Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning is one of the best books I’ve ever read. Here’s Michael Cook:
This year marks the 70th anniversary of the publication of Man’s Search for Meaning, one of the most powerful statements of human dignity written in the last century.
The author was Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist and a Jew, who spent about three years in concentration camps, including Auschwitz. His father, mother, brother and his pregnant wife all perished in the camps.
Frankl was astonishingly productive and soon after he was released in April 1945, he was back at work. The next year he wrote his memoir of Auschwitz. In German the title of the first edition was Trotzdem Ja Zum Leben Sagen: Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager, which translates roughly as “In spite of everything, say Yes to life: a psychologist’s experience of the concentration camp”. Later he added a section reflecting on his experiences and sketching what became the third school of Viennese psychology, logotherapy.
Man’s Search for Meaning was an immediate best-seller which made the author famous around the world. By the time of his death in 1997, it had sold more than 10 million copies.
It’s astonishingly contemporary, for more than any other book I’ve read, it speaks to the anxieties of a society in which suffering has no meaning and euthanasia seems like a plausible solution to life’s pain.
Read more: Mercatornet.com
Also of interest is this:
7 astonishing quotes from Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl
The famous psychiatrist survived because he knew that even the most brutal moments in life have a meaning
Image credit: www.liveinternet.ru.
