One of the smallest books that I own and one of the most influential. There is little that I can add to the reviews that have already been written. Written in 9 days in 1945 and intended to be published anonymously it was first published in Englisj 1959.
Victor Frankl was born in Vienna in 1905 and trained as a psychiatrist, as a Jew he was persecuted by the Nazis and spent years in the death camps including Auschwitz. Miraculously he survived; this book is not so much about his experiences, although those he mentions are chilling enough, but how how he found the strength to survive. As he says it is not the fact that so many died but that any one survived is so remarkable.
From the foreward by Harold S. Kushner: Terrible as it was, his experience in Auschwitz reinforced what was 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. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it. At one point, Frankl writes that the person is “may remain brave, dignified and unselfish, or when the bitter fight for self preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal”. He concedes that only a few prisoners of the Nazis were able to do the former, “but even one such example is sufficient proof that man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate.”
Finally, Frankl’s most enduring insight, one that I have called on often in my own life and in countless counselling situations: forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.
Man’s Search For Meaning is available here.
The Incisal Edge 
