My neighbor tends to put things out on the curb that she doesn’t want, for people to pick up. I picked this book out of a box one afternoon a few weeks ago. I recognized it, vaguely, and thought that for some reason it was something I should read. For some reason, I read it this last weekend and was blown away.
Viktor Frankl was 37, a prominent Austrian Psychiatrist with extensive work in suicide prevention, and was recently married when he was taken to a concentration camp at Theresienstadt in 1942. For the next three years, until liberation, he spent time at four camps, including Auschwitz. “Man’s Search for Meaning”, written in 1946, is his brief account of life in the camps. It is extraordinary in its detail and clear-headedness, and focuses on the psychological impacts of the camp conditions and the question of how to find meaning in suffering.
Frankl’s text, in my reading, is also strikingly Buddhist in its themes, though Frankl likely had little if any exposure to Buddhist thought, at least not at the time of the writing. In his deep observation of suffering, he is quite Buddhist.
In the preface to the 1984 edition (Frankl died in 1997, at age 92), Frank said that he wrote his account ”... to convey to the reader by way of concrete example that life holds a potential meaning under any conditions, even the most miserable ones.”
“Success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.”