Book Notes: Man’s Search for Meaning

“Mans Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl is a profound book that delves into the author’s experiences in Nazi concentration camps and presents his psychological approach, known as logotherapy.

What is Logotheraphy?

Frankl states that many mental struggles like depression or alcoholism can be solved by giving a person a meaning. If a person has a meaning, he can overcome even the most difficult situations. As stated in the book:

As evidenced by tests and statistics, 90 percent of the alcoholics studied had suffered from an abysmal feeling of meaninglessness. Of the drug addicts studied by Stanley Krippner, 100 percent believed that “things seemed meaningless.”

Logotherapy is an approach to psychotherapy that focuses on this aspect. It’s about finding your own meaning to life as a solution to mental suffering like depression or alcoholism.

Key Learnings:

1. ⭐ Life Has Meaning Under All Circumstances: Frankl’s primary lesson is that life has meaning, even in the most miserable of circumstances. He emphasizes that one’s purpose in life is not a static thing but a dynamic and ever-evolving pursuit.
2. Suffering Can Be Meaningful: Frankl argues that while suffering is an inevitable part of life, it can also be a source of meaning. He suggests that how we deal with suffering and what we learn from it can give our lives a deeper sense of purpose.
3. Freedom of Choice: Frankl’s message is that forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.
4. How to Find Meaning: Frankl identifies three sources of life’s meaning: first, through engaging in meaningful work or creative endeavors; second, by experiencing love and forming deep connections with others; and third, by demonstrating courage and resilience in the face of suffering. He emphasizes that suffering itself is inherently meaningless; it gains significance through our reactions and the attitudes we adopt towards it. Thus, finding meaning in life can involve creating, loving, or courageously enduring hardships.
5. Don’t Aim at Success or Happiness: Frankl offers that success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must happen and it only happens as a result of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.

Favorite Quotes:

1. Depression, aggression, addiction—are due to what is called in logotherapy “the existential vacuum,” a feeling of emptiness and meaninglessness.
2. Frankl is fond of quoting Nietzsche, “He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.”
3. A man’s concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.
4. Not every conflict is necessarily neurotic; some amount of conflict is normal and healthy.
5. There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one’s life.
6. Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being.
7. What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him? “No, thank you,” he will think. “Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy.”