"Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor E. Frankl

I must say that I sabotaged my own experience of this book. I was so impressed by logotherapy as reading the other books of Dr.Frankl, I left this one for last, as his most famous book, in order to enjoy it more aided by the fire of expectation. The book was excellent. The part about the concentration camp was deep, moving, genuine and insightful. The detached and in the same time compassionate voice with which Dr.Frankl describes his sufferings, the sufferings of his fellow men, the sadistic behavior of the Kappos, and his psychological explanation of their reactions, his analysis of the guards, the desensitization and mechanisms of dominance and will to torture other human beings are fascinating.

There is much written about concentration camps, most of it forgotten in the 21st century, and much was written from the first person perspective, from the inmates, the lucky few who survived, but there is no other account written by one of the fathers of modern Psychology and the founder of the third school of Viennese psychotherapy, Dr.Viktor Frankl. He is able, if only for a few moments, to abstract himself from his daily torture, the numbing cold, the bone cracking forced labor, the few scraps of food, the cramped freezing quarters, the complete lack of means for personal hygiene, and to rise above it and observe the psychological mechanisms at work, some for coping, some for dying.

Dr. Frankl notices first hand that the will for life equates with the will to meaning. Whoever of the inmates had perceived their lives as having meaning, usually surviving to see a love one, or to perform a task after the war, no matter how mundane, those people would find strength to survive, to somehow extract yet another ounce of energy from their starved, beaten, bruised, wounded, skeleton-like bodies and go on. On the other hand the people who gave up were the people who could not see any meaning at all, nothing to live for, nothing to continue the torture for. These people could be recognized, Dr.Frankl says, because they were smoking their cigarettes, which in the camp were used only as currency for obtaining food or clothing, and only the Kappos and guards would smoke them.

It is from these experiences that Dr.Frankl solidifies his theory of logotherapy which he started to develop already before the war and it is here that he coins the main maxim of logotherapy that life has a meaning under ANY circumstances.

I was a bit dissapointed by the second part, since I was expecting a more in-depth explanation of logotherapy, but by the very nature of the essay it is short, concise and does not go into many issues and concepts in the necessary depth. It is a very good introduction to logotherapy, but having already read several full-length books on the subject by Dr.Frankl I did not extract too much value from it.

It is often mentioned that this book was ranked as one of the 10 most influential books of the XX century by the reader's survey of the Library of Congress. I was never able to obtain the survey and the ranking, so I don't know which are the other 9 books, but this book is definitely a required reading for every human being on this planet.