Man’s Search for Meaning

A short book by the Viennese psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, first published in German in 1946, soon after his release from the Nazi camps, and in English in 1959. Part One describes camp life from a psychologist's point of view. Frankl divides prisoners' reactions into three phases: shock on arrival, the apathy that set in as they adapted, and the bitterness and disillusion that could follow liberation. He observes that those who kept a sense of purpose, a task to finish or a person to return to, were often better able to endure, and argues that even when everything else is taken away one freedom remains: to choose one's attitude to one's circumstances. Part Two, 'Logotherapy in a Nutshell', sets out his school of psychotherapy. Its premise is that the primary human drive is the will to meaning, which can be found through work or deeds, through love and experience, and through the attitude we take to unavoidable suffering.

It is a direct and humane argument that meaning, not pleasure or power, is what sustains people, drawn from experience at the limit of endurance.