Man's Search for Meaning
by Viktor E. Frankl
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Book Reviews of Man's Search for Meaning
Book Review: Faith, hope and responsibility.
Summary: 5 Stars
This marvelous work does for the psychologically wounded what Peter Drucker's "The Effective Executive" does for the time-impaired. That is give people a feel for what tools to use to construct their own framework for achieving happiness (not someone else's concept of what another person's happiness ought to be).
Both "Man's Search for Meaning" and "The Effective Executive" should be taken up and re-read at least once a year (pardon me for offering so specific a prescription). Both works are short enough so they can be read quickly. But don't go too fast. Consider Speaker Newt Gingrich's advice when he recommended people go through "The Effective Executive" stopping at salient points (there are plenty of those) and making notes about how something relates specifically to one's life and incorporate that into one's operating system.
Dr. Viktor E. Frankl's logotherapy (or "meaning" therapy) springs from his experience in World War II concentration camps. His writing is refreshingly free from veiled (and sometimes not-so-veiled) invective of Holocaust literature. The terms "Jew" and "German" are scarely to be found. The Jewish identification is raised only when unavoidable to give a complete picture such as when Dr. Frankl's words give an Eastern European rabbi a new lease on mental health. Frank's statement about mankind's only two groups -- the decent and the indecent -- is telling.
Among other Frankl profundities --
-- Suffering is unavoidable.
-- Man in metaphysical tension is normal and worthwhile.
Perhaps his most important statement is that life is meaningful yet the meaning is different for each person and it changes more often than one might think. Keys to following this bouncing ball include taking responsibility and developing a sense of humor, according to our author.
Freedom is not an end in itself, Frankl correctly notes, although others (especially libertarian thinkers in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises) have suggested that it needs to be treated as such societally to that the road to happiness be as wide as possible for individuals. Recognition that life is meaningful is essential to a successful navigation of this road, no matter how wide.
Frankl: "Freedom is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness."
Frankl and many libertarians/classical liberals would agree that freedom and responsibility call for a delicate balance in the human mind. But who am I to say? Read Frankl, Allport and Fabry alongside Mises, Hayek and Rothbard and judge for yourself.
Something you can't miss about Frankl -- he refuses to be a dictator. He was persecuted through the caprice of at least one hideous dictator yet denied the enemy victory by not taking on the enemy's characteristics. This represents a high level of moral reasoning. Although Frankl isn't an explicitly religious author he has earned the title of "Rabbi Frankl" through such choosing.
The opposite of the spirit that animates Frankl and other greats (arrived at through attainment of true knowledge coupled with respect for all mankind) was wonderfully encapsulated by Stephen Crane is his story "Above All Things." Of this all-too-common unholy spirit of the imperialist, the dictator, the socialist "reformer," Crane wrote:
"...The stranger finds the occupations (read: lifestyles) of foreign peoples to be trivial and inconsequent. The average mind utterly fails to comprehend the new point of view...'How futile are the lives of these people.'...This is the arrogance of the man who has not yet solved himself and discovered his own actual futility."
Book Review: The Meaning of Life
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a small book with a big subject - life and meaning - written in 1946 and first published in 1959. Only recently it has been published in English. It still rings true, written by a Nazi concentration camp inmate, Dr. Viktor Frankl. He originally wanted to be an anonymous author; however, his friends persuaded him to publish under his own name to give the book credibility. Readers could therefore also understand this is a psychiatrist's objective view of suffering, which is part of life, and why life and hope prevail in the darkest moments.
Part One, Experiences in a Concentration Camp is key to all he learned on the meaning of life. The horrible losses and inhumanity are seared into your mind, but when Dr. Frankl looks at the horror with educated eyes, he recognizes courage, objectivity and responsibility as vital for survival. This is a story of a man who was sent to the concentration camp with a belief that if he had to suffer and die, it would be significant: he would not suffer nor die for nothing.
