Man's Search for Meaning
Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl is a powerful book about suffering and meaning. The book is split into two parts: the first is an autobiographical account of Frankl’s experiences as a concentration camp inmate during the Holocaust and the second is a treatise on Frankl’s logotherapy, a psychotherapy approach that focuses on man’s “will to meaning.”
The autobiographical first part is an engrossing description of life within the concentration camps. Importantly, Frankl skillfully elucidates the psychological effects of the camps’ conditions on the inmates using stories; as he describes in the introduction to the account, his goal is to answer the question: “How was everyday life in a concentration camp reflected in the mind of the average prisoner?” Thus, his story is less about grand sacrifices and martyrs, and more about the survival of “common prisoners” and the “multitude of small torments.” I found his stories extremely compelling, although I found the organization of the section hard to follow. Frankl does not tell his story in chronological order. Instead, he jumps around time to illustrate different points, which sometimes makes the account hard to follow. In addition, the whole autobiography is organized as one continuous account with no chapter breaks, so I occasionally had trouble seeing the connections between the various philosophical and psychological claims he raises in the text.
The second part is much clearer, and concisely lays out his therapeutic doctrine of logotherapy, which focuses on people’s search for meaning. The tone and content of this section represent a larger departure from the first part (a reflection of the fact that it was written 3 years later). I still really enjoyed the section–in part due to my interest in psychotherapy and psychiatry–and I believe it clarifies some of the arguments he laid out in the first part of the text.
Overall, I found the book to be a fascinating read. I did not find it life-changing like some have. Nevertheless, his experiences and thoughts on finding meaning in suffering gave me a sense of comfort, strength, and hope, and I believe this is a book that I will need to return to and reread several times in the future.
Rating: 5/5
Note: I expand a bit more on the actual contents of this book in my blog post entitled Suffering and Healing. Be sure to check it out if you’re interested!
A selection of my favorite quotes (potential spoilers):
- “We have come to know Man as he really is. After all, 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.”
- “On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves. We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles–whatever one may choose to call them–we know: the best of us did not return.”
- “I never tire of saying that the only really transitory aspects of life are the potentialities; but as soon as they are actualized, they are rendered realities at that very moment; they are saved and delivered into the past, wherein they are rescued and preserved from transitoriness. For, in the past, nothing is irretrievably lost but everything irrevocably stored.”
- “Emotions, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.”
- “When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude… He knows the ‘why’ for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any ‘how.’”
- “If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.”