Man’s Search for Meaning
In part one of Man’s Search for Meaning Viktor Frankl recounts his harrowing experience in the Nazi concentration camps of World War II. Despite the unrelenting depths of privation, suffering and death all around him, Frankl, a psychiatrist by training, resolved to control what he would feel about what was happening to him. He found that those who had purpose had a greater likelihood of survival. His purpose was to help others in the camp and to one day be reunited with his wife and finish a manuscript begin before he was sent to the camps. Tragically, his wife died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen. After the war, he completed his manuscript, which became the basis of part two on a pioneering therapeutic approach for mental health detailed in part two called Logotherapy. Logotherapy is an approach to mental health that focuses on the search for meaning in one’s life. This approach is informed by Frankl’s experience in the concentration camps: retain the freedom to choose how to respond to suffering, nourish this inner freedom and embrace the of beauty of anything that is around you: family and frields, nature, art, poetry and literature.
