I’ve been meaning to read this for a very long time, but have to admit that the idea of reading a book by someone who survived the Holocaust with long descriptions of that part of their life included with graphic detail didn’t really make me want to jump at the chance. And this book is harrowing – particularly the first half or so – the pain is infinite.

I was also keen to find out what he felt he learnt from this experience about how to live a good life. I have to say that I found this part of the book quite unsatisfying. His discussion of ‘logotherapy’ left me cold, I’m afraid. I don’t really like books that say things that amount to – this guy came to see me about some problem that had plagued his life for decades, I said three sentences to him and he went away with a skip and a spring in his step.

There are bits of this that are worthwhile – you know, suffering isn’t an ‘and also’ in life, but often learning how to live with (rather than overcome) suffering is our key task. Yes, I think the Buddha said something similar. That life is better with a meaning is also hardly novel either, although, I guess not something the Buddha said, so much.

Psychology is a subject that inevitably stresses the position of the individual, and the psychology of a man who has lived through an experience where those with power held his life in utter contempt and enjoyed making it clear to him that his ongoing existence was completely at their discretion would hardly encourage him to seek meaning in ‘grand projects’ and such. But I don’t really like psychology and worry it gazes wistfully down the wrong end of the telescope.

I feel awful writing this review, by the way. It feels disrespectful to criticise a book written by someone who lived through something so utterly unimaginable and disgusting. But this is a book providing advice on how one should live one’s life – and even though people tend to think that having lived through the unspeakable is qualification enough to write such a book, I find I can’t really agree. As he makes too clear, sometimes we can look into the abyss and learn nothing from it at all. What he has learnt is better than what some of his fellow prisoners learnt, but if anything this book should be a reminder that someone forced to live through the banality of evil isn’t really under obligations to learn cuddly and life-affirming lessons from that experience. All to the good if that is what you do learn – but it does seem to compound the punishment of such an experience if such ‘lessons’ become mandatory.

There’s a joy at once fierce and quiet in feeling profoundly rearranged by your encounter with a book. In understanding, with certainty, in the deep core of your heart, that the you who first entered this book exists at a distance of several hundred pages: you’re not the same person, you’ve changed—been changed—in ways you cannot explain but which you will always carry with you. I might have finished this book but I feel like it’s only just begun me.

Man’s Search for Meaning weaves together compelling personal narrative and profound scientific inquiry into a short volume that is luminous, insightful, and deeply empowering. Frankl provides us with an extraordinary investigation into his doctrine of Logotherapy, a branch of therapy that believes that “the primary motivational force” of a human being is the striving to find a meaning in his life.

From the outset, Frankl makes it clear that he does not bring to this inquiry solely the tools of a scientist, but even more importantly, the weight of first-hand lived experience. The first part of this book recounts, intimately and horribly, Frankl’s experiences as a Jewish detainee in several Nazi concentration camps, illuminating in the process the key concepts of Frankl’s theory of Logotherapy.

It is impossible to hide one’s wince reading this section. Frankl’s account is unsparing, giving an unflinching testimonial of humanity’s violence against itself, of “the hard fight for existence which raged among the prisoners,” of what it means to survive through unimaginable horror in places where one’s definition of suffering is deranged, every second, into entirely new meanings. (In a particularly haunting instance, Frankl remembers how he abruptly stopped himself from shaking a fellow inmate out of a fearful nightmare he was having because “no dream, no matter how horrible, could be as bad as the reality of the camp which surrounded us, and to which I was about to recall him.”) To cushion himself against the shock and constant oppression of terror, Frankl remembers his wife’s face and the stolen manuscript containing his life’s work and feels empowered to survive long enough to fulfill his twin needs of seeing his wife and re-writing his manuscript. Frankl’s beloved and unwritten manuscript become, in other words, the marginal references for the survival of his self.
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Frankl survives to speak the full agenda and unequivocal goal of his therapeutic doctrine— Logotherapy—which is explained and explored in the second part of this book. Frankl’s theory of Logotherapy, when reduced to its simplest form, is clear, precise, and easy to both grasp and appreciate: that “life holds meaning under any condition,” therefore the purpose of Logotherapy is for one to be “confronted with, reoriented towards the meaning of his life.” From this deceptive simplicity, however, arises a practice of meaning-making that is complex, challenging, unresolved, and ongoing.

