Mans Search for Meaning

Viktor E. Frankl
Beacon Press 2006
184 pages
[@] getab.li/25382
Book:

Rating Take-Aways

9
10 Importance Viktor E. Frankl, a Viennese doctor and psychiatrist, survived four Nazi death and labor
camps during World War II and developed a deep sense of the meaning of life.
9 Innovation
9 Style In the camps, human life had no worth. Many prisoners lost all scruples as they fought
to endure.

Without knowing how or why, people can grow accustomed to and cope with anything.

Focus Even the worst living conditions reveal the potential for meaning.

After years of imprisonment, Frankl stopped making choices; he let fate take
Leadership & Management its course.
Strategy
Sales & Marketing
Postwar, he created a third school of Viennese psychology, logotherapy, to help
people find the purpose and meaning in their lives.
Finance
Human Resources Seeking meaning in life is humankinds primary drive.
IT, Production & Logistics
Your attitude toward life determines the meaning of your life.
Career & Self-Development
Small Business You must take responsibility for finding the answers to the problems your life presents
Economics & Politics and doing the tasks life sets for you.
Industries
The salvation of man is through love and in love.
Global Business
Concepts & Trends

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getabstract

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Relevance
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What You Will Learn
In this summary, you will learn:r1) What events marked the life and work of psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl, 2) How
Frankl survived four Nazi death camps, 3) What Frankl learned in the camps, and 4) What methods you can use to
apply Frankls logotherapy to your life.
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Review
Viktor E. Frankls extraordinary, moving memoir of three years in Nazi death and labor camps is a literary classic
and an inspiration to millions. This 2006 edition features a 57-page added section offering Frankls explication of
logotherapy, the psychoanalytic method he developed after the war. Frankl wrote this memoir in nine days in 1946,
after returning to his former home in Vienna, Austria, to learn that the Nazis had murdered his pregnant wife, his
parents, his brother and his community of friends. His unsentimental account sets out to help readers avoid what he
regarded as a misleading, conceptual trap: thinking of the camps with sentiment and pity. As of 2006, Frankls
book had sold more than 12 million copies in 22 languages. A 1991 Library of Congress survey placed it among
the 10 most influential books in America. In non-English editions, its title is Say Yes In Spite Of Everything; that
exuberance captures Frankls belief that what happens to you including suffering is secondary to your response
to it. His book teaches that everyone must find his or her unique meaning and purpose in life, and fulfill it. After the
intense horror of his camp saga, Viktor E. Frankls report on his psychoanalytic approach is less gripping, but quite
meaningful. getAbstract recommends his brilliant, stirring, unforgettable memoir to students of history, all therapists
and, really, to everyone.
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Summary
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Viktor E. Frankl
As a teen, Viktor E. Frankl studied philosophy and psychiatry. He initiated a correspondence
with Sigmund Freud, who submitted an article of Frankls to a leading journal, which
getabstract published it when Frankl was only 16. By age 34, in 1939, he was head of neurology
It is a question of at Rothschild Hospital, Viennas only Jewish hospital. When the Nazis closed it, Frankl
the attitude one takes
toward lifes challenges feared for his and his familys lives. In 1942, the US consulate offered him a visa. This rare
and opportunities, both invitation, a stroke of luck, was a tribute to his reputation. Few Jews got out of Austria that
large and small.
getabstract late; fewer still got to America.

Frankl wanted to flee; he knew he could finish his pending book in America. But he
saw a fragment of marble his father had saved after the Nazis destroyed Viennas largest
synagogue. It came from an engraving of the Ten Commandments and bore only a Hebrew
letter. When Frankl asked about it, his father said the letter stood for Honor thy father and
mother. Unable to abandon his family, Frankl let his US visa lapse. The Nazis deported him
getabstract
and his family in September 1942. From then until March 1945, the Nazis shuttled Frankl
Life is not primarily among four death and labor camps: Theresienstadt, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Kaufering and
a quest for pleasure,
as Freud believed, or
Trkheim, part of Dachau.
a quest for power, as
Alfred Adler taught, but Scruples
a quest for meaning.
getabstract Frankl worked in small, less-well-known camps where the real extermination took place
and uncounted people perished in horror and obscurity. The Nazis pushed their captives
off cattle cars at the entry to Auschwitz, confiscating their documents and few remaining
belongings. They tattooed numbers on the arms of those they did not send straight to the