Dr. Frankl reviews the fight for survival and his decisions that somehow help him survive. He notes that prisoners go through three phases, 1)shock: the period following his admission 2)apathy: the period where they they become well entrenched in camp routine, and 3)the sense of loss, where they lose everything but hope. He digs down deep in his own soul to helps others to go on and have meaning in their life - not to give up and find the basic motivation to go on. He teaches despairing men "that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but what life expected from us." Dr. Frankl repeats, "if we have the "why" we will always find the "how" to go on."
This book shows each individual he is important and every decision he makes is impactful. Therefore, make the right decisions and be triumphant. Right decisions cause the least pain and give the most love for fellow man. It is what gives us hope and value as part of humanity.
Part Two, Logo-Therapy in a Nutshell, was not as interesting to me. It describes Frankl's philosophy of logo-therapy and reminded me of of mid-eastern religions as well as Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. It is a way (Frankl calls it "neo-dynamics") to have a goal in mind and achieve it no matter what obstacles and stress you are facing. The things that make life important and with meaning are different for each of us. All of us can have a meaning of life, but the "big picture meaning" is hard to understand. It takes us a lifetime of good and bad events and decisions to shape us.
Part Three, is a postscript on "Tragic Optimism" and states that despite the "tragic triad" (as it is called in Logo-Therapy) 1)pain, 2)guilt, and 3)death - how is it possible to say yes to life in spite of all that? Logo-therapy teaches there are three main avenues on which one arrives at meaning in life. The first is creating a work or by doing a deed. The second is by experiencing something or encountering someone, and the third is turning a personal tragedy into a triumph. He mentions using bad situations as a growth experience.
Overall a deep book but a good book on looking at life. It shows that each one of us can determine personal meaning and why it is important.
Book Review: Inspiring
Summary: 5 Stars
This book describes Frankl's experience in a concentration camp during WWII. I read it for a course I took. I expected a self-help book, but what I got was a life changing work, one of the most inspiring books I've ever read.
This powerful book is a firsthand account from a Holocaust survivor about how even prisoners at Auschwitz could still find hope amidst the horrors within the walls of that concentration camp. The experience of those prisoners showed that even the deepest suffering can be turned into something positive.
The first half describes Frankl's experiences and observations of life in the camps from 1942-1945, like a Reader's Digest condensed version of Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch." But Frankl is also a psychiatrist, and his insights into the human behavior he saw are particularly interesting and detailed. He explains some of the coping mechanisms that people used and discusses why some defense mechanisms were more effective than others. Given the title, it's not surprising that the concept of "meaning" plays a key role.
The second half of the book is about how Frankl took the concepts he learned in the concentration camps and applied it to his work as a psychotherapist. Frankl's approach to psychotherapy is called Logotherapy. Logotherapy "confronts" patients to help them find, recognize, and reorient themselves toward the true, vital meaning of their own lives. Frankl talks about people living in an "existential vacuum" and proposes a technique or approach through which people can find meaning in work, love, or by responding in a healthy way to difficult circumstances.
The book is full of interesting ideas about human behavior and emotions. And of course, the historical context of Frankl's observations and insights makes them that much more powerful. One interesting idea is the concept of "paradoxical intention," which implies that people frequently end up doing pretty much exactly the opposite of what they actually intended to do. That may help explain why people who go on a diet frequently end up gaining weight, why people who resolve to quit drinking frequently go back to the bottle, and similar, puzzling behaviors. Frankl describes a number of ways in which understanding the concept of paradoxical intention can help people overcome certain types of seemingly uncontrollable behavior problems.
But the key insight of course is the concept of "meaning," the idea that it is up to each person to recognize that even if they lose everything, their family, their freedom, their rights, even their very identity, nevertheless there is still one thing that no one can take from them, and that is their ability to choose how to respond to adversity. People who realize that have an incredibly valuable tool for making sense of life, even in the most dire circumstances. The realization that there is a higher purpose, even amidst such circumstances, can be a powerful tool to help one find a way through adversity. That's an awesome thing.
This was a very inspirational book. I recommend it to anyone, especially those who may be experiencing something of an "existential vacuum" in their own lives.
Book Review: The only self-help book you'll ever need
Summary: 5 Stars
Part essay about his time in the concentrations camps, part psychiatric tract based on those experiences, Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning is one of the most important books I've read. It is not surprising that there are more than 12M copies in print and that it's been named one of the ten most influential books.
