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Summary: How Frankl helped me
Review: Viktor Frankl uses his hellish experience in the concentration camps of World War II to illustrate how one must be pushed to the limit of their being to find out what they are truly capable of. He turns one of the darkest episodes in the history of the world into a strangely uplifting experience for the reader. Through the objective look at the behavior of man suffering the negative sublime, he is able to guide an individual to find the meaning to their own lives. Logotherapy is a key point in this book. Explained thoroughly in the book, logotherapy can be applied to everyone. This book helped me to understand my life in a way which I had not thought about before. I would highly recommend Man's Search for Meaning to anyone, especially those feeling like they need some kind of purpose in their lives.
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Summary: Hope in Suffering
Review: Viktor Emil Frankl, eminent psychiatrist and founder of logotherapy passed away on September 1997. A sadness swept through me as I heard of his death. "Man's Search for Meaning" was the very first book of his that I read, and along with many others who have read this best-seller I have been comforted with his simple but sagely advise: "[E]ven the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by so doing change himself. He may turn a personal tragedy into a triumph." Dr. Frankl shall be remembered as one who gave humanity the courage to go through life's tumult and to endure suffering with dignity.
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Summary: Victor Frankl ,TheTwentieth Century's Finest Gift to History
Review: "Man's Search For Meaning" by Victor Frankl is a book which shouldn't even be allowed to be read by a lot of people. As I read some of the negative reviews here, I was reminded of the words of another well published fellow: "Don't cast your pearls before swine. They will trample your pearls beneath their feet, and then turn and and rend you". This little book was written and translated into English over fifty years ago by a man who went through the crucible of the Holocaust. Not only did he survive as an organism, but as a naked human spirit. He looked death and horror right square in the eye, not in a brave moment, but over the grind of years and DEFIED IT, WITH JUSTICE,AND MERCY, AND WALKING HUMBLY WITH AN ADEQUATE WHY! Having done so, he began to try to share his gift with a world of people in pain, and people in vacuum. He has passed on now, but his gift of understanding will THUNDER down through the centuries, and continue to be built upon. If we humans ever transcend the petty little dogs nipping at our heels, and the monsters that confront us with our worst nightmares, we shall do it with the gift of understanding he left us.
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Summary: An Essential book to understand the 20th century
Review: Essential,painful,awesome,ultimately uplifting.Another strong antidote to new-age fuzzines practiced by PBS snake oil hustlers. Real pain,actual expierence,astonishing,almost unbelievable horrors which led to logotherapy.Frankl, who passed away the same time as Mother theresa and Diana Spencer,recieved the least treatment in the press of the three.And may have had the greatest impact. A tour de force!A Masterpiece!
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Summary: Inspired
Review: Simply one of the most inspiring books I've ever read since his philosophy comes out of true experience and suffering. A beautiful story, in the very least.
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Summary: Pivotal...Landmark...Watershed...
Review: I wish I had read this book earlier in my life. And, I can see that this will be just the first time that I have read it--I am going to be reading this book at least once a year, I want to re-visit it frequently. It will be a classic for me. For me, the first power of this short book is his narrative of survival in the concentration camps. What he witnessed and reports has its own power, but when he compounds it with an interpretation, that is, a search for meaning, Frankl's book has resounding merit. The second power is his development and explication of logotherapy. Freud advanced the theory that it was sublimated urges that drove the individual; Adler advocated that it was the individual's will to power that moved one; but Frankl's logotherapy is a theory searching for meaning--life needs to be interpreted. The individual lives and suffers now and in the past, but for the future, striving to be a better person, one must find a meaning, a 'why,' in order to change. Frankl's psychotherapy school of thought, I'm sure, has its detractors. I don't care about that. What I care about is the singular wisdom, tested in the fire, of his narrative. My spirit and my soul are still reverberating.
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Summary: The next step
Review: The best statement in this book is "Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now".If I can do this I will have mastered the course. He leads me up to trying to find my meaning to my life, but lets me go from there. The next step is mine.
