the art of leading

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Do you need the courage to keep living? Do you feel that life is cruel and that you can’t deal with the suffering it throws at you? If so, you need a reality check of sorts. You need to find meaning in your life, and that’s what this book is about.

Man’s Search for Meaning covers essentially one topic: how people, even under the most dreary circumstances, can look for and find a reason to keep living. Its author, the psychiatrist Victor Frankl, was a Holocaust survivor and the father of logotherapy. Therefore, he roughly divided the book into two parts: his experience as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp, and an explanation of how his theories helped him survive that experience.

In the first part, Frankl recalls detailed events of everyday life in the camps. He also includes stories, some of success and others of failure, about other prisoners who were also anxiously looking for a reason to live. What differentiates this from other narrations of life in concentration camps is that Frankl’s is much more in tune with a psychiatrist’s point of view. The content of the second part of the book is more focused on Frankl’s theories and the development of logotherapy. Logotherapy was born, essentially, out of his own experiences in the camps. Even when this second part has what may be seen as more “scientific” or “psychological” explanations, it is masterfully written so that anyone outside the fields of psychology and psychiatry can understand it and extract value from it.

The book is full of valuable information, but there are three main points that can be taken from it:

1. The process an inmate goes through: shock, apathy, and depersonalization;
2. There only two kinds of people: decent and indecent;
3. Even in severe suffering, human beings have the choice to find some reason to live.

That last point is definitely the most important one. As long as one has faith that the future holds at least one positive thing, you can keep living. Once one loses that faith, death is certain, as there is no reason to withstand brutal suffering like the one that prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp did.

A couple of quotations from the book capture the essence of its message:

“We have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.”

“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

I use any opportunity I have to recommend this book to everyone. This book has been one of the most important reading experiences of my life. At least, it has produced the most impact on my point of view of what it means to be human, and what that human ‘experience’ should be like. It has given me the courage to find many reasons to live and excel as a human being. After all, if Auschwitz inmates can, why can’t anyone?

Categories : Books //