Man's Search for Meaning
Viktor Frankl's account of his years in Nazi concentration camps, followed by logotherapy, the framework he derived from the observation that prisoners who found meaning survived longer than those who did not.
Summary
The book divides into two parts of very different character. The first is a memoir of Auschwitz and several other camps, written with clinical restraint. Frankl describes how the first days in a camp produced a kind of emotional anesthesia, a dehumanization that was also protective. Then the observation his theory rests on: prisoners who had something to live for, a person they were determined to see again or a manuscript they wanted to finish, kept their dignity and their will to survive longer than prisoners who had lost all purpose.
The second part introduces logotherapy (from the Greek logos, meaning "meaning"), the psychological framework he developed partly in the camps and partly in theoretical work before them. Its central claim is that the primary human drive is meaning rather than pleasure or power, and that existential frustration, the inability to find meaning, produces a distinct class of neurosis. Logotherapy works by helping patients identify or construct meaning rather than by resolving past traumas.
The passage everyone quotes: "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances."
That claim is the book's core argument and the place it is easiest to attack. It puts the moral weight on the prisoner's internal state and almost none on the structures that built the camps. Frankl does not address the tension.
Quotes
"Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'."
"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."