Man's Search for Meaning

Overview

Man's Search for Meaning is Viktor Frankl's most famous book, and one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. Originally published in German in 1946 under the title Trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen — "Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything" — it combines two books in one. The first part, "Experiences in a Concentration Camp," is Frankl's account of his three years in the camps of the Third Reich; the second part, "Logotherapy in a Nutshell," is the outline of the psychotherapy he founded on those experiences. The book has sold over twelve million copies, been translated into more than twenty languages, and was named by the Library of Congress one of the ten most influential books in America. It is at once a Holocaust memoir, a psychological treatise, and a philosophy of life.

Author

Viktor E. Frankl (1905–1997) was an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor. Before the war he headed the suicide ward of the Steinhof Psychiatric Hospital in Vienna; after the war, having survived four concentration camps while losing his parents, his wife, and his brother, he devoted the rest of his life to developing and spreading logotherapy — the "Third Viennese School" of psychotherapy, after Freud's psychoanalysis and Adler's individual psychology. He wrote the manuscript of Man's Search for Meaning in nine days after his liberation.

Historical Background

The book belongs to the literature of the Holocaust and to the history of psychotherapy. Its first part is one of the most remarkable documents of the camps: Frankl wrote not as a detached observer but as a psychiatrist analyzing the conditions of survival — the phases of psychological reaction, the loss of the sense of the future, the "provisional existence" of the prisoner, and the discovery that those who had a meaning to live for were the ones most likely to survive. The book's second part belongs to the history of the Third Viennese School: logotherapy, the "meaning-centered" therapy that Frankl had begun to develop in the 1930s and that the camp experience had tested and confirmed.

Key Ideas

The book develops the central theses of logotherapy. The first is the will to meaning: the primary motivational force in human life is not pleasure (Freud) or power (Adler) but the search for meaning. The second is the existential vacuum: when the will to meaning is frustrated, the result is the emptiness and boredom that Frankl called the signature neurosis of the modern age. The third is the three pathways to meaning: through creative values (what we give to the world), through experiential values (what we receive, above all through love), and through attitudinal values (the stance we take toward unavoidable suffering).

The book's most famous passages belong to the camp memoir. Frankl's account of the last freedom — "everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances" — is the philosophical heart of the book. His observation that prisoners who lost their "why" often collapsed, while those who held onto a meaning endured, grounds the psychology of meaning in the most extreme empirical test imaginable.

Important Passages

The most quoted passages of the book include: "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how" (Frankl's restatement of Nietzsche); "When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves"; and "Those who have a 'why' to live can bear with almost any 'how'." The famous account of the prisoner's experience — the loss of the sense of the future, the apathy that protected the psyche, and the rare moments of beauty and love that pierced the horror — remains among the most powerful writing in the literature of the camps.

Influence

The influence of Man's Search for Meaning is difficult to overstate. It has shaped the modern understanding of meaning and purpose, influenced the development of existential psychology and the positive psychology movement, and been cited by millions of readers as the book that changed their lives. The modern psychology of meaning — the research on meaning in life, purpose, and post-traumatic growth — has confirmed Frankl's central claim: meaning is a fundamental human need, and its frustration is a source of suffering. The book remains the most widely read introduction to logotherapy, and it continues to be a source of consolation and direction for readers facing suffering, loss, and the question of why to live.

Sources

• Frankl, Viktor E. Man's Search for Meaning. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006.
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Viktor Frankl" (britannica.com/biography/Viktor-Frankl)
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Logotherapy" (iep.utm.edu/logotherapy)