Man's Search for Meaning | 
 enlarge | Author: Viktor E. Frankl
Publisher: Beacon Press
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  68 reviews
Sales Rank: 554
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 165
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.1
Dimensions (in): 6.6 x 4.1 x 0.6
ISBN: 080701429X
Dewey Decimal Number: 302
EAN: 9780807014295
ASIN: 080701429X
Publication Date: June 14, 2006
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Product Description
Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl's memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Between 1942 and 1945 Frankl labored in four different camps, including Auschwitz, while his parents, brother, and pregnant wife perished. Based on his own experience and the experiences of those he treated in his practice, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. Frankl's theory?known as logotherapy, from the Greek word logos ("meaning")?holds that our primary drive in life is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but the discovery and pursuit of what we personally find meaningful.
At the time of Frankl's death in 1997, Man's Search for Meaning had sold more than 10 million copies in twenty-four languages. A 1991 reader survey by the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club that asked readers to name a "book that made a difference in your life" found Man's Search for Meaning among the ten most influential books in America.
Born in Vienna in 1905 Viktor E. Frankl earned an M.D. and a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna. He published more than thirty books on theoretical and clinical psychology and served as a visiting professor and lecturer at Harvard, Stanford, and elsewhere. In 1977 a fellow survivor, Joseph Fabry, founded the Viktor Frankl Institute of Logotherapy. Frankl died in 1997.
Harold S. Kushner is rabbi emeritus at Temple Israel in Natick, Massachusetts, and the author of several best-selling books, including When Bad Things Happen to Good People.
William J. Winslade is a philosopher, lawyer, and psychoanalyst at the University of Texas Medical School in Galveston.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 63 more reviews...
 A good challenge June 28, 2008
In short, it's difficult to complain about life when getting a lesson on it from an Auschwitz survivor. It really puts things into perspective for anyone who feels lost or depressed or worthless or small. It gives depth to "if you can't change your situation, change your attitude."
Frankl hits on surprisingly modern points about depression years before Prozac Nation and the transferring of therapy and medications to the mainstream--the normalization of not feeling normal. And he manages to provide a power-packed message in a tiny book; I found myself taking notes on logotherapy and Frankl's observations. And now I find myself trying to figure out how to apply his theory to my everyday frustrations. It's a good challenge.
Feeling curious about the world, frustrated by your life, or lost? Take a weekend and read this book.
My only gripes are the translation, which was crap in the version I read (but I'm an editor, so I get cranky about things like that) and that Frankl does paint himself as the all-answering, all-curing type who can walk into a room and fix any poor fool who's been suffering for years within minutes. I appreciate a degree of modesty. But I guess he's earned the right to feel righteous.
Just buy it June 24, 2008
I've read this more times than I can count. The autobiographical part of the book is stirring. The details of Logotherapy wear a bit thin after many reads, just because of familiarity.
I don't really relate to the idea of suffering as a life accomplishment - not because I devalue the trials of those who have no other choice, but just because I'm disconnected enough from it that I have trouble relating. I do continue to find the idea that a purpose is imposed on you rather than vice versa intriguing, although again, I'm not sure that I agree.
It's a great book and everyone should at least make a lap of the biography to understand what the Holocaust looked like from an insider, particularly people like myself who have been affected by the death of loved ones.
If you've never read it, it will be the best $7 you've ever spent.
Powerfull account of humanitys will to survive June 11, 2008
Viktor Frankl has written an powerfull book about his years as a prisoner inside a nazi concentration camp. He worked as a psychologist and wrote on the subject of lifes meaning. The book is a powerfull testament to the will of humans to survive in dire circumstances. The book begins with the train full of prisoners rolling into the camp. At once they are stripped of all their belongings. Beginning with their clothes, and then glasses, jewlery and all other personal belongings. This is the first step in the process of dehumanizing them. So the struggle for these prisoners he writes is very much about struggling to keep the idea of yourself as a subject alive. To keep alive ones feeling of self worth was essential for survival. it was also important he writes to have the feeling that one had a spiritual center where one could retain some freedom even though one was imprisoned. Otherwise he or she will regress to feeling very small and in the end becoming a formless member of the herd, like an animal. Once this was achieved, when the personality and subjectivity had been broken and erased the person could be willed to do almost anything. The spirit only survives he writes, as long as the idea of hope does. That is why in the suffering one has to parodoxically have to try to find some meaning. If one dosent then the organism is in great danger of being annihilated. Only those who where able to somehow retain a sense of hope, that maybe somewhere someone was waiting for them, that someone who loved them was thinking about them, that god,even though it seemed impossible, saw their suffering.
Wonderful book - even if you've found meaning in your life! May 27, 2008
Title says it all. The second half of the book has some really great tips & tricks for life. You shouldn't skip the first half of the book since it ties into and validates the teachings in the second half of the book.
Sometimes the writing is a bit awkward and verbose (he does speak in technical terms at times), but go slow and really try to understand what he's saying. The book is a really quick read, but again take your time!
For a while I really didn't understand this quote from the author: "Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time." But, after taking some time to think about it (like the time you need to read the book), it truly hit home what this quote means.
I'd recommend this book to anyone!
A great introduction to Viktor Frankl May 22, 2008
Viktor Frankl, famed psychotherapist and a holocaust survivor, said: The spiritual dimension cannot be ignored, for it is what makes us human. Spirituality is at the core of who we are; it defines for us what is meaningful in life.
Among all living things, only we humans can envision our futures and play out mental scenarios of how we will make our visions a reality.
Viktor Frankl, survivor of the Holocaust, emphasized that the meaning of life is not what happens to us. It is what we do with that which happens to us.
Viktor Frankl while interned in sub-human conditions in a Nazi concentration camp found meaning through meditating. He would overcome these horrendous and barbaric conditions by holding a mental image of him speaking to a group of International Psychiatrists at a special dinner event.
His wife had been transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she died. On April 27, 1945, Frankl was liberated. Among his immediate relatives, the only survivor was his sister, who had escaped by emigrating to Australia. It was due to his and others' suffering in these camps that he came to his hallmark conclusion that even in the most absurd, painful and dehumanized situation, life has potential meaning and that therefore even suffering is meaningful. Meaning cannot be invented but must be discovered.
Viktor Frankl wrote "Man's Search for Meaning" after surviving the worst conditions a human can experience during his imprisonment at Auschwitz.
Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning - the classic best seller now considered to be one of the most important contributions to psychiatry since the writing of Freud. Frankl gives a moving account of his life amid the horrors of the Nazi death camps, chronicling the harrowing experience that led to his discovery of his theory of logotherapy.
Viktor Frankl, to be sure, leaves a profound legacy. He wrote many books on existentialism and Logotherapy. Throughout his life and his work, he reminds us that we all have important work to do, that whatever we do is important, and that there is meaning everywhere, all the time.
Human freedom, therefore, is the freedom of responsibility. Freedom without responsibility is something arbitrary, senseless and either leaves us directionless, or can lead to irresponsible, that is, lawless, immoral and violent, self-destructive ways of living. Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn. Because boundaries between groups overlap we must not try to simplify matters by saying that these men are angels and those others are devils.
As far as happiness is concerned Frankl, said: Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.
If you want to get better acquainted to the work of Viktor Frankl " Man's Search for Meaning" is a good place to start.
Raymond Le Blanc. Auhtor.Achieving Objectives Made Easy! Practical goal setting tools & proven time management techniques
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