Man's Search for Meaning

A psychologist in the camps. Suggested on LinkedIn as an underrated book. Give it a chance.

Good book. Raw, harsh, the history and the cruelty of people are unspeakable. Viktor had lost the manuscript and recreated it inside the camp. He lost his whole family there. And still, with a scientific tone he analyzes the psyche of people in that setting… What a read.

He does not go too deep into details of life and personal history in the camp; it is more a scientific treatise with anecdotes (heartbreaking, the one about the speech to the other prisoners). I would have liked to understand more about what had happened, but I suppose his focus was elsewhere. Still, a good read. So much cruelty leaves a bitter taste. Never forget.

Notes

• The experience of suffering could have extinguished in Viktor Frankl the love for life or made it blaze like an inextinguishable fire. Seventy years have passed since these pages first saw the light. They still burn.
• Love does not refer at all to the corporeal existence of a person, but with extraordinary depth intends the spiritual being of the beloved: their “being thus” (as the philosophers say). Their “existence,” their being-here-with-me, even their physical life, their being-alive, are beside the point. Whether the loved person is alive or not, I do not know, nor will I find out (throughout the internment we could neither write nor receive letters), but at this moment that does not matter.
• Of course all these meager “joys” of life in the camp are a perfect example of happiness understood in the negative sense of Schopenhauer, that is as absence of pain, and this too, as we have
• I am nauseated by the horrid coercion that every day, every hour, chains my thoughts only to these problems. So I use a trick: suddenly I see myself in a lecture hall, well lit, beautiful, warm; I am on the podium. In front of me, an interested and attentive audience in comfortable chairs, and I speak. I speak and give a lecture on the psychology of the concentration camp, and everything that torments and oppresses me becomes objectified, seen and described from a higher scientific point of view.
• “What you have lived, no power in the world can take from you.” What we have achieved in the fullness of our past life, in its richness of experience, this inner wealth, no one can take from us.
• We must not search for an abstract meaning of life. Each person has their own specific vocation or mission in life and wants or must reach a concrete and specific goal. In this sense, no one can take someone else’s place and no one can take theirs. So each of our tasks is as unique as our capacity to accomplish it.