Throughout the book, Frankl insists upon the plural, specific, and shifting nature of the meaning of one’s life—as opposed to a unified, abstract, and generalized understanding of meaning-making. In other words, it is not so much a man’s search for a meaning, but for a multitude of meanings: a constantly changing constellation of potentialities, as opposed to a fixed quantity of traits. In this book, Frankl invites us to work out the vocabularies of our unwieldy selves, to make our own meaning(s) and walk through them. For him, this exercise is fraught with tension—the tension “between what one has already achieved and what one should become”—because tension is not only inevitable in the process of meaning-making—it is also “normal and healthy.” Frankl refuses to see this contradiction as conflicting: in his rendering, it is precisely this tension that prevents us from being embedded in misery and a freezing boredom. It is an amulet that protects us against the void that threatens to devour our selves, what Frankl calls the “existential vacuum.”

Frankl identifies this void as a primary aspect of the atrophy of the imagination that precludes us from finding meaning in life and stresses how important it is to resist this void and to struggle openly and fiercely against it. To this end, Frankl delineates three broad avenues through which one might find meaning(s) “at any given moment”. The first is through personal achievement or a good deed. The second is through the embrace of beauty, culture, and nature and/or personal encounters with one another, in which we grapple for each other’s depths and love each other. The last one is through personal suffering.
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Let me immediately admit that I was very resistant, for several pages, to this last point: to the idea that suffering enobles us, that our life and the meaning of it is enlivened by it somehow. But Frankl, as it turns out, has anticipated this objection and hastens to explain that he isn’t making a case for suffering as something indispensable for or dissociable from the practice of meaning-making—that suffering is, to put it differently, a requisite for leading a meaningful life—but that meaning can come, not from suffering, but despite the abundance of it. It is difficult not to feel persuaded, and even liberated by this: the idea that not only can we survive through our suffering, but that we can live thoroughly within it. That even in the worst types of circumstances, through a rigorous and indefatigable striving for meaning, one can be transformed.
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Here, Frankl brings us directly and inevitably against the question of how. How does one give meaning to one’s suffering when one’s subject, in their everyday life, to larger systemic forces that feel impossible to overcome? Frankl’s theory of Logotherapy does not deny that there are circumstances beyond our control, but it insists that there is one thing that we are able to control, which is “the way(s) in which we respond to (them).” What is available in the search for meaning, in other words, is the deepest kind of freedom. “It is not freedom from conditions,” to borrow Frankl’s words, “but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions.” The freedom one is born with, which is as inextricable from one’s self as a strand of DNA. The freedom to imagine an elsewhere and an otherwise, or as Frankl puts it, to imagine a present that is both past and future: “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!” The principle of responsibleness is therefore integral to Frankl’s vision of freedom: the pursuit of meaning has the immense power to heal the fissures that suffering makes on the imagination—but only if we can first extend our imagination to articulate what we are responsible for.

In its most radical moments, Man’ Search for Meaning speaks deeply to the human desire to mediate rupture and powerlessness and create ourselves through annihilation. It’s a testament to how humans have always evolved creative responses to rupture, crisis, and fissure, and how we manage to endure at the center of even the most unendurable atrocities. This is not a book one comes to for answers—Logotherapy is, in Frankl’s own words, “neither preaching nor teaching”—but rather, a book that one can approach as a way of being and thinking, as a way of conceiving of one’s self and the world, as something to hold consciously at the center of one’s practice. Ultimately, what Man’s Search for Meaning does best is posit a set of questions that become a ferocious call to action: to always strive for meaning—and to hunt for it when it’s necessary—even in a world that seems to perpetually corrode our freedom.

كتاب جميل جدا ومهم في مجال الصحة النفسية
يستعرض الدكتور فرانكل تجربته الذاتية وخبراته في معسكرات النازية
وكيف استطاع من خلال إيمانه بمعنى وجوده من الإستمرار في مقاومة حياة الذل
كيف أعطى لنفسه معنى حين ألغي وجوده في المعسكر وتحول لمجرد رقم من خلال تحقيقه الانتصار الداخلي
الكاتب وصف المراحل التي يمر بها السجين منها مرحلة النكوص مرحلة اختلال الشخصية ومرحلة البلادة
مرحلة العدم ومحاولات الإنتحار كما يتحدث باسهاب عن المعاناة والألم النفسي
المشوق في الكتاب أنه يضرب أمثلة من واقع تجربته شخصيا

