Summary
Viktor E. Frankl: Man's Search for Meaning
If a book has one paragraph, one idea that has the power to change a person's life, that alone is usually enough to justify reading it, rereading it, and finding a place for it on the shelf. This book has several such passages.
Like so many German and Eastern European Jews who thought they were safe during the 1930s, Frankl was sent to the Nazi network of concentration and extermination camps. Amazingly, he survived - in the biblical dictionary, "a head plucked from the fire". But his narrative in this book is less about his miseries, what he suffered and lost, than about the sources of his strength to survive. Several times in this book, Frankl quotes Nietzsche approvingly: "He who knows why he lives can bear almost any how."
Frankl kept himself alive and kept hope alive by thinking of his wife and the possibility of seeing her again - and dreaming, at one point, of lectures after the war, of the psychological lessons that can be learned from the Auschwitz experience. Horrible as it was, his experience in Auschwitz reinforced one of his key ideas: life is not primarily a search for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a search for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a search for meaning.
The greatest task of every person is to find meaning in his life.
Biblos Newsletter
New titles, special copies and quiet recommendations from the antiquarian bookshop.