|
| Man's Search for Meaning | 
 enlarge | Author: Viktor E. Frankl
Publisher: Beacon Press
Category: Book
List Price: $6.99
Buy New: $2.86
You Save: $4.13 (59%)
New (40) Used (39) Collectible (1) from $2.86
Avg. Customer Rating:  75 reviews
Sales Rank: 313
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 165
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.1
Dimensions (in): 6.6 x 4.1 x 0.6
ISBN: 080701429X
Dewey Decimal Number: 302
EAN: 9780807014295
ASIN: 080701429X
Publication Date: June 14, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New and Factory Sealed Item Fast Shipping
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl's memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Between 1942 and 1945 Frankl labored in four different camps, including Auschwitz, while his parents, brother, and pregnant wife perished. Based on his own experience and the experiences of those he treated in his practice, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. Frankl's theory?known as logotherapy, from the Greek word logos ("meaning")?holds that our primary drive in life is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but the discovery and pursuit of what we personally find meaningful.
At the time of Frankl's death in 1997, Man's Search for Meaning had sold more than 10 million copies in twenty-four languages. A 1991 reader survey by the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club that asked readers to name a "book that made a difference in your life" found Man's Search for Meaning among the ten most influential books in America.
Born in Vienna in 1905 Viktor E. Frankl earned an M.D. and a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna. He published more than thirty books on theoretical and clinical psychology and served as a visiting professor and lecturer at Harvard, Stanford, and elsewhere. In 1977 a fellow survivor, Joseph Fabry, founded the Viktor Frankl Institute of Logotherapy. Frankl died in 1997.
Harold S. Kushner is rabbi emeritus at Temple Israel in Natick, Massachusetts, and the author of several best-selling books, including When Bad Things Happen to Good People.
William J. Winslade is a philosopher, lawyer, and psychoanalyst at the University of Texas Medical School in Galveston.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 70 more reviews...
A powerful book that can reshape how you think March 4, 2007
86 out of 91 found this review helpful
Dr. Frankl's book is divided into two parts. In the first part, he eloquently describes how he survived a Nazi concentration camp during World War Two. He took this terrible "opportunity" to learn how people survive crises and deprivation and continuously life-threatening horror. This section will be valuable to anyone, and especially to those of us who have survived tragedy and trauma of any kind (in other words, just about anyone again). The bottom line beyond survival is not about learning to collaborate or being physically strong or not "rocking the boat," although those can be factors; the main road to survival a horror is through holding onto core beliefs and values, and an image of yourself in a better future, toward which you strive.
The second part of the book describes the philosophy of life and the existential theory of psychology that Dr. Frankl derived from his experiences. I am a practicing clinical psychologist and, while Dr. Frankl probably would not label my brand of psychotherapy as his "logotherapy," I credit this book as providing me with a framework that had been missing in my work. Through my education, I learned many techniques that were useful to me, and I read about many theories of psychology and psychotherapy that were interesting, but I ended up with a set of tools but no toolbox to put them in. "Man's Search for Meaning" gave me the toolbox, or the framework that tied everything else together. Read it; it will challenge you and probably change you.
Fascinating and thought provoking September 7, 2006
42 out of 46 found this review helpful
There is something to be said of a person who can go through a horrific journey such as the atrocities of Auschwitz and recall it with such clarity in order to help others. I was completely emotionally overwhelmed by the first half of the book-which is a narrative of what he experienced and fascinated with the next half which is an explanation of logotherapy.
This is not an overly long or hard book to read in spite of some of the subject matter. My version was a thin paperback that I finished in a few days. It took me longer to fully appreciate because I hung onto each page and felt a responsibility to make sure I understood his journey and how he came to his conclusions.
I recommend this book for anyone.
A new approach to life April 1, 2007
22 out of 23 found this review helpful
This book is a true classic in that it speaks to every generation. Even though it was written in the immediate post-Holocaust period and was one of the first personal accounts of the Nazi death camps, Frankl's brief account has new meaning today. In today's world, many people are constantly pursuing pleasure in the form of wealth, success, or sexual fulfillment. Although there is nothing intrinsically wrong with these, Frankl's point is that life must have meaning. A person can inject meaning into even the most degraded life conditions by clinging to his values. But without meaning, life can drag on, seemingly without end. The "purpose-driven life" is the only life that leads to true fulfillment.
