Man's Search for Meaning
by Viktor E. Frankl
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Book Reviews of Man's Search for Meaning
Book Review: Making meaning from the fragments of our lives
Summary: 5 Stars
When I was eighteen years old in the spring of 1968, in a book store on the square in Racine, Wisconsin, I found a little book titled Man's Search for Meaning, by philosopher and psychotherapist Victor Frankl. The author survived Auschwitz during the Second World War. He emerged from the death camp having lost everything that mattered to him. His beloved wife was dead, his family was dead, almost all of his friends or acquaintances were dead or dying. He himself was nothing more than a bag of bones, barely clinging to life. In addition he had lost the manuscript of the book he had been writing, the work of his life. He saw no future for himself, and his past contained only suffering and death.
In the days after the end of the war when his camp had been liberated by the Allied armies, Frankl said, he
"...walked through the country past flowering meadows, for miles and miles, toward the market town near the camp. Larks rose to the sky and I could hear their joyous song. There was no one to be seen for miles around; there was nothing but the wide earth and sky and the lark's jubilation and the freedom of space. I stopped, looked around, and up to the sky - and then I went down on my knees. At that moment there was very little I knew of myself or of the world - I had but one sentence in mind - always the same: `I called to the Lord from my narrow prison and he answered me in the freedom of space.' How long I knelt there and repeated the sentence memory can no longer recall. But I know that on that day, in that hour, my new life started. Step by step I progressed, until I again became a human being."
He had felt, for the first time, a spark of hope. That was all he needed to begin living again. He had found a subtle meaning in the beauty of the world and he could use his new consciousness and connection to that beauty as a reason to go on living.
Frankl's little book was one of the most important books I've read in my life. When I was eighteen I understood only a bit of what he was trying to say, but it was enough to provide a frame that allowed me to continue my life and to continue learning.
We all make meaning from the fragments of our lives, said Frankl, from the beauty of the world around us, from the fragile connections we have with each other. We construct a narrative that allows us to survive because it tells us who we are and what it is we love.
The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family
Book Review: Say yes to life, nevertheless!
Summary: 5 Stars
"Say yes to life, nevertheless!" is the original title in the German mother tongue of Frankl He was a philosopher, doctor, physiotherapist and founder of the Logotherapy (not to be mixed with Logopedics). This is a medical science which emphasises the openness and the chances of a situation and of life, with the aim of encouragement. The pastoral help consists according to Frankl in the dedication to a thing, to another people, in the memory of fortunate moments, in the hope, in humour and in prayer. And even when the whole thing is limitless and inevitable, there is still meaning: to endure sufferings in dignity and with courage.
Frankl, a Jew, survived the Nazi concentration camps. His parents, his wife, his brother did not. Shortly after his deliverance he wrote this book with the programmatic title. He depicts herein the life in the camp with the point of view of a participating observer. This relativization helps him to keep distance to the frightful events. At the same time he receives hope in an almost dead-end situation. He advices the desperate people around him for a more biblical attitude of "Nevertheless!" and to acquire the consciousness that even the desperation of their fight cannot harm the meaning and dignity as long as the courage is preserved.
In accordance with that Frankl tried to be an encouraging example. He told them that he himself never thought of losing hope and lived to that. "No man knows the future!" Not only hope is for Frankl a worthy power for survival, but also love - and this is also something he experiences together with his co-prisoners.
For the novelist Basil Hume Frankl`s narrative of his day-dreams in the middle of a cruel camp-reality where he speaks in thoughts with his also imprisoned wife is one of the most moving reports about human love, that he ever read. In this text Frankl also shows in which respect man is more than just a "psychologic organism" what he was for Sigmund Freud. He is rather a spiritual being, an eternal creature. In this dimension man is not vulnerable and cannot get sick.
After his release Frankl developed his Logotherapy which is taught all over the world. Frankl held several professorships in the USA. He married again. At the age of 70 he acquired his pilot license with the reasoning that he need not acquiesce in everything from himself. He meant his fear of a comedown. For somebody who teaches always to stand up, a consecutive effort.
Book Review: "Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete"
Summary: 4 Stars
"Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete."
