Man's Search For Meaning is a small book, with its dimensions just a little more than that of an adult palm. Contained in just 155 pages, this book is a 'read-in-one-sitting' book; however, that was not the case for me. The author, Viktor E. Frankl is described as "an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, philosopher, author and Holocaust survivor" by Wikipedia, which I find apt for this review, so am not changing that.
The book is divided into three parts; Part 1 - Experiences in a Concentration Camp; Part 2 - Logotherapy in a Nutshell, and Part 3 - The Case for a Tragic Optimism. Part 1, as the name suggests, describes his experiences at the concentration camps, two camps - Camp Auschwitz and Camp Dachau. Part 2 is about the personal school of psychotherapy he formed after being released from the camps. Part 3, though having a different name, is just an extension of part 2.
The best part of the book is the Part 1 section. If you haven't read any personal records or documentaries about the actual day-to-day lives of the WW2 concentration camp inmates, then this book will be of a mild shock to you. This part is the stitching together of various incidents that happened there and how the author himself being a psychiatrist reflected upon those incidents, incidents like how they survived on 1/2 pound bread and watery soup every day or how inmates without any sympathy, upon finding a dead inmate, would take off the dead man's coat and shoes and keep it for himself. Recollection of events like these, along with scattered mentions of the camp inmate hierarchy (the wealthy inmates being exempted from hard work), trade (trading one's quota of cigarettes for extra bread or soup), activities (arranging a secret group prayer/a comedy show/an improvised singing), etc. gives the full picture of camp life. The sentences are short and crisp, with no extra exaggeration of expressions.
However, this is where the good part of the book stops, and from part 2, up to part 3, the grey region reigns. Logotherapy, as he describes, is a therapy focused on helping patients find the "will to meaning" in their life. The "will to meaning" is the reason for a person to exist, and his Logotherapy helps people find/recognize it. In the extremely cruel conditions of the concentration camps, where on top of the physical labour (working even during snowstorms), inadequate rations, diseases, there was the added labour psychological labour of not knowing when, if ever, they would be released; in these conditions, the author asks us, what kept them from killing themselves? The answer, that he elaborates in Part 2 and 3 of the book, is their drive to find the meaning of life. For Viktor, the "will to meaning" was completing his scientific journal he had started before being sent to Auschwitz. For another inmate, it was going back to his son. Given these accounts, Viktor challenges two established schools of psychology, the Freudian view of "will to pleasure" (people always do things which guarantee the most amount of pleasure to them) and the Adlerian view of "will to power" (people always fo things which guarantee the most amount of power to them/they strive for superiority). Viktor instead proposes man does things that give him the most amount of "meaning" to his life; this proposal is fairly criticized in psychological schools.
However, part 2&3 is not only about challenging established schools meaninglessly, but there are also some good independent points too - like mentioning the "existentialism vacuum" in people now a day. "No instinct tells him [people] what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism)" Take for example so many people are confused/depressed about their career choices today, natural instinct rarely tells someone to become a physicist, while tradition rarely tells anyone to become a twitch or youtube streamer, so what do people do? Likely many join or devote themselves to religion, maybe join an extreme group because everyone is doing that, or go for a mediocre degree because their parents tell them that everyone is doing that (conformism) or maybe they join a party, ardently stand in protests for that party, let the leader take decisions for him and give him some meaningful thing to do (totalitarianism). All these as a result of not finding his own "will to meaning" or finding the purpose of his life on his own. Viktor also talks about the "Noo Dynamis" or the "polar field of tension", where he claims for some necessary amount of tension to be present in one's life for his growth, in contrast to other psychotherapy which aims at a state of complete relaxation. If the total life of a person is visualized to be a sphere, then one end of the sphere is represented as the meaning one has to fulfill (ex - writing a scientific paper) and the other end represented by the man himself, and the interaction of this two poles are supposed to create a field which is supposed to create a 'necessary tension' which the man has to overcome to meet his goal at the end.
The rest of Part 2 and 3 essentially delve into existentialist views, axioms, and questions like the two instances mentioned above; and in my view, Logotherapy is just an abridged or fairly digestible version of existentialism. If read separately from part 1, parts 2&3 seem like a good read, like reading an alternate version of psychoanalysis, however, when read together parts 1, 2, and 3, the part 1 starts to seem like a premise used to justify the theories proposed in part 2&3.
The book in total took me 15 days to read, both because I am a lazy reader and also because I actually had to shut the book sometimes and think about the horrors of camp life mentioned in it. So, that's that. This book in my opinion is not a light reading exercise, if you already know a little bit about the holocaust, then only you should read this as a means to expand your knowledge on the topic.
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