Chicago Philosophy Association

Book spotlight · Free to borrow

Man’s Search for Meaning Viktor E. Frankl, 1946

In 1942 Viktor Frankl, a young Viennese psychiatrist, was deported with his family to the Nazi camps. Over the next three years he passed through four of them, including Auschwitz. His parents, his brother and his wife did not come home. He did, carrying a question most of us never have to ask so sharply: what keeps a human being alive when everything has been taken away?

The first half of the book is a spare, almost clinical memoir of camp life. Frankl watched who endured and who gave up, and noticed it was rarely the physically strongest. The ones who held on usually had something still ahead of them: a person to see again, a task unfinished, a book to write. Frankl himself kept going partly by rebuilding his confiscated manuscript on scraps of paper. Echoing Nietzsche, he concluded that someone with a why to live can bear almost any how.

The second half introduces logotherapy, the school of psychotherapy Frankl founded. Its claim is bold: our deepest drive is not pleasure, as Freud thought, or power, as Adler thought, but meaning. And meaning is not something we invent. We discover it in three places: in what we create or give, in what and whom we love, and in the stance we take toward suffering we cannot avoid.

Written in a matter of days and read by millions since, it remains one of the most humane books of the last century, and a sharp reply to an age that has plenty of comfort and very little purpose.

For discussion: Is meaning discovered or created? Frankl and Sartre give opposite answers. Bring yours to the next CPA evening.