Mans Search for Meaning

Report on Man’s Search for Meaning: An introduction to logotherapy by Viktor E. Frankl

I really enjoyed reading this book. Viktor brought me with him inside the concentration camps and allowed me to see them through the eyes of the prisoner. While many parts of this book were sad the overall message was not. Viktor states that man can suffer anything as long as he feels there is meaning behind the suffering. He concerns himself with issues such as the meaning of life, and explains how even amongst the guards there were good people and amongst the prisoners there were bad people.

One question he found him asking was why some people found the will to survive despite overwhelming odds and why others gave up the will to live. He found that those who had lost the will found themselves succumbing much faster to disease and exhaustion. The answer that he found was that having a reason to endure made it that much more likely that you would survive. At times he calculates that his own odds of surviving were about 20 to 1 against. During his darkest hours he would try to reconstruct a manuscript that had been taken from him when he was taken prisoner. Some people stayed alive on the hope that their family would be waiting for them or held onto their religious convictions, and a few others kept thoughts of revenge in mind.

After the main story Viktor goes into a discussion of logotherapy. Logo means meaning. Logotherapy “focuses on the meaning of human existence as well as on man’s search for such a meaning. According to logotherapy, this striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man.” (pg. 99) One example Viktor used to illustrate how this works is the story of a man he was treating. The man was very depressed and lonely because his wife had died. The man wanted to understand why it was that he should have to suffer so. Viktor asked him to imagine that it was he who had died and his wife that was suffering. The man said that he believed his wife would be suffering a great deal in his place. Viktor told him that the reason he was suffering was that so his wife would be spared this ordeal. This illustrates Viktor's point that “Suffering ceases to be suffering