Man's Search for Meaning in The Complete Idiots Guide to the Ultimate Reading List

Mar 16, 2012 Lisa (Harmonybites) rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction, biography, religion, ultimate-reading-list, horror, philosophy, psychology, memoir, spirituality, ebooks

The core of this slim 167-page volume is Frankl's 90-page memoir of his years in four Nazi Concentration camps, including Auschwitz. He wrote his account in nine days in 1945 and it was originally published in German under the title "Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationlager." I've read quite a few accounts of the Holocaust and the Concentration Camps. While Frankl's account may not be able to claim the stark lyricism of Elie Wiesel's Night, it makes up for it in psychological insight, and win The core of this slim 167-page volume is Frankl's 90-page memoir of his years in four Nazi Concentration camps, including Auschwitz. He wrote his account in nine days in 1945 and it was originally published in German under the title "Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationlager." I've read quite a few accounts of the Holocaust and the Concentration Camps. While Frankl's account may not be able to claim the stark lyricism of Elie Wiesel's Night, it makes up for it in psychological insight, and winds up with a much less bleak message. For at the heart of this book is not the stripping away of faith in the face of hell, but of survival--not just physical but psychological and spiritual. Not that there aren't similarities. Both memoirs emphasized how randomness, how much blind luck, factored into survival. And well, the moral and spiritual toll taken and how a certain shaming ruthlessness was needed to survive. Wiesel would agree, I think, with Frankl's comment of the survivors (one in about 28 he says at one point) that "the best of us did not return." Trained as a psychiatrist and neurologist and a practicing physician before his time in the camps, Frankl goes into the three stages in the psychological states of camp survivors, each with their dangers. There is the initial shock, then followed by a self-protecting apathy once used to the routine, which can develop into a suicidal numbness, and finally for those lucky few liberated, the dangers of hateful revengeful rage, bitterness and disillusionment.

His answers for each came from his psychological philosophy and practice of what he calls "logotherapy," which he elaborates more upon in the second section added in 1962, "Logotherapy in a Nutshell." Called the "Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy," the first being Freud with his "pleasure principle," the second Adler who thought the principle human drive was a will to power, Frankl, in contrast, thought the most important human drive is the quest for meaning. He quotes Nietzsche who wrote: "He who has a Why to live for can bear almost every How." Giving many examples from his experience, he related that often those who survived were not necessarily the most physically robust, but those who found meaning in their existence and even in their suffering--those who had hope and kept a sense of humor. He spoke in particular of the importance of work, love, and courage. For himself, he still had a book to write, his love for his wife he hoped to be reunited with, and the examples before him of those who still kept their dignity aiding in keeping his will to survive. Frankl writes that Freud claimed that if you could take a diverse group of people and starved them, that "the imperative urge of hunger can and will blur individual differences." Frankl says Freud was wrong. That in the face of starvation in the camps "people became more different" and that they were "unmasked" as "swine or saints." In the conclusion to that second section he says: "We have come to know Man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also the being who entered those gas chambers upright with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips." ...more

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