Man's Search for Meaning

Man's Search for Meaning 

by Viktor Frankl

"Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a “secondary rationalization” of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning."

Viktor Frankl is the founder of logotherapy - meaning-centered psychotherapy - which is considered the "Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy". 

As Sigmund Freud argued that man's motivations are based on obtaining pleasure, and Alfred Adler argued that man's motivations are based on obtaining power, Frankl argues through logotherapy that man's motivation are based on searching for their life's meaning. 

When Frankl, who was Jewish, was in the middle of finishing his thesis on logotherapy, he is captured by the Nazis and taken to a concentration camp. After he survived the concentration camp, he wrote this book were he uses examples of the experiences he lived in the concentration camp to validate his thesis that man primary motivation in life is to search for meaning. 

The book's foreword explains the intention of the book in a very clear and concise way:

Typically , if a book has one passage, one idea with the power to change a person’s life, that alone justifies reading it, rereading it, and finding room for it on one’s shelves. This book has several such passages.

It is first of all a book about survival. Like so many German and East European Jews who thought themselves secure in the 1930s, Frankl was cast into the Nazi network of concentration and extermination camps.  Several times in the course of the book, Frankl approvingly quotes the words of Nietzsche: “He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.”

He describes poignantly those prisoners who gave up on life, who had lost all hope for a future and were inevitably the first to die. They died less from lack of food or medicine than from lack of hope, lack of something to live for. Frankl’s concern is less with the question of why most died than it is with the question of why anyone at all survived. Terrible as it was, his experience in Auschwitz reinforced what was already one of his key ideas: Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life.

Here are some of the key lessons I learned from reading this book:

• No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.
• Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms— to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
• When a man suffers, no one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.
• Nietzsche : “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
• I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium.
• What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.
• What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.
• If one cannot change a situation that causes his suffering, he can still choose his attitude.

Here is a chapter-by-chapter summary of the lessons I learned from the book - link