Mind & psychology

Man's Search for Meaning

Viktor Frankl

What a psychiatrist learned in the Nazi camps about finding a reason to go on

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  • Published 1946

Introduction

In the first part of this book, Vienna psychiatrist Viktor Frankl describes what he saw and lived through as a prisoner of the Nazis between 1942 and 1945, in Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and two subcamps of Dachau. He looks at how the people around him, and he himself, held on inwardly.

In the second part he sets out logotherapy, the approach he had begun to develop before the war, which holds that the deepest human drive is the search for meaning. A short postscript added in 1984 argues for what he calls tragic optimism. Together they make one claim: a person who can see a reason to go on can bear a great deal, and keeps some freedom in how to meet what cannot be changed.

  1. 1Camp life broke people down in stages, and freedom brought a stage of its own
  2. 2Even in the camp, a person kept one freedom: to choose an attitude
  3. 3Having a "why" to live carries a person through almost any "how"
  4. 4Love can give a person fullness even when everything else is gone
  5. 5Life asks the questions, and we answer with how we live
  6. 6Logotherapy: the deepest drive is the will to meaning, not pleasure or power
  7. 7When meaning is missing, an existential vacuum opens, and it shows up as boredom
  8. 8Meaning can be found in three ways, and suffering is meaningful only when it cannot be avoided
  9. 9Freedom needs responsibility, and what has been lived is never lost
  10. 10Tragic optimism: saying yes to life in spite of pain, guilt and death

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