Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

Product Description

Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl's memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Between 1942 and 1945 Frankl labored in four different camps, including Auschwitz, while his parents, brother, and pregnant wife perished. Based on his own experience and the experiences of those he treated in his practice, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. Frankl's theory—known as logotherapy, from the Greek word logos ("meaning")—holds that our primary drive in life is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but the discovery and pursuit of what we personally find meaningful.

At the time of Frankl's death in 1997, Man's Search for Meaning had sold more than 10 million copies in twenty-four languages. A 1991 reader survey by the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club that asked readers to name a "book that made a difference in your life" found Man's Search for Meaning among the ten most influential books in America.

Born in Vienna in 1905 Viktor E. Frankl earned an M.D. and a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna. He published more than thirty books on theoretical and clinical psychology and served as a visiting professor and lecturer at Harvard, Stanford, and elsewhere. In 1977 a fellow survivor, Joseph Fabry, founded the Viktor Frankl Institute of Logotherapy. Frankl died in 1997.

Harold S. Kushner is rabbi emeritus at Temple Israel in Natick, Massachusetts, and the author of several best-selling books, including When Bad Things Happen to Good People.

William J. Winslade is a philosopher, lawyer, and psychoanalyst at the University of Texas Medical School in Galveston.
Product Details

* Amazon Sales Rank: #510 in Books
* Published on: 2006-06-14
* Number of items: 1
* Binding: Mass Market Paperback
* 165 pages

Editorial Reviews

About the Author
Viktor E. Frankl was a professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Vienna Medical School until his death in 1997. His 29 books have been translated into 21 languages. During World War II, he spent three years as Auschwitz, Dachau, and other concentration camps.
Customer Reviews

Wonderful book - even if you've found meaning in your life!5
Title says it all. The second half of the book has some really great tips & tricks for life. You shouldn't skip the first half of the book since it ties into and validates the teachings in the second half of the book.

Sometimes the writing is a bit awkward and verbose (he does speak in technical terms at times), but go slow and really try to understand what he's saying. The book is a really quick read, but again take your time!

For a while I really didn't understand this quote from the author: "Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time." But, after taking some time to think about it (like the time you need to read the book), it truly hit home what this quote means.

I'd recommend this book to anyone!

A great introduction to Viktor Frankl5
Viktor Frankl, famed psychotherapist and a holocaust survivor, said: The spiritual dimension cannot be ignored, for it is what makes us human. Spirituality is at the core of who we are; it defines for us what is meaningful in life.
Among all living things, only we humans can envision our futures and play out mental scenarios of how we will make our visions a reality.

Viktor Frankl, survivor of the Holocaust, emphasized that the meaning of life is not what happens to us. It is what we do with that which happens to us.
Viktor Frankl while interned in sub-human conditions in a Nazi concentration camp found meaning through meditating. He would overcome these horrendous and barbaric conditions by holding a mental image of him speaking to a group of International Psychiatrists at a special dinner event.

His wife had been transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she died. On April 27, 1945, Frankl was liberated. Among his immediate relatives, the only survivor was his sister, who had escaped by emigrating to Australia. It was due to his and others' suffering in these camps that he came to his hallmark conclusion that even in the most absurd, painful and dehumanized situation, life has potential meaning and that therefore even suffering is meaningful. Meaning cannot be invented but must be discovered.

Viktor Frankl wrote "Man's Search for Meaning" after surviving the worst conditions a human can experience during his imprisonment at Auschwitz.
Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning - the classic best seller now considered to be one of the most important contributions to psychiatry since the writing of Freud. Frankl gives a moving account of his life amid the horrors of the Nazi death camps, chronicling the harrowing experience that led to his discovery of his theory of logotherapy.

Viktor Frankl, to be sure, leaves a profound legacy. He wrote many books on existentialism and Logotherapy. Throughout his life and his work, he reminds us that we all have important work to do, that whatever we do is important, and that there is meaning everywhere, all the time.

Human freedom, therefore, is the freedom of responsibility. Freedom without responsibility is something arbitrary, senseless and either leaves us directionless, or can lead to irresponsible, that is, lawless, immoral and violent, self-destructive ways of living. Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn. Because boundaries between groups overlap we must not try to simplify matters by saying that these men are angels and those others are devils.

As far as happiness is concerned Frankl, said: Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.

If you want to get better acquainted to the work of Viktor Frankl " Man's Search for Meaning" is a good place to start.

Raymond Le Blanc. Auhtor.Achieving Objectives Made Easy! Practical goal setting tools & proven time management techniques

Suffering, Meaning and a Worthy Life....5
Suffering, Meaning & a Worthwhile Life....

"A psychiatrist who personally has faced such extremity [as the Nazi death camps] is a psychiatrist worth listening to. He, if anyone, should be able to view our human condition with compassion. Dr. Frankl's words have a profoundly honest ring, for they rest on experiences to deep for deception."

So wrote Gordon Allport, Harvard Professor of Psychology and at mid-20th century, one of the great American psychologists. What does Frankl say? More vitally, what talk has he walked?

"Man's Search for Meaning" is not a boastful or an easy book. But it is forcefully honest & gripping -- ongoing struggles, failures and flashes of success, brilliant success really. Not so much in preserving sanity. For who of us has the right to dare call insane anyone in a concentration camp who became overwhelmed or gave up? Frankl's struggles, and the struggles of those around him, were how to keep humanely living in the face of what seems unfaceable.

As Frankl says, "...we had nothing to lose except our so ridiculously naked lives." If there's a meaning, a reason, a "why?" sturdy enough to bear that load, it must confront outrageous & unavoidable suffering.

I'm a psychotherapist; I work with many who suffer: children severely abused & neglected, adults still caught up in their abuse, soldiers back from Iraq along with their spouses & children. A label is easy & obvious: PTSD. Healing is not.

Frankl, writing well before we called this a "stress disorder" (Concentration camps = STRESS? Can you feel how wrong it is to stop at the mechanics of stress?), shows us a deeper, more accurate, more transcendent reality & truth. Struggling to find a worthy life in the face of suffering is not a "disorder". In that struggle we can become profoundly sickened, and our risk of sickening is never far away. But equally possible & present is a humbling choice: we can honestly face our suffering and struggle to find (create, build, open ourselves up to, ....) our own meaning. "Our own", in that it is individual to us, but it is never "just ourselves".

Through brutally-learned understandings & terribly-lived examples, Frankl shows us ways. I fear quoting a few lines. It feels like sound-biting & trivializing, not only misleading but obscene. Frankl isn't about one-liners, though he writes many memorable lines & stories. But lines pale when removed from their stories, their struggles to grasp onto meaning.

"Man's Search for Meaning" is short and easy-to-read, especially the first section, about the camps. Read it. Likely someday you'll be glad you did.