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Summary: Your Purpose in Life
Review: As an entering Freshman into a University, it was nice to have read this book right off the get go. College is about finding yourself and helping the others around you. Throughout this book that is exactly what Victor Frankl did. He survived the Nazi death camp by caring about the men around him and helping them realize that they too have a future. Man lives for his future, not dwelling on his past. I would recomend this book to any senior in high school or higher. It is something that will really get to you, even the 'older' people. There is a reason that you are here...fate has a plan for you.
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Summary: A Triumph of the Highest Kind.
Review: Mr. Viktor Frankl left the physical world in 1997, but for me he remains a HERO. He came to be a Doctor of Medicine, and Doctor of Philosophy. He founded his own psychological system "Logotherpahy" which strives to give people a sense of their own vitality, something to live for, and, in a word, "meaning." He loved life and the humans within it. MAN'S SEARCH FOR MEANING deals in part with Frankl's own dealings with Nazi Concentration Camps, for he was a suffering Jew. He was there for 3 years, and never saw his wife again, presuming here to have been already killed. The second portion of the book is a cursory look at "Logotherapy." A more detailed account is found in THE DOCTOR AND THE SOUL, THE UNHEARD CRY FOR MEANING, THE WILL TO MEANING, anf THE ULTIMATE MEANING. The man Frankl had, throughout, a sense of purpose, positivity, and courage, whereas many of the others were embittered or frightful. He gave them hope and, again, "meaning." He thought of his wife, his work, and his fellow man, in all the deepst of ways. He helped the sick, and spoke vehemently of having a "Will to meaning" or, will to live, rather than sit there in despair. Frankl asserts that man, whether "consciously" aware of this or not, strives for meaning. This implies something apart from himself (transcendent), as a cause, a religious impulse, a person. The "ultimate" or "super" meaning is something beyond living for family, friends, school, and so on. He ask of us to consider the possible hidden meanings within every happening in our lives, rather than a single meaning in life. He will take a given a person and help him to find himself by teh discovery of a meaning in (a) love, (b) suffering, (c) death. He ask us not to dwell on the past, but to dwell on the future. He defiantly says that man is not, as Freud so emphasizes, bound up in pleasures. Man is not, as Alder asserts, looking for power. Psychology is then not materialistic or reductionistic. Man has Free Will, and spiritual drives. For Frankl, and myself, man wants MEANING. For example, Frankl notes that Darwinism discusses a "struggle for survival." But, consider middleclass persons living in North America. Where is their struggle? They have "survived." Now what? Struggle for what? Another example is a simple person who attends university, is doing well, has friends, a working relationship, supportive parents, and so on and so forth. He told Frankl he still felt "empty" and without meaning. And lastly, my own 10 months in a factory could not have been handled so well without Frankl. I was there to save money for school. This was my purpose. Rather than concentrate on the poor working conditions, the long hours, the angry bosses, and so on, I reminded myself that I am here for school. And so, I worked exceptionally hard, unitimidated. I regarded it all as a welcome challenge. They say "work 10 hours," I say "give me 12 hours." In short, I handled every hardship with eager diligence on account of Logotherapy's positive insistence on meaning and purpose. Every person who has opened a book should read this and work therefrom. We owe it to ourselves.
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Summary: A Very "Meaningful" Little Book
Review: In the first section of this book, the author describes in great prose his and others' experiences as prisoners during the Holocaust and the horror of it all. Then in the second section, he relates the logotherapy theory (or the therapy by looking for meaning.) The connection between the two sections clearly is that the fellow prisoners of the author's who did not have a meaning/objective in their lives to live for or who gave up on any meaning were the ones who gave up on the will to live (and actually let themselves die without being taken to the gas chambers.) Those who had a meaning to their life or something to strive for were those who tried their best to survive those horrible conditions. Another way to look at it is: if those people found the will to live in such horrific circumstances (some of them didn't as mentioned above), then one must conclude that life in and of itself must have a meaning and is worth fighting for. I highly recommend this book for any serious reader.
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