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 gas chamber. This with being stripped naked, completely shaved and given the clothes
of dead prisoners destroyed prisoners identities. With the loss of identity came the
loss of principles. Few inmates could care about morality or ethics. To live amid great
getabstract suffering, each person grew a very necessary protective shell. Some of those who shed
I do not at all see
in the bestseller their compunctions survived. Camp life killed many others, and wiped out those who clung
status of my book to a higher purpose. The best of us did not return.
an achievement and
accomplishment on
my part but rather an Cigarettes
expression of the misery
of our time. Frankl worked as a doctor in a typhus ward during his last few weeks of captivity only.
getabstract He spent most of three years doing crushing manual labor, laying train tracks in cold, wet
weather, wearing rags and rotting shoes. Jews were slave workers for German industrial
concerns. At times, they earned bonus coupons for cigarettes, the camps currency. Only
the Capos Jewish prisoners chosen as guards actually smoked their cigarettes. Everyone
else traded them for food or tidbits, like a scrap of wire to use as a shoelace. If a prisoner
smoked his own cigarettes, everyone knew hed lost the will to live and would die shortly.
getabstract The SS soldiers who ran the camps gave liquor to prisoners working in the gas chambers and
I am a survivor of
fourconcentration crematoria. These workers knew they soon would end up in the ovens like most prisoners.
campsand as such The Nazis kept them drunk to keep them working.
I also bear witness
to the unexpected
extent to which man Reality
is capable of defying
and braving even Frankl quickly recognized the reality of the camps. He divorced himself from his previous
the worst conditions life and vowed to live within this new reality. All he had was his existence. He learned he
conceivable.
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did not need any of the things he once thought he couldnt live without. He had to sleep on
rough boards in unheated huts, sharing two ragged blankets with eight other men, and yet
he still slept. He ate almost nothing, but lived. He accepted Dostoevskys truth: A man can
get used to anything. Prisoners seeking suicide would hurl themselves onto the electrified
barbed-wire fence. Frankl vowed never to run into the wire. He would die soon anyway;
he wanted each day he could get.

Apathy
getabstract
If there is a meaning Prisoners hardened to their circumstances did not look away from humiliating punishments
in life at all, there that fellow inmates endured. They raced to strip new corpses of clothes, shoes or hidden
must be a meaning in
suffering.
food. Many lost all empathy as they starved, though Frankl clung to some caring for his
getabstract friends as a path to his own survival. The men grew almost used to constant beatings, finding
that the most painful part of the beatings is the insult they imply. To the Capos and the
SS, no prisoner had humanity. They were nothing. All that mattered was survival. Fed only
watery soup and a tiny bread ration daily, the prisoners watched their bodies devour
themselves. They forgot anything that wouldnt help keep them alive. Few had the energy
to help others. As the guards and Capos ruled life and death, the prisoners became mere
toys of fate, further reducing their sense of humanity.

Spirituality
getabstract Prisoners retreated into interior lives. Many Jews became more religious. The more
In logotherapy the
patient is actually
sensitive and artistic tended to survive as their hardier, less-aware compatriots died. The
confronted with and most sensitive were physically weak, but their richer, deeper interior lives fueled survival.
reoriented toward the By embracing their inner lives, the men became more, not less, appreciative of natural
meaning of his life.
getabstract beauty, sunsets, or brief respites, like an hour by a hot stove. Frankl learned that the tiniest
moments could evoke profound joy. Longing for his wife, speaking to her in his mind, the
full power of love transfixed him. Amid squalor and death, he saw in his soul that the
salvation of man is through love and in love.

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 Fate
Over time, prisoners became more passive. Any active decision might further death, so they
avoided making choices. As liberation neared, Frankl turned down an SS offer to join other
prisoners on a truck to Switzerland. He let fate take its course. He didnt try to alter his
getabstract destiny. Like many, he felt fate controlled him and that trying to shift it meant disaster. The
Happiness must
happen, and the same Nazis crammed the men from the truck into a hut, set it on fire and watched the Jews in
holds for success: You it burn alive.
have to let it happen by
not caring about it.
getabstract Choice
Camp life showed Frankl that men have options for how they act. He maintained and saw
others maintain spiritual freedom and individuality no matter what the Nazis forced them
to endure. He found that attitude provides meaning. How you cope with your fate adds or
subtracts meaning from your existence. Amid privation, you can keep your inner liberty.
Men who could hold onto even a small sense of a future found that it helped them survive.
Those who ceased to believe in tomorrow did not. In February 1945, a friend of Frankls
dreamed that the camp would be liberated on March 30. On March 29, amid reports that
getabstract Allied advances had slowed and would not reach the camp when he had dreamed, the man
What man needs is fell into a deep fever. He died the next day. Typhus appeared to be the cause, but Frankl knew
not a tensionless state,
but rather the striving his friends loss of belief in his future killed him. Life becomes meaningless when people
and struggling for a have nothing to strive for, lose their sense of direction and stop searching for meaning. That
worthwhile goal, a
freely chosen task. is why you must seek answers to the questions your unique life raises. The singularity of
getabstract your existence gives it meaning. Yet a meaningful life includes death and suffering. Frankl
found that life at the bottom of existence revealed good and evil clearly.