In the first 100 pages, Frankl recounts the time he spent in the camps from 1942-1945. Anyone who has read other accounts of the camps or seen movies of them knows the depravities there. But Frankl's account is somewhat unique in that he approaches the experience as a psychiatrist, in a very clinical fashion, only using emotion here and there to spice his writing. His writing is perceptive, showing a keen empathy for not only those who were heroic in such places, but also those who were not. This goes for both the prisoners as well as the German guards. He explains the psychology of lowered expectations, how a simple de-lousing, for example, could be the source of so much happiness for the prisoners. And given the title, it's not surprising he spends much time talking about meaning. The whole premise of his book is that humans are driven by their search for meaning. And in these pages, he demonstrates how meaning in a prisoner's life, whether it be a family to get back home to or work still left to be done, literally was the difference between life and death in many cases.
This leads to the second part of the book, called Logotherapy in a Nutshell. Logotherapy is a therapy Frankl pioneered after his experiences in the camps. In it, a patient is `actually confronted with and reoriented toward the meaning of his life'. He talks of the existential vacuum, in which so many people now languish due to the complexity of having so many choices and a lack of traditions to fall back on. Logotherapy simplifies this for us. According to it, meaning can come from three places: creating work or doing deeds, experiencing something or encountering someone (love), 3) or by our attitude to unavoidable suffering.
To me, this puts logotherapy in the realm of religion, especially eastern religion. It's about human transcendence. Frankl says here that we derive meaning by helping others (through deeds or work), putting another above ourselves (loving someone), or by seeing unavoidable suffering as something of meaning in its own right. These ideas seem Buddhist to me, and in this case I applaud the convergence of science and spirituality in a space that needs it.
I found this book inspirational. The experiences of the concentration camps by themselves are enough to put matters in harsh perspective for anyone living in freedom. But Frankl's expanding of this information into a book that can help so many others is a fine example of his own theories. We are lucky to have such a work available to us.
Book Review: Just read it
Summary: 5 Stars
I came to this book in a round-about way - it was recommended in the book A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future in the chapter on "Meaning". In "A Whole New Mind" the author, Daniel Pink, has come up with six senses that are important to develop one's mind in a Conceptual Age and "meaning" is one of the them. The idea that we have to read a book to realize that we have to develop meaning in our lives seems pathetic. But nevertheless, I was intrigued by Pink's description of "Man's Search for Meaning" and read it immediately after reading "A Whole New Mind". Surprisingly I had never heard of "Man's Search for Meaning" nor its author Victor Frankl even though its afterword states that it has sold 12 million copies in 24 languages and in a 1991 "Book of the Month" survey was voted among the 10 most influential books by readers.
The book is the story of Frankl's experience as a prisoner in various concentration camps during World War II. Before being arrested, he was working on a manuscript about his psychological theories (he had been a practicing psychiatrist in Vienna). Though his wife sewed the manuscript in his coat, it was soon confiscated in the camp; he proceeded to practice his theory of searching for meaning despite his bleak situation and he also tried to recreate the manuscript on scraps of paper. Despite the grim and horrible scenes described by Frankl, you will be amazed by his outlook on life and how he just kept going. There is no doubt that his survival was aided by his firm belief in the importance of finding meaning in life (in ANY situation). He was also lucky and resourceful. When he was liberated from camp, he wrote the entire book in 9 days.
At the end of the book is an essay on his theory of logotherapy which is a very practical outlook on addressing many psychological problems. He states that "man's main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life." He says that life has no inherent meaning but rather a unique meaning exists for each person which he has a responsibility to discover. The meaning can be discovered in 3 ways:
1) By creating a work or doing a deed
2) By experiencing something or encountering someone
3) By the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering (though suffering is NOT a prerequisite for discovering meaning)
His theory is much more than a theory since it was so effectively put into practice by him and the people he counseled. His theory is given much more weight by his life story (he lost both his parents and his pregnant wife in the camps). This is a short book that bears reading multiple times.