"Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor E. Frankl
One word review: Edifying!
Did you know?
The author was a prisoner in one of the Word War II concentration camps and survived.
Man's Search For Meaning is a psychology book that is quite small with just about 150 pages. It has two parts: the first part describes the debilitating experiences of the author while he was at the concentration camp and the second part delineates the field of study which the author had invented.
Having read the works of Sigmund Freud and Carl G. Jung, I approached the field of psychology with much awe and seriousness. But in Man's Search For Meaning, the author has deciphered the basic nature of human psychology in the most simplest means. In the first part of the book, the mere depiction of excruciating events and concentration camp tribulations is presented to you without any bowdlerization. Reading the first part of the book made me more grateful to the life I possess now.
Coming to the second part, the author has recapitulated his pragmatic and empirical lessons that he had learned during the period he spent in the concentration camp. And then he presents his discovery, a new field of study named Logotherapy. With several case studies, logothreapy is given a detailed overview about the subject in this part.
Life in a concentration camp tore open the human soul and exposed its depths. Is it surprising that in those depths we again found only human qualities which in their very nature were a mixture of good and evil?
Reading this book will definitely teach you many new lessons of life.
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