Book review: Man`s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

Dr Frankl was Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Vienna Medical School, the founder of School of Logotherapy, the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy after Freud`s psychoanalysis and Sadler`s individual psychology.

Dr Frankl was also a man who spent three terrible years during WWII at Auschwitz, Dachau and other concentration camps.

In `Man`s Search for Meaning,` the book that was written in in 1959 and has gone into over a hundred reprints, Dr Frankl recalls some of his dehumanizing experiences in the

concentration/extermination camps in an amazingly impassive manner, very moving for all its deliberate lack of emotion.

Having survived those years of dehumanization, Dr Frankl gathered his experiences and used them to found his School of Logotherapy, based on his belief that life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power as Adler believed, but a quest for meaning.

It is indeed strange to find meaning in what the Jews suffered during the Holocaust, in what Dr Frankl himself lost: his parents, his brother, his wife of nine months. Eating 1.5 ounces of stale bread every interminable day to keep himself alive. Stacked many men to one shelf in sleeping arrangements. Watching the Damocles sword of the gas chamber swinging lower and lower each hellish day. Enduring beatings, abuse, torture each miserable day. Weeping upon hearing the sound of a violin from the senior warden`s room, the music forcefully bringing memories of all that was lost. And then, the long period to get readjusted to `normal` life after liberation from the camps, the rehumanisation of these prisoners.

The cure, according to Dr Frankl, is to cope by searching for a meaning in everything that happens to you, a poignant version of ikigai. He firmly believed that human life, under any and every circumstance, never ceases to have a meaning, and this infinite meaning of life includes suffering and dying, privation and death. Hence logotherapy…the word `logis` in Greek denotes meaning.

We need to read this book lest we forget. Because that is one thing we must never do: forget.