Man's Search for Meaning
Viktor Frankl
Logotherapy
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| A Personal Response | ||||||
| After reading "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl there were a few things that I realized. The first was my own opinion of the Holocaust and the Nazi Concentration Camps. Before this book I only saw the perspective from a historic point of view with statistics and information regarding total deaths an such. This book gave me a more in depth look at the terror of the Holocaust which movies like Schindler's List tried to capture. Being that he experienced it all, it assured me that this was the real things that occured during this time. One thing that struck as surprising was the way many of the Jews treated each other. Although most of them relied on each other there were some who were only in it for themselves called Capos who were prisoners who acted like trustees, and ratted out there fellow prisoners and Jews for special privileges. It surprised me to see even other Jews as the murderers where before I only saw them as the victims. Another aspect that I found both interesting and moving was when Frankl discussed what happened during the liberation of the prisoners at the end of the war. I knew that they must have felt some sort of post traumatic stress that affected them emotionally and spiritually but it seems a little more than that. Frankl said that "the crowning experience of all, for the homecoming man, is the wonderful feeling that, after all he has suffered there is nothing he need fear anymore". To me this seems to be some sort of jubilant victory which these prisoners have conquered and feel empowered because of it. It goes along the lines of the saying "whatever doesn't kill you, makes you stronger". I was moved that he thought of his experience in this way and made me measure my own challenges and sufferings in my life and they are essentially dwarfed compared to his. It did however help me to see the silver lining in suffering because it would provide me with experience and make me stronger for more challenges to come. Although I loved when he incorporated his thoughts with the experiences at the Concentration Camp, I continuely kept getting confused with the lego therapy. I was interersted when he would talk about the power of love and the meaning of life, but when he used such words as Noogenic, it became a little hard to follow. Also he would give a term such as Existential Frustration and not necessarily define it but give a story that describes it, which I thought was a bit confusing at times. Despite these difficulties I overall found the book quite interesting because it made me question my own reactions to teh sufferings I face and provides an original answer to the universal question: Why are we here? | ||||||
| For Further Study on... Man's Search for Meaning Viktor Frankl Logotherapy |
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