Man's Search For Meaning

Viktor Frankl is a well known psychiatrist and neurologist. He is praised for his book, Man’s Search For Meaning, a story that depicts Frankl’s viewpoint during the Holocaust. The narrative illustrates Victor’s perspective and his coping techniques during this time. Frankl also mentions his theory of Logotherapy. A technique that he uses to help people find meaning with their life.

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.

In "Man's Search for Meaning," Victor Frankl describes lessons for spiritual revival and his personal experiences inside the Nazi concentration camps. Frankl disagreed with Freud, a philosopher who believed that life is a quest for power, and Alfred Adler, who believed that life is a quest for power; instead, Frankl agreed with Nietzsche who stated that "He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How." (Page IX.) The three most significant factors that Victor Frankl wrote about that gave life meaning were work, love, and courage during difficult times.

Viktor Frankl’s thesis found in Man’s Search for Meaning is repeated multiple times, in different ways throughout his book. On page 111 he states, “According to logotherapy, we can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering” (Frankl). This is not saying that all of those qualities have to be present to find one’s meaning though especially suffering. The only way to find the meaning of life is by answering your own call for life, not what others value as meaning. Each meaning

In Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning we are told a powerful story of a man’s survival through the Holocaust. Frankl struggles to not only keep his body alive, but his spirit as well. Frankl’s main goal is to not only come out alive from the Holocaust but to not let it change him and ultimately defeat or take over his life and change who he truly is. He knows the only way to stay alive is to find some sort of meaning in his life. As we watch him fight to survive during his stay in concentration camps we begin to realize that the only way he is surviving is because he hasn’t forgotten who he still is and the identity that the Nazi’s were trying to take from him. He keeps his personal identity, goals, and morals in mind while

In the book Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl, he uses his past experiences from different concentration camps to describe what he learned was the true meaning of life. Throughout the book he describes in details that he had no hope for life as he felt pain, humility, and human cruelty during his time as a prisoner in multiple concentration camps. Frankl, believed that he had a chance to survive by using inner strengths. His great sense of humor helped him get though the many difficult situations that he had encountered. He supposed that “what doesn’t kill you makes your stronger.”

Imagine being arrested, forced out of your home, transported to a jail-like camp, and seeing people die all around you while wondering if you would be next - all due to your race, religion, or sexuality. This situation seems unrealistic for the 21st century, but sadly, just one century prior, this circumstance was reality for millions of people, including Viktor Frankl, who tells the story of his Holocaust experience. Between the years of 1933 and 1945, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi soldiers captured anyone who he viewed as a lesser race. Common targets included Gypsies, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, Afro-Germans, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, disabled people, and the most common, Jews. About two-thirds (six million) of European Jews were killed during the Holocaust, more than one million of these were children (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). Frankl turned his experiences and findings into an extremely powerful novel, Man’s Search for Meaning. He tells his story of living in a concentration camp, while also introducing and explaining his psychological theory of logotherapy.

The premise of Frankl’s book is that mankind’s desire for meaning is much stronger than its desire for power or pleasure and that if man can find meaning in life he can survive anything. Frankl introduces this idea [which he calls the theory of logotherapy] throughout his concentration camp experiences in the book’s first section and delves deeper into it in the second section. Referencing Nietzsche, Frankl tells us “Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'” (p. 80). The most important thing to be learned from this statement is that no matter what your circumstances are, you can be happy, or at least survive, if you find a meaning or purpose in life. While in the concentration camp Frankl tells us that in order to maintain his desire to have a meaningful life he focused on three main things: suffering, work, and love. Of sacrifice

Through Frankl's view of suicide you can discover his view of human person. Suicide is wrong in all cases, and should not be even considered an option. He believes that all people can find some meaning in life which would prevent them from giving up all hope and ending their lives. Every human life has meaning, and therefore every human life has value. While in a concentration camp serving as a doctor to those who were ill with typhus or other diseases, he encountered two individuals who had given up hope on life. He asked them both to think of something worth living for. One answered that he had a son waiting for him at home, and the other said he was writing a book and wanted to finish it. Frankl helped them find meaning in their lives to hold on to some hope. Just as they did, anyone can find a meaning to live for, whether it be another person or a goal or achievement.

We are meant to become our truest selves by finding meaning in our lives, which, according to Frankl, can come from three places: work, love, and our attitude in the face of horrific suffering or difficulty. And at the center of this meaning is our responsibility and human right to choose. In Frankl’s theory, we all strive to fulfill a self-chosen goal, from which meaning has the potential to be found. And if no meaning is found, there is meaning yet to be found, or meaning to be drawn from the apparent lack of meaning. Whatever the case, Frankl viewed man’s lack of meaning as the greatest existential crisis, the stress of this meaninglessness giving life and shape to all of our neuroses.

Viktor Frankl’s quest for purpose culminated in finding meaning in love, the love of his wife and looking to the future to be reunited with his loved ones. He asserts that, in the face of depressing circumstances, an individual can look to the future and maintain a hope in whatever they find meaning in. This book resonated with my questions about injustice, human purpose and meaning and illustrated the powerful

Frankl states that “it is this spiritual freedom - which cannot be taken away - that makes life meaningful and purposeful” (Frankl 67). Living in the concentration camp made it hard for some to find a reason to live, but that is what motivated Frankl to make it through each day; to find the purpose of life. Although they were stripped of their freedom in Auschwitz, some were still able to hold onto their spiritual freedom. This spiritual freedom encompassed their emotion, thoughts, feelings and it gave them a vast amount of time for them to reflect on the purpose of life. Throughout the book Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl uses logotherapy to find his meaning of life and therefore I am going to address that each person’s search for the meaning

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.

In this paper I will be analysing/ reflecting on Viktor Frankl’s Man 's Search for Meaning. In my reflection I will compare the main philosophical message of frankl 's experience and try to compare its meaning to my very own life experience. In order to do this I must give you some personal background while growing up I was born with some challenging complications due to a lack of oxygen at birth I was diagnosed with ataxic cerebral palsy. The thing about ataxic cerebral palsy is that it has affected my life in many ways some miniscule others immense. I can write an entire book on my childhood / adolescence and some of the many challenges I have faced but that 's neither here