VIKTOR FRANKL

Man's Search for Meaning

Man's Search for Meaning

Introduction

Man's Search for Meaning is a book written by psychiatrist Austrian Viktor Frankl, published in Germany in 1946. In English was published under the titles From Death Camp to Existentialism, in 1959 and Man's Search for Meaning in 1962. In this work, Frankl explains the experience that led to the discovery of logotherapy, was to experience three years of internment in concentration camps where Frankl lost his family well. A study carried out by the Book of the Month Club and the Library of Congress found that man's search for meaning was in the top ten most influential books in America.

At the outbreak of World War II, Viktor Emil Frankl was director of therapy in a large mental hospital in Vienna and the organizer of a group of successful youth guidance centers. Frankl, along with his family and many other doctors, soon sent to a Nazi concentration camp. He carried with him the manuscript for his first book, which taken from him and destroyed at Auschwitz (Redsand, 2006). Ironically, the desire to reconstruct and rewrite that volume on psychotherapy helped him endure three harrowing years of prison life. This brief volume divided into two parts; the first, longer essay titled “Experiences in a Concentration Camp,” the second, “Basic Concepts of Logotherapy”.

Frankl does not dwell unnecessarily on personal hardship, but he uses his experience and observations to illustrate the life of the ordinary prisoner. Inmates performed hard manual labor, such as digging ditches and tunnels for water mains or laying railway tracks, while working on a near-starvation diet. His observations thus have both the gritty reality of personal experience and the universal quality of shared suffering.

Life in a Concentration Camp

First phase: Confinement in the field

All camp prisoners transported by train to the first field. When the prisoners were on the train, felt some hope for them to return to their homes. Upon arrival, at the camp divided the men and women, and those who were to carry the gas chamber and those who left alive after this selection washed them and they took everything they owned. They had to sleep in bunk beds, did not wash very often, or change their clothes in months. For, it was a very distressing situation.

In the first part of Man's Search for Meaning, Frankl describes the daily humiliation and violence that stripped many people of their dignity and their very humanity in the concentration camps and of his own struggle to maintain a sense of meaning in the face of such brutality. He did so primarily by focusing on his wife, with whom he held imaginary conversations; on the work, he hoped to resume after leaving the camp; and on the isolated acts by some of those in charge that demonstrated, if not kindness, at least a relative absence of malice. Along with these personal recollections, Frankl presents the inmates' reaction to camp life during its three phases: the phase subsequent imprisonment, the stage of becoming ...