OUTSTANDING! March 20, 2007
18 out of 25 found this review helpful
The author was sent to Auschwitz. After a while, disgust, horror and pity went numb; you could not feel them anymore. Apathy was the second stage: a "protective shell" to preserve one's life. Under-nourishment, absence of sexual urge came third. Thus, he began to reconstruct the manuscript he lost in the disinfection chamber. People with intellectually rich life were able to retreat "within," away from their terrible surroundings. Love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Salvation of man through love and in love (p. 57) He answered YES to the question of the ultimate purpose of existence (p. 60). Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even under tremendous stress. Outside influences are not the only cause of a person's behavior. Only the men who allowed their inner hold on their moral and spiritual selves to subside, eventually fell victim to the camp's degenerating influence (p. 90). Any prisoner who lost faith in the future was doomed: to let go of the spiritual hold on life, caused one to die. Frankl's views truly turn Maslow's hierarchy upside down (this suggestion of mine used to send my former fiancee into fits of rage, who loved Maslow's view because it "justified" her lack of control in her life and her innate inability to grow spiritually and mentally).
"He who has a 'why' to live for can bear with almost any 'how'."--Nietzsche February 20, 2007
17 out of 18 found this review helpful
This book was read many years ago at a time when this reviewer felt nearly crushed under the weight of family and personal troubles. It is not light and diverting reading; indeed, in part it is terrifying. Yet the memory of it has persisted across all these years.
A prominent psychiatrist in pre-World War II Vienna, Doctor Frankl found himself suddenly stripped of all money, possessions, position, respect, and ultimately, his family--including his pregnant and beloved wife. After confinement in some of the smaller concentration camps, he ultimately arrived at Auschwitz--the lowest circle of the man-made Hell that was the system of concentration and extermination camps (in German, 'Konzentrationslager' and 'Vernichtungslager'). There, his medical skills were not employed until nearly the end of the war. Instead, he was employed at hard labor just like the rest of the men in his prison block who were marched every day to their work site before dawn and marched back late at night.
The most striking thing about Frankl's account of his imprisonment (to me at least) was not the backbreaking work, the all-pervading fear, nor even the constant, maddening hunger; but the unrelenting degradation of the prisoners in order to get them to accept the Nazi's judgment of them as sub-human. For example, when carrying heavy tanks filled with human sewage for disposal, almost inevitably some would splash prisoners full in the face. Any move to wipe one's face, or even show instinctive grimaces of disgust would be punished by the Capos (trusted prisoners, chosen mostly for their brutality) with a prompt beating from a club or whip. Because of this, the normal reactions of prisoners to being befouled were soon suppressed. Every attempt possible was made to degrade the prisoners by the (frequently delighted) SS guards and the Capos. Subjected to this treatment, some prisoners gave up hope and committed suicide by running into the inner electric fence that encircled the camp. Others would lie motionless in their bunks in their own waste--ignoring pleas to get up from fellow prisoners, and blows from guards alike--smoking up all of the cigarettes they might have been saving for barter.
Faced with this, Frankl combated this potential demoralization in himself and others by leading the prisoners back to their own humanity. "Every freedom may be taken away from a man but one; the freedom to choose what attitude he will take towards his conditions." Despite every attempt to rob them of human dignity, prisoners still had a choice. Would they take an attitude of 'I die tomorrow; you die today' and behave as starving beasts--stealing other prisoner's food, for example; or would they show that they were neither animals nor things, but human beings? Some Amazon reviews of an earlier edition of this book seemed to imply that Frankl had judged those who despaired and died to be weak, or that he was somehow 'better' than they for having survived. Those reviewers can only have done this by forgetting what they had read. Frankl instead writes with sorrow that "the best of us did not survive", warmly remembering comrades who ended their days offering comfort and sometimes their last bit of bread to fellow prisoners.
We live in an age when the feeling that one's life is meaningless is rampant even compared to the recent past. Many compensate by drowning themselves in their career; working fourteen hour days, always gabbing into their cell phone, and carrying their laptop everywhere so they can do some work even in what would be an idle moment. Others escape into escapist and/or authoritarian religion, gladly handing over the miserable burden of their freedom and the need to find meaning to someone else. (Frankl--an observant Jew throughout his life--was not anti-religious I should point out. He writes that a therapist's attempts to debunk genuine religious or spiritual views are an unethical attempt to force the therapist's views on a client.) Still others use alcohol and/or drugs (including perfectly legal drugs)as a response to a sense of life's meaninglessness or futility.
Frankl writes that our struggle--even our despair--over finding meaning in our lives is not an psychiatric illness, or even a precursor to one. Potential readers of this book will not find "The Meaning of Life". What they will find is the story of a man who was compelled to develop the tools to find his own meaning, his 'why'--at a time when his life depended on it in a way seldom seen in life and history. Hopefully, these tools will benefit others as they have benefited me. As someone wrote of Ralph Waldo Emerson, "He did not try to lead others to himself, but to themselves."
|
|
|
Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| |
