Man's Search for Meaning

Viktor Frankl founded a school of psychotherapy called logotherapy, which focuses on helping people create and find meaning in their life. Frankl’s book is divided into two parts, the first of which details his harrowing experiences as a Jew in Nazi concentration camps, and the second part on logotherapy as a framework is derived from his experiences in witnessing death, near-death, and the fringes of human condition at the camps. If existential philosophy gives a theoretical ideal to look up to in order to fight against nihilism, logotherapy is a framework for putting that theoretical ideal to practice and guide people to craft and pursue meaning that they can instill in their work, love, and most interestingly in Frankl’s framework, in suffering.

The point of finding meaning in suffering has been most personally provocative. In the concentration camps when people were exposed to suffering, some held to their principles and hopes, and perhaps even died and remembered as martyrs - others became like animals, stealing and manipulating and betraying to do whatever it took to lessen the suffering by some small bit. If someone didn’t ascribe any meaning to their suffering and just acted out of the hedonistic principle, it’s easy to see how they’d fall in that second category. Before reading this I didn’t ascribe any meaning to suffering and so it was easier to be frustrated with pain and setbacks. This book made me rethink that: just in this past few days when I’m bored or frustrated or in some other kind of (mostly emotional) pain, framing it as a challenge to be overcome grounds me some bit and makes it much more bearable by helping me seeing the big picture of what the pain might be for, most always something greater than it once the pain is overcome.