MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING by Viktor Frankl

Without a doubt, this is not a book one forgets, ever.

During the second world war, Viktor Frankl was held in several concentration camps and was one of the very few to survive Auschwitz. His wife, and most of his family died in concentration camps.

The first part of the book is describing the unimaginable suffering, degradation and brutality the prisoners were subject to and the psychological phases they went though.

The first phase was shock, followed by the development of apathy and in the end, when freed, depersonalisation, the feeling that everything appears to be unreal.

The second part of the book is an absolute treasure, a way for us to learn from his misfortune. He looks back and correlates his experiences to the main ideas of logotherapy, a form of psychotherapy that is focused on the future and on our ability to endure hardship, such as:

“Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivator in his life and is unique to every individual.”

“What matters is not the meaning of life in general, but the contextual meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.”

“Suffering ceases to become suffering at the very moment it finds a meaning.”

Frankl explained that ultimately, a differentiating factor between those who lived and those who died was one’s ability to find meaning in the future and see past the hopelessness of the moment.

It brings to surface tough questions that we often don’t want to think about. Who are we if we don’t own anything but our bare bodies? What defines us? What keeps us going and why?

I was truly inspired by some kind and generous souls Frankl met in the concentration camp who comforted others and even gave away their last piece of bread - “they may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Lastly, I think the duality of man’s nature is powerfully summed up by the following:

“After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.”