlines his "logotherapy" theory, is interesting too. As opposed to the Freudian therapy centring on desire and pleasure, and Adlerian therapy centring on status, Frankl's theory centres on the importance of meaning and purpose, and claims that in many cases of neurosis, the cause is that a sense of meaning is lost. The theory does have useful observations, and is told with fascinating anecdotes at times, but feels very antiquated now. While trying to reinstate a sense of meaning in some mild patients with environmental difficulties is undoubtedly a useful approach, Frankl never questions whether losing a sense of meaning is a cause or symptom of more severe conditions, such as bipolar disorder.

The book is utterly worth reading for the rivetting, intensely psychological description of the holocaust, but the second psychotherapy half should probably be skimmed. ( )

holocaust survivor, sister betty recommended ( )

Classic ( )

I have been reading this book off and on for a LONG time now. I'm not sure what the delay is about. More will be revealed once I get finished. ( )

http://thebookwormslibrary.com/?p=37 ( )

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. ( )

The author was introduced on a concentration camp on world war II, on those days he psicologically studied the persons involved, and as a result he writes this book, which is the base for logoterapy, the main idea of the book, is that the men looks for meaning on the main situations of the 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. ( )

In Part I, Frankl's describes how logotherapy -- a psychological method of finding meaning and purpose in one's life, even in circumstances of unavoidable suffering -- helped him (and other prisoners) survive years of torture and deprivation in Nazi concentration camps. The second part of the book provides interesting insights into the ways therapists can apply the same techniques to treat depression and suicidal tendencies in patients who've come to believe their own lives are meaningless. ( )

This psychiatrist survived the Nazi death camp by treating his time there as an experiment in finding out the mind set that keeps people alive even under the harshest and most hopeless of conditions. What he learned is valuable to us all. Although he is a professional, he writes for a larger audience. Dr. Frankl spent the rest of his life teaching and using logotherapy, his own special form of psychiatry, that he hoped would make us all better people, and thus, the world as well. ( )

This is an astonishing book that you must read. Victor Frankl was a Jewish Austrian Psychiatrist imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps including Auschwitz during the Second World War.

The book begins with the remarkable biographical story of life in the concentration camp in conditions that are scarcely imaginable and where the prospects for survival were bleak. The second half of the book takes these experiences and their understanding as the basis for development of what Frankl called Logotherapy. At its heart is a belief that striving to find a meaning to ones life is the primary motivational force within people. This may be contrasted with striving for pleasure, or striving for power which are respectively at the heart of Freudian and Adlerian psychology.

The description of life in the concentration camp is chilling in what it describes but this appears multiplied by the manner of the description. The narrative is largely free of gruesome details and uses simple matter of fact language to convey and amplify the all enveloping abject awfulness of the situation faced by those imprisoned. They are described as having been transported into an incredible and inexplicable world where every normality is replaced by ever present abnormality. Yet in this utterly abnormal world we see there is space for the acts of saints as well as demons.

It is a book which provides insights into the nature of life and meaning and thus should be read by all. If its relevance to those involved in change needs to be stated, for me it is captured in clear imagery that life in the concentration camp which removed so much from the inmates, was denied removing one crucial thing, described thus:-

In the concentration camp every circumstances conspires to make the prisoner lose his hold. All the familiar goals in life are snatched away. What alone remains is “the last of human freedoms” – the ability “to choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances”.

It is this choosing of attitude that sits at the heart of the inmate’s ability to survive, for those that did survive are characterised by having a clear vision, a clear imperative that they must survive for they have work yet to be done.
When so much effort directed at change focuses on what to do and how, Frankl powerfully quotes the words of Nietzsche
‘He who has a why to live, can bear with almost any how’.

I highly recommend this book as one that will change your perspective on what people and organisations can achieve and the incredible importance of establishing meaning; of answering the question ‘why?’ ( )

A slightly different spin on the usual Holocaust stories (very good, very heart-wrenching, as they all are), but his "introduction to logotherapy"--a theory about psychiatry that came out of his concentration camp experiences--didn't impress me all that much. So man needs to find meaning in his life to feel happy and fulfilled ... is that really so revolutionary? ( )

(Kate, 12/08) A secular understanding of LDS doctrine taught even to children: God has a plan for your life, and you survive by having a purpose higher than yourself.

A most profound book that will forever affecting your point view of life. Required reading for all. ( )

I wanted to read a first-hand account of the Holocaust, so I picked up this book. I didn't read the section about logotherapy; I'm not into witch-doctory.

Interesting introduction to the psychiatric world of logotherapy. Combines actual story with the major themes of the practice. I found the book very practical and educational. The only element I disliked were the constant slams on Freud and his psychoanalysis.

Would highly recommend this as a self-help book for those looking to develop a new perspective on life. ( )

Frankl, Viktor Emil.