Man’s search for meaning

Man’s search for meaning is an autobiography of Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankyl. He wrote the book within nine consecutive days, with the firm intention of publishing it anonymously, but upon his friend’s insistent urge, he agreed to add his name.

This book is divided into two sections :

1. Experiences in a Concentration Camp: In this author gives vivid detail of his life in various concentration camps during World War II and how he narrowly survived. How guards in the camp took every belonging away from him but not his inner freedom to respond to the situation.

“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.”

The author wants to concentrate less on the atrocities of Nazis, what he suffered and lost but more on the strength that kept him alive.

“He who has a Why to live for can bear any How.”

He observed the way a prisoner imagined the future affected his longevity. Prisoners, who had lost all the hopes for a future and had no meaning to life were the first ones to die. They died less from the lack of food or medicine than from lack of hope or meaning in life.

2. Logotherapy in a Nutshell: The second part gets a bit clinical presents an existential analysis. He had started working on developing Logotherapy (Therapy through meaning) before he was imprisoned by the Nazis. Here he explains with examples how he applied this theory to himself as well as on his fellow prisoners to survive in camps.

“Give opportunity to be proud of your sufferings and to consider it ennobling rather than degrading. Find meaning in your sufferings.”

Professor Frankl indicates that we can discover this meaning in life in three different ways:

(1) by creating a work or doing a deed

(2) by experiencing something or encountering someone and

(3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.

This book contains a wealth of ideas and it will remain next to me always.

Read it, talk about it

PS: My favorite part is where he talked about his wife knowing that she might not be alive at that moment.

“I did not know whether my wife was alive, and I had no means of finding out (during all my prison life there was no outgoing or incoming mail), but at that moment it ceased to matter. There was no need for me to know; nothing could touch the strength of my love, my thoughts, and the image of my beloved. Had I known then that my wife was dead, I think that I would still have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of her image, and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying. Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death.”