يشرح في الجزء الثاني من الكتاب المبادىء الأساسية للعلاج بالمعنى
الكتاب قيّم جدا لمن يعانون من الإحباط وحالات الإكتئاب

4.5 stars.
I think this was a good year-starter, and much deeper in its message than I thought. This is the 2010 edition of a story of the struggle for survival and purpose in concentration camps, and how logotherapy works explained in easy manner. My book had photographs on the inside of the front and back cover. Of his family, the only other one to survive was his sister, who had moved to Australia; he did later remarry and have a daughter. He explains to us also why he didn’t take the chance to go to America to avoid being sent to a concentration camp – a piece of marble from a destroyed synagogue, picked up by his father, made him stay behind to be with his parents.

In some ways, this book’s message gets close to Stoicism, in that one always has a freedom to choose one’s attitude, even when all other choices have been taken away. And having a rich inner life helps in finding a meaning and the will to endure and (try to) survive.

The first part gets into what his experience in concentration camps was like, and what he learned about it. For him, he found a meaning in wanting to see his (already dead) wife again, and to get to finish a book he was planning to release (though first he would have to rewrite it, the original having been destroyed on his arrival at the camp). He talks about the three phases of camp life: the arrival, the routine (apathy, regression, survival), and the after (unrealness, moral recovery, the great need of new goals and meanings). Besides the necessity to have something good going on mentally, the support of watching nature, moments of art, and humor were good ways of mental relief. The attitude: choosing – inner hold on moral and spiritual selves, a future goal to look forward to (the ‘why’). He also talks about the moments of luck and opportunity within the camp, and in his own case.

The second part, on logotherapy, is easier than what one might think, and brings up further points on his message. This therapy focuses on the future, breaking the self-centredness and reorienting the person. The author gives us some examples on how logotherapy has helped patients.
Each one of us has their own personal meanings to fulfill. A lot of sufferings in the present life can be rooted in the lack of meaning, that some try to find by other means. Meanings can also change, but it’s always important to search for a new one when the old one stops being useful (like when in the life after concentration camp one finds out the person one wanted to meet again is dead). Meaning can be also found in love and/or suffering (when unavoidable), which also needs to have a change in inner attitude). Remembering the past can be useful when searching for a meaning, and also as a storage of memories to be proud of – here age really has a benefit. We all have a potential to be a swine or a saint, a decent person or not, within us.

The 1984 postcript, from a lecture from the previous year also adds some: saying yes to life in spite of pain/guilt/death – get the best out of them; to find a reason to become happy; how loss of meaning can show in seeking only of immediate pleasure, and in negativity; on unemployment neuroses. Logotherapy in not about being talked into doing one thing, but of offering variety to choose from. And how one arrives at the meaning of life: is it of creating and action, experiences and encounters (here can be both), or rising above and growing beyond ourselves? There is much variety to choose from indeed!

The letters and speeches at the end are also of interest – the letters tell us what was the author's frame of mind in the months after becoming free again; the speeches given on anniversaries of events say that each of us has our own guilt, and collective guilt is not the way to go. People are of decent and not-decent kind, and the decent make life worth it.

I can see easily why this book has been so popular, and still is: the way of finding a meaning for one’s life is neutral enough to fits many kinds of beliefs and lack of, all kinds of minds. I found plenty to make notes about, and not just for making this review. This is a book one might want to reflect on, and it can improve one’s life and mind easily. So very recommendable, and I do so, here.

Listening to Man's Searching for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl, an Audible realise, has deeply touched me. It happens to be that I have been in Auschwitz and visited this particular concentration camp a few years previously. The place itself seemed to be a frightening place after all those years post-war when I was visiting it. I could visualise the story told by the author and connect it with my memories of the terrible place. Nonetheless, the was more similar places like this where Hitler's minions did evil. A similar place German execution place is near Kaunas in Lithuania. I have been unduly.
People were dying daily in Auschwitz concentration camps. Such existence, hard work, starvation, diseases. All that reality brought emotional agony and suffering. Yet, he survived among the majority that had never come back.
Viktor E transferred the experience brought from the captivity. And helped people overcome or recover from various mental illnesses. The begging of Logotherapy arise, and Frankl is the founder of this treatment. Therapy involves finding meaning, and that comes with a choice.