What is the meaning of life? Frankl try's to answer that through his experience as a prisoner in a concentration camp in Auschwitz (among others) and in his psychiatry practice after the war. Be it by grace, a miracle, or chance, he made it out alive. And now he is here to tell this powerful, optimistic story and help us with an age old question.
He try's to answer this question: " How was everyday life in a concentration camp reflected in the mind of the average prisoner?" This would later influence psychotherapy. Even being surrounded by so much evil there was still kindness to be found in an occasional guard. The prisoners were not always kind to there fellow inmates: there were sellouts and CAPO's; Capo's were Jews that watched over their fellow captives for favors, food, and extended life. Who is to say what any one of us would do. With misery and suffering beyond comprehension, "having a why to live for enabled them to bear the how". I will never look at that last leftover pea the same way.
Writing on his concentration camp experience Frankl briefly discusses "logotherepy". In a later chapter he goes into detail: Logotherepy (which he coined), the "striving to find a meaning in ones life is the primary motivational force in man". In his practice he uses a form of reverse psychology. The last chapter is on optimism during tragedy.
Freedom is only part of the story, he writes: "I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast"
There are many quotables from Frankl, I will leave you with this: "Our generation is realistic, for 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."
In the end, there is that need for a reason.
Wish you well
Scott
Book Review: Perhaps the most valuable book of the 20th Century
Summary: 5 Stars
Excluding scientific achievements and their documentation, no other short book presents the gifts of the twentieth century as perfectly as Frankl's work.
Man's Search for Meaning, or ISM for the modern substitution of "An Individual's" for "Man's," gives the extreme twisted side of human organization with its autobiography of a holocaust survivor, but balances it with the strongest statement possible not against the horror, but against determinism: humans always have the freedom to choose their response. Furthermore, the text is written with the direct, yet respectful words, for the twisted, but not fixed, timber of human life exemplified in the intelligent style of Freud, Jung, and Adler - a mid-century style not commonly written anymore, a style that assumes that a reader not only has worked to develop a humane education, but is also willing to work to improve it.
The main thrust of Frankl is that humans strive to make meaning of their lives first and foremost. This updates Freud's statements that humans seek pleasure primarily or Adler's statements that people seek power. The job of a psychoanalyst (a quaint word today) is to use logotherapy (a set of approaches initiated by Frankl) to help patients solve their problems, internally and externally, by finding their meaning. Obviously Frankl fits within the resolving existentialism tide of the twentieth century. He complements the texts of Isaiah Berlin which also focus on the meaning of freedom within the constraints of humans as they are and the societies in which they live.
If only considered responses to Frankl by stoics such as Seneca and Aurelius were possible. A dialogue across time - which a reader can form - places many of the travails of history as being those of humans within history resolving their search for meaning, a seeking also inherent within most readers. This segues into seeing history not just through the lens of great events and powers, but through the experiences of everyone, not just elites.
Book Review: Should be required reading for every student of self-actualizing
Summary: 5 Stars
Great books are often great testimonies. This is one. Frankl's message is not so much about man's inhumanity to man as about how everyday life in the Nazi death camp was reflected in the minds of the prisoners. Beyond that, what can his experiences mean to us today? A great deal, writes Frankl: "Do not think that these considerations are unworldly and too far removed from real life. It is true that ... of the prisoners only a few kept their full inner liberty and obtained those values which their suffering afforded, but even one such example is sufficient proof that man's inner strength may raise him above his outward fate. Such men are not only in concentration camps." What has this to do with Abraham Maslow's concept of self-actualization? And, what are the metavalues Dr. Frankl referred to? Why, of course, Truth, Beauty and Goodness: "... by experiencing something--such as goodness, truth, and beauty--by experiencing nature and culture or, last but not least, by experiencing another human being in his uniqueness--by loving him ... by love [we are] enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, to see that which is potential in him; which is not yet actualized but which ought to be actualized ... By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, [we help make] these potentialities come true." Too bad these contemporary geniuses and champions of the invincible human spirit, Frankl and Malow never met. Readers who are taken by Viktor Frankl's remarkable testimony in Man's Search for Meaning may want to examine his first book, the precious manuscript the Nazi's confiscated and he recreated shortly after WWII ended. Originally titled "The Unconscious God," it has been republished as "Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning." Written for his peers, and not laypersons, it is a challenge to read. But it is also a spiritual gem of equal value to Man's Search for Meaning.