Man’s Search for Meaning Themes

According to Frankl, the will to meaning is the motivating force in any person’s life—in other words, the need for some kind of meaning in one’s actions and existence is at the core of one’s psychology. The first section of the book is a testament to this belief. Frankl writes from his own horrific experience as a prisoner in four different Nazi concentration camps over the course of three years, and he uses his observations…

While meaning can be found through love and work, Frankl focuses most strongly on how to find meaning through suffering. He describes in detail the many injustices he and his fellow inmates were made to endure in the Nazi concentration camps: from walking miles through the snow with bare feet, to being made to ride in train carts surrounded by their own excrement. Most men gave up in the face of this suffering, but those…

Although much of Frankl’s book is focused on his time in concentration camps, Man’s Search for Meaning is fundamentally about logotherapy. Logotherapy is a school of psychology—developed by Frankl himself—that is centered around helping people find meaning in life. Logotherapy is known as the “Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy,” after Freud’s and Adler’s respective theories. Unlike Freud’s psychoanalysis and Adler’s individual psychology, logotherapy claims that the search for existential meaning is the major motivating…