I have to separate the emotional impact of the first half of the book from my overall impression on how effective the book was as a whole. It's really difficult not to find stories of the holocaust incredibly gripping, and the way in which Frankl speaks of his experience is inspiring and yet still maintains that gravity you'd expect from such a narrative.
However, the latter half of the book delves much more into a psychological, and less personal, examination of 'logotherapy' (that is, the author's personal psychological theory). Once it became more of a text book with small sections reflecting on specific terms and theories, it was difficult to stay engaged. I also felt it lacked the cohesiveness that the first part of the book had with a more linear narrative structure.
Nonetheless, the nuggets of wisdom I gleaned from this book were worth the reading. And I can only commend Frankl on his 'tragic optimism' in such a horrific environment as a Nazi concentration camp.

I read this years ago. But it still sits with me. In my heart. I will not forget. We should never forget.

Even though this was written during a dark, dark time in history, we can not discount how relevant it is to the world we live in today. It is an amazing look at surviving, forgiving and finding meaning. It is also a reminder and warning of atrocities that we collectively must oppose.

The sun is slowly rising up ushering the dawning of a new day. The mother and the father are sipping their first cups of coffee. Their schooling children are rising up from their bed. The mother attends to her children’s daily routine. She bathes, feeds them their breakfast and makes sure that their things are all in their individual school bags. Para Kanino Ka Bumabangon? (translation: Whom Do You Wake Up For?) is heard as a voice over. This is Nestle’s TV ad for Nescafe coffee but it sends a very clear message: n  that each of us has our own reason for living and this reason is the meaning of our life, our existence.n

In a nutshell, this is what Viktor Emil Frankl (1905-1997) an Austrian Jew, neurologist, psychiatrist and a Holocaust survivor, is saying in this 1946 originally-published book, Man’s Search for Meaning. He says that the life of each one of us has its own meaning. That meaning cannot be generalized. His theory of logotherapy which is a form of Existential Analysis, can be used to determine one’s meaning for living or even suffering. Using his horrendous experiences at Auschwitz concentration camp, which he narrated in the first part of this book, he said that he and the other survivors kept themselves alive by imaging and looking forward to their lives after the war. Those who felt hopeless and they could not picture themselves reuniting with their families after the war, perished. As if they had no longer any reason for living and thus they chose to die rather than to survive.

He also said that we should not ask for the meaning of our life. Rather, we should ask what life wants from us.

I have read several books about the holocaust. I have seen and liked Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List and read and liked Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark, Imre Kertesz’s Fatelessness, Elie Wiesel’s Night, Victor Klemperer’s I Will Bear Witness and of course Anne Frank’s Diary of the Young Girl. That’s why the first part of this book did not shock me anymore. However, there are some parts here that were new to me like Frankl’s heavy interactions with the Gapos, co-inmates but they have leadership positions and also he, as a doctor, had a chance to escape from the Auschwitz concentration camp together with another doctor. This was the first time I heard that a prisoner could well, almost successfully escape the camp.

The second part of the book is more on clinical analysis and theories about logotheraphy which Frankl pioneered. It is similar to psychotherapy but this one is more forward-looking. It is a type of existentialist analysis that focuses on a will to meaning as opposed to Adler’s Nietzchean doctrine of will to power or Freud’s will to pleasure. Rather than power or pleasure, logotherapy is founded upon the belief that it is the striving to find a meaning in one's life that is the primary, most powerful motivating and driving force in humans. (Source: Wikipedia).

And this striving to find a meaning is the reason why we wake up each morning. Ikaw, para kanino ka bumabangon?

Very authentic description of life that the depravity of man revealed, it is written very factually and pragmatically.
The book is recommendable to everyone who strives to study the meaning of life, mindfulness and resilience.

“Beni kalbine mühürle, sevgi ölüm kadar güçlüdür”

Firește, Viktor Emil Frankl (1905 - 1997) nu și-a propus să ofere (încă) o relatare a anilor petrecuți în lagăr de un inocent, ci o meditație asupra individului captiv și a transformărilor suferite de psihicul său. Poți să fii de acord (sau nu) cu ideile sale, dar ele provin dintr-o experiență-limită, asupra căreia autorul a meditat îndelung.

