Man's Search for Meaning
Viennese psychiatrist Viktor Frankl survived Auschwitz, Dachau, and two other Nazi camps, and in the first half of this short book he describes daily life inside them with clinical precision, attending to small acts of kindness and self-betrayal as carefully as to starvation and selection. In the second half he lays out logotherapy, the school of psychotherapy he developed afterward, which argues that even in extremity a human being retains the freedom to choose a stance toward suffering. The book has sold in the tens of millions of copies precisely because it refuses easy consolation while insisting that meaning remains available at the edge of what any person should have to bear.
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What you might want to know about Man's Search for Meaning
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
An Austrian psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz and three other camps writes about how prisoners stayed psychologically alive, then lays out the logotherapy framework he built on the idea that meaning, not pleasure, drives a life.
Yes. Man's Search for Meaning is Viktor Frankl's nonfiction account of surviving four Nazi concentration camps and the psychological framework (logotherapy) he developed from the experience. Frankl was a practicing psychiatrist.
Man's Search for Meaning draws on existentialism, Jewish thought, and Frankl's own observations rather than promoting a specific religion. The argument is that finding meaning in suffering is universal across belief traditions.
Man's Search for Meaning was written by Viktor Frankl, published in 1946 by Paidos.
Man's Search for Meaning is 192 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Man's Search for Meaning takes most readers 3 to 4 hours to finish.
Man's Search for Meaning is a standalone novel by Viktor Frankl, not part of a series.
Man's Search for Meaning is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
