Top 25 growth books - IV

Man's Search For Meaning

Victor E. Frankl

A quote from the book

Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.

The backdrop of the book is the days spent by Victor in Auschwitz concentration camp.  In this 1946 book, Victor explains how the pursuit of meaning allowed him and so many others to endure their difficult days in the concentration camp. 

At the time of his arrest by the Nazis in 1942, Victor was working at a psychologist in Vienna, Austria. He endured the torture of the SS guards, the injustice of being beaten and broken, and the pain of seeing those around him “treated like nonentities,” and in the midst of the horror, he found what carried some through to the end - quest for meaning in one's life.

For Frankl during his time in the camp, the desire to see his wife again (he didn’t know she was already dead) and his hope of publishing a book on his psychiatric theories gave him a meaning that helped bring him through his nearly three years of captivity.

While some died violent and empty deaths at the hands of their enemies, many more died internally. Frankl said that when a prisoner ignored a guard’s order to get out of bed and instead began smoking a cigarette, he knew that the prisoner would die within two weeks, not from weapons, but from purposelessness. “The prisoner who had lost faith in the future—his future—was doomed…. In the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone.”

The first half of Man’s Search for Meaning description of life in the camp is intense though not overly graphic. Food was scarce to the point of starvation, and warmth—both physical and emotional—was not to be found. Some of the SS guards were kind. Some of the Jewish guards were harder than the SS guards. "Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn.”

Frankl tells the story of a camp commander, a Nazi, who used his own money to buy medicines for the prisoners from a nearby town. “There are two races of men in this world, but only these two—the ‘race’ of the of the decent man and the ‘race’ of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people. In this sense, no group is of ‘pure race.'”

In the second part of the book, Frankl explains Logotherapy, his method of “curing the soul by leading it to find meaning in life. 

Viktor understood that it’s not circumstances that define meaning, but what we take from those circumstances. “The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life.”

By the time of his death in 1996, this book had already sold more than ten million copies. One of the all time influential books.

Namaste

Prabir