Chiar dacă a dictat în nouă zile prima parte a cărții, Viktor Frankl a urmat, cu siguranță, o serie de note și „sistematizări”. Autorul încearcă să întemeieze o concluzie - viața are sens - și din această pricină nu urmează cronologia și nici nu descrie amănunțit toate suferințele prin care a trecut: nu dă nume, oferă o perspectivă de sus, austeră. Observă că, de obicei, psihicul captiv trece prin trei stadii. Uluirea inițială, revolta pot duce la o stare de apatie („Nu mai are nici un rost să trăiesc, moartea e preferabilă”) sau, în cazuri izolate, la intuirea sensului ascuns pînă și în suferința cea mai atroce. Firește, sensul nu e ceva valabil pentru toți, ceva ce ți se impune de sus, sensul vieții ține de o decizie strict personală: „Tovarășii mei de lagăr se temeau să ia decizii sau să aibă orice fel de inițiativă... Prizonierul prefera să lase soarta să aleagă în locul său” (pp.70-71).

Pentru a-și păstra echilibrul mintal, prizonierul poate încerca o serie de „exerciții spirituale”, în tradiția celor prescrise cîndva de Ignatiu de Loyola. Cel mai important dintre ele este neîndoielnic vizualizarea minuțioasă a persoanei iubite (în cazul lui Frankl a fost Mathilde / Tilly Grosser, prima lui soție). O variantă a acestui exercițiu e vizualizarea unui eveniment fericit din viitor:

„Mă scîrbisem de starea aceea de lucruri care mă constrîngea, zi de zi şi ceas de ceas, să mă gîndesc doar la astfel de lucruri mărunte. Mi-am silit gîndurile să treacă la un alt subiect. Brusc, m-am văzut stînd în picioare într-o sală de conferințe bine luminată, caldă şi plăcută. În faţa mea, un public atent şedea pe nişte scaune tapiţate, confortabile. Ţineam o prelegere despre psihologia lagărelor de concentrare” (p.86).

Reflecțiile lui Frankl nu sînt niciodată confortabile. Citez cel mai provocator pasaj:

„Noi, cei care am trăit în lagărele de concentrare, ne amintim de aceia care treceau din baracă în baracă, mîngîindu-i pe ceilalţi, dăruindu-le ultima lor îmbucătură de pîine. Vor fi fost puţini la număr, dar ei ne dau îndeajuns de multe dovezi că omului i se poate lua totul, mai puţin un lucru: ultima dintre libertăţile umane - respectiv aceea de a-și alege propria atitudine într-un anumit set de împrejurări date, de a-și alege propriul mod de a fi... La o ultimă analiză, ne devine limpede că genul de persoană care ajungea să devină deţinutul era rezultatul unei decizii lăuntrice, nu doar rezultatul influenţelor lagărului asupra sa” (p.79).

Găsim aici cîteva sugestii foarte asemănătoare cu cele formulate de Sartre în 1943: omul e obligat mereu să aleagă, refuzul alegerii e tot o alegere, noi înșine alegem să fim liberi (sau nu). De noi depinde să fim bestii sau sfinți... Sigur că aceste opinii sînt discutabile: nu cred că viața are sens și nu cred că „voința de sens” conduce negreșit la sens, dar asta e o altă poveste...

Citind cartea asta, mi-am dat seama că (aparent) marile adevăruri ale vieții sunt cam la îndemâna oricui, dacă îl duce un pic mintea.
Experiențele autorului din lagărele de concentrare naziste sunt prezentate rece, clinic, prin prisma logoterapiei, o formă de psihoterapie care pare cât de cât OK în teorie, dar despre care am senzația că supersimplifică lucrurile (dacă nu în practică, măcar în teorie). Adică, din ce am citit în paginile acestei cărți, pare mai degrabă un fel de religie privată a autorului (ergo, inerent legată de propria sa viziune asupra lumii), și mai puțin un instrument de îmbunătățire a experienței umane care să poată fi utilizat la o scară largă.

بهداشت روانی مستلزم اندازه‌ای از تنش است؛ تنش بین آن‌چه انسان بدان دست یافته و آن‌چه باید بدان تحقق بخشد؛ تلاش در پر کردن شکاف آن‌چه هست و آن‌چه باید باشد. این تنش لازمه‌ی زندگی انسان است.