Man's Search for Meaning / Victor E. Frankl

RATINGS

Overall: 5 / 5 stars

Text Level: Difficult

Entertainment: High

Self-Help: High

Genres: Nonfiction, Psychology, Philosophy, History, Self Help, Autobiography, Memoir, Spirituality, World War II, Holocaust

Page Count: 192

Is this book right for my inmate and me?

In this book people facing trauma, pain, loss of starting over, will find a story of hope. Dr. Frankl lost everything, his career, home, and family to the Holocaust. It would have been the easiest thing to blame everyone else for his life, but he chose not to turn to hate. Instead, he took the overwhelming amounts of trauma and pain he faced and gave it purpose. That purpose was to help heal others. For anyone hoping to work past their own life traumas, Frankl teaches that the path is through finding self meaning. This is an inspirational story of sorrow that leads to hope and growth for its readers.

Review By: Blackbird (Inmate)

We can find recovery from loss, misery, and pain by gaining hope through purpose and meaning.

What are we able to endure in great times of pain? Can we hold on to hope when we feel we have lost everything? Dr. Victor Franl was able to not only survive the Nazi Concentration camps of WWII, but he builds a life’s mission of changing souls towards positive growth from his experiences. This book chronicles his journey through the camps to the rebuilding of his life’s work in a practice of therapy he developed as a neurologist and psychiatrist, called Logotherapy, based on his premise that the primary motivating force for humans is to find meaning in life.

Meaning and purpose in our lives are easily lost when in jail. Our souls become lost to anything more than getting through the next moments of time. Without a meaning of something more than what we currently are, hope can be forgotten leading inmates to spiral downwards into nothingness. Dr. Frankl’s book asks us to search for more and never give up the fight toward happiness.

Reading this book we follow Frankl, a young Jewish doctor as he is brought to the concentration camp. His life’s work, a medical journal, is stripped off of him and he is forced into hard labor. He is not alone, with millions of other Jews face the same fate of starvation, work then death. Dr. Frankl toils way at work in the fields until he is moved to work in the sick hospital. Surrounded by torture, cruelty and death, the psychiatrist expertise in him begin to search for a common thread for all the death he has seen. He learns monsters can be made of any man, and lacking a purposeful meaning in life leads to death.

So, how do we hold onto hope when all seems lost? In prison this is a question we must face constantly. Rebuilding our lives when we eventually come home to those we love requires us to have ea a vision of a future of success. We will not be able to gain redemption from our past if we don’t have something of meaning to guide us as a compass for positive change. As inmates we learn our destinies can change for the better if we follow a life of purpose.

Dr. Frankl sets out for us steps we can take for change through logotherapy. In each step, we are reminded with faith and love we have a meaning to make our worlds around us better.