Book review: Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning

Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning is a serious book, as serious as it gets. The first half, or rather the first 60%, is a narration of the author's stay in the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and Dachau towards the end of World War II. A man of weak heart, I have never been the sort to go out exploring reads related to that absolute awful horror in human history, but I wasn't really expecting the gross brutalities in the book, so it was a bit of a misunderstanding on my part. Having already begun the audiobook though, it felt like it would be a disrespect to the sufferings if I instead turned it off, so on I went, at 3x the pace hoping to reach the philosophical part of the book as soon as possible.

The narrative part of the book is exactly what one would expect, there's no point in elucidating too much. One thing I'll add though: it speaks greatly to the strength of the human mind and body, and the absolute limits of the sense of self. There is nobody and no one who can take away your lived life, your memories and experiences, and who can make you make your individual choices. To choose a certain way at every moment in time, regardless of what may be going around in the world, is always yours. Even the prisoners at concentration camps, they all reacted to their circumstances differently, some chose to end their lives, miserable and the lowest as it could have gotten, and some chose to live up to the absolute final moment their circumstances would let them.

The second part of the book is a extensive proposition of the author's new school of psychotherapy, which he calls logotherapy, where the driving force is one's responsibility towards one's self to find the meaning of life, to decide upon it and act on the goals. It was inspiring and motivating,  and I got a good sense of why the book was recommended to me, and what part Frankl's recommendations might play in the way I shape my goals and strategies.

This is a solid 10/10 book, with the slight disclaimer the first part of the book is about the trauma suffered in the worst of Nazi concentration camps.

I'm glad I 'read' the book by listening, it's made me a better person.