The main goal of this book is to provide perspective and techniques for a person to use to find meaning in his or her life. It is written in an autobiographical style by psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl. He discusses many specific examples from his imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp, along with his professional knowledge to offer a method for discovering personal fulfillment and a sense of meaning in life. With descriptive language, Frankl creates a vivid image of this horrible ordeal. He begins the book by describing his reactions and observations at the outset of his imprisonment.
Specifically, he details the conditions of the concentration camp and defines specific terms. He tells the reader that facts are presented only as they are part of man's experience, which provides the basis for understanding the psychology of
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Here he outlines a theory of Logotherapy as a psychological technique for helping people. In this section, Frankl discusses the basics of this approach to therapy and supports it by referring to some work with patients and again his own experiences in the concentration camps. The writing is less an autobiographical account and more a detailed presentation of psychological terms and concepts associated with logotherapy. Through an examination of logotherapy, Frankl contrasts its approach with traditional psychoanalysis and emphasizes it is the only form of therapy that can help people with their search for meaning. The meaning of life can be discovered in three ways. First, one can perform a deed. Second, one can experience something or encounter someone. Or thirdly, one can demonstrate a certain attitude toward suffering. Concepts of existential frustration, noogenic neuroses, and life's transitoriness are addressed in terms of their relative impact on a person's search for and perception of
Use details from the text to explain how human beings respond to life in a concentration camp. How do their attitudes, personalities, and behaviors change over time?
This is one of the first situations in the book that exemplifies going through a hard time. In this case the concentration camps, can change who you are as a person even after you have already developed your own
Shock, apathy, and disillusionment were three psychological stages that the prisoners of the Nazi concentration camps experienced. Ironically, it took an event of such tragedy and destruction to enable us to learn more about how the human mind responds to certain situations. Frankl’s methods for remaining positive can be used by every human being to give them a meaning in their lives regardless of what predicament or mental state they are in – it is in many ways like a phoenix risen from the
In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl tells the honest story of his own experiences as an inmate in a concentration camp during World War II. In his book, Frankl answers the question “How was everyday life in a concentration camp reflected in the mind of the average prisoner?” (Frankl, 2006, p. 3) He describes the physical, emotional, and psychological torment that he endured as well as the effect that the camp had on those around him. He breaks down the psychological experience as a prisoner into three stages: the initial shock upon admission into the camp, apathy, and the mental reactions of the prisoner after liberation. He highlights certain emotions experienced throughout the time in the camp such as delusions of reprieve, hope, curiosity, surprise, and even humor.
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl is filled to the brim with rhetorical devices from all three sections of the text. Particularly in his section about logotherapy, Frankl’s practice to find an individual’s meaning of life, he explores the three main meanings of life: accomplishment, love, and suffering. This area uses a plethora of comparison, such as parallelism and metaphor. Recurring themes are used to draw back to Frankl’s three life meanings, like word repetition and alliteration. Frankl’s use of rhetorical devices allows his audience to focus on their individual possibilities and incorporate his ideology into society.
Many books were published about Holocaust, but Frankl’s work is “One of the outstanding contribution to psychological thought . . .” (Carl Rogers. 1959). Frankl, a psychiatrist and neurologist, spent 3 years in Nazis concentration camps where he underwent
The will to live and survive is a very basic drive in humans. When people are stripped of their freedom and their lives are threatened, their instinct is to find some way to stay alive physically and to cope mentally. During the Holocaust, relieved to be alive and in fear of the death around them, many prisoners made an amorality of choices to survive and so these prisoners became implicated in the system of torture and killing themselves. This is an identity given to them not only by the prisoners who are subject to their mistreatment and punishment, but also by the Nazi SS men who use freedom from death as leverage to help in managing other prisoners. Other than the prisoners who they managed and repressed, the soldiers were the only social, emotional and psychological contact these prisoners had. Unconsciously, these prisoners began to adopt some of the behavior and attitudes of the Nazi SS men. They became numb, and detached from the people suffering around them. In this essay I am going to compare Tadeusz Borowski 's tone, voice and creative narrative in, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman, with Ruth Franklin 's findings from her investigation of his work, in her book, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in the Holocaust Fiction.
Logo therapy is the belief that everything that one does in his/her life has a meaning. It does not necessarily mean if something bad happened then it is good that it happened, for example the Holocaust, however, it is about what we can learn and understand from such a horrific event. In the memoir novel Night by Elie Wiesel, Eliezer is sent to concentration camps as a teenager and manages to survive. However, he is not the same person he was at the beginning of the book. Through the course of the novel, Eliezer is able to transform from an innocent pious adolescent to a war-hardened young man, well acquainted with death because of the horrible atrocities he witnessed in concentration camps, such as children and women being burned alive which
Man’s Search For Meaning details Viktor Frankl’s horrifying experiences in Nazi concentration camps during the holocaust, and during that time he found meaning in his life. And he describes three things that were the most important factors that contributed to his and some prisoners survival: love, work, and suffering. It was because of those three things that they were able to survive. Many found hope in the thought that a love one was waiting , others were so preoccupied with work they were un able to think, and most effective was
Everyone experiences emotional and physiological obstacles in their life. However, these obstacles are incomparable to the magnitude of the obstacles the prisoners of the Holocaust faced every day. In his memoir, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, illustrates the horrors of the concentration camps and their mental tool. Over the course of Night, Wiesel demonstrates, that exposure to an uncaring, hostile world leads to destruction of faith and identity.
Psychologist Victor Frankl’s novel: Man's Search for Meaning delivers a powerful and humbling perspective on life that inspires introspection in the minds of all those that read it. The book achieves this by taking us on a journey with Frankl as he describes his personal experiences of the Holocaust. During his time spent in four different concentration camps Frankl gradually learns lessons in spiritual survival. Devoid of all pleasures and possessing nothing but his “naked existence” Frankl is forced to look inward and in the process discovers what he believes to be the primary motivating factor of all men (p. 15).
In Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl describes his revolutionary type of psychotherapy. He calls this therapy, logotherapy, from the Greek word "logos", which denotes meaning. This is centered on man's primary motivation of his search for meaning. To Frankl, finding meaning in life is a stronger force than any subconscious drive. He draws from his own experiences in a Nazi concentration camp to create and support this philosophy of man's existence.
'He who has a why to live for can bear any how.' The words of Nietzsche begin to explain Frankl's tone throughout his book. Dr. Frankl uses his experiences in different Nazi concentration camps to explain his discovery of logotherapy. This discovery takes us back to World War II and the extreme suffering that took place in the Nazi concentration camps and outlines a detailed analysis of the prisoners psyche. An experience we gain from the first-hand memoirs of Dr. Frankl.
Man’s Search for Meaning, is a biography and the personal memoir of Victor Frankl’s experience in a Nazi Concentration Camp. The book was initially published in 1946 in German and was then published in 1959 in English, under the title From Death-Camp to Existentialism. Prior to World War II, Victor Frankl was a psychiatrist working in Vienna and then later was responsible for running the neurology department at a Jewish Hospital in Rothschild. In 1942 he and his family were arrested and deported. They were separated and sent to concentration
In September of 1942, Viktor Frankl was arrested in Vienna and taken to one of the many Nazi death camps. Frankl was working on a manuscript which was confiscated from him in a move to Auschwitz. In this manuscript entitled, The Doctor and the Soul, Frankl had began his work on a theory he would later call logotherapy. The term logotherapy is derived from the Greek word logos, which means meaning. According to logotherapy, the striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man (Frankl 121). Frankl’s theory and therapy generated and grew through his experiences in the concentration camps.