Depersonalization
When the Allies liberated the camps and freed Frankl, he and his fellow inmates felt no
joy. They had lost the ability to feel pleased. They had to relearn it. Their experiences
depersonalized them. Their new life seemed to be a dream. They could not connect to it.
Frankl learned his body could recover as he ate every bit of food that came his way and
grew stronger, but his mind and emotions would not heal quickly. He leaned on his faith
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and slowly found his humanity. Many inmates felt that after what they had suffered, they
I had learned to let could behave any way they liked and that their suffering justified evil conduct. Many could
fate take its course.
getabstract not cope with people who hadnt been in the camps. As the men regained a measure of
humanity, they lost their understanding of how theyd survived. The camps came to seem
like a bad dream, disconnected from their new lives. The best feeling for those who were
able to feel again at all was the exquisite absence of fear.

Logotherapy
After the war, Frankl created a new therapeutic approach he called logotherapy, which leads
a patient to understand even if the understanding might hurt the purpose and meaning of
his or her life. He told a colleague that in psychoanalysis a patient lies on a couch and says
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things that are disagreeable to say. Using logotherapy, a patient sits in a chair and hears
The attempt to develop thingsdisagreeable to hear. Where Freud wrote of a will to pleasure and Alfred Adler
a sense of humor
and to see things in a
of a will to power, logotherapy concerns the will to meaning. Finding lifes meaning
humorous light is some is a humans primary drive. Each persons meaning is exclusive, particular to his or her
kind of trick learned life. For a gratifying life, each person must discover and fulfill his or her own meaning.
while mastering the art
of living. If you cannot find or fulfill your lifes meaning, you will suffer existential frustration.
getabstract Logotherapy helps patients find their lives meaning. Unlike psychoanalysis, it doesnt limit
its inquiry to forces in the unconscious. Logotherapy includes the impact of existential
realities how patients live, work and love, their health, and the like. Logotherapy tries to
help patients identify what their souls need most and fulfill it to give their lives meaning.

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 Tension
A healthy psyche exists in a state of tension between what youve accomplished and what
you have yet to do. Mental health stems not from an absence of tension or an excess of
leisure but from trying to reach a goal with profound meaning. This is a goal you choose,
getabstract not one that life thrusts upon you like, for example, the goal of staying alive in a death
Life ultimately means camp. The two poles of existence are, first, a meaning you must explore and, second, the
taking the responsibility
to find the right answer person who must explore it you. When an arch needs repair, those fixing it put a larger
to its problems and to load on top of the arch. The load pushes the pieces of the arch together and strengthens it.
fulfill the tasks which it
constantly sets for each Your quest for meaning is like the increased load atop an arch.
individual.
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The Existential Vacuum
A sense of emptiness, the existential vacuum is a malaise from the late 20th century and
beyond, manifesting as boredom. It springs from a disconnection between you and your
goals. It occurs when you cannot find or connect to your necessary purpose. People without
a goal fall prey to conformism, doing what everybody else does, or totalitarianism,
doing what other people say. The vacuum might become apparent during times of enforced
leisure, like a quiet Sunday.

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Meaning
Everything can be Lifes meaning changes with each person, each day and each hour. Dont seek a grand,
taken from a man but overall meaning to your life. What matters is your lifes unique meaning in the present
one thing: the last of
the human freedoms moment. This is not an abstraction: Its a concrete task or series of tasks you must identify
to choose ones and perform. To find this meaning, determine what your life asks of you. Only you can
attitude in any given
set of circumstances, to answer the demands of your existence. No matter how life shifts, its meaning endures. You
choose ones own way. can take three paths to finding the meaning in your life: producing work that is yours alone,
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connecting with another person that path is love or transcending hardship or tragedy. If
you cannot change your fate, rise above it.

Love
Only love enables you to understand the essence of another person. Love reveals your
beloveds foundational characteristics. Love lets you see your loved ones true potential.
Your love inspires and enables your beloved to achieve his or her true potential as his or
her love does the same for you. Love may be manifest in sex and, ideally, sex expresses
getabstract love. But love exists in a place beyond sex or rationality.
So, let us be alert
alert in a twofold
manner. Since Suffering
Auschwitz we know Suffering, like love, can reveal your lifes meaning. Suffering can stop feeling like suffering
what man is capable of.
And since Hiroshima when you understand its deeper meaning. But, contrary to what most people think, you
we know what is at do not have to suffer to find meaning in your life. Your heart can change at any instant.
stake.
getabstract What seems oppressive today can be revelatory tomorrow. Despite your suffering, strive
to embrace tragic optimism. Welcome life no matter what course it takes; believe in a
future even amid a bereft present. When you find what you must do, and do it, you will
gain strength to deal with suffering.

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About the Author
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World-renowned writer and psychotherapist Viktor E. Frankl wrote more than 30 books on theoretical and
clinical psychology.

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