Man's Search for Meaning

Viktor E Frankl is a World War II concentration camp survivor. His book Man’s Search of Meaning details his experiences living in a concentration camp and techniques he used to get through this ordeal in which countless people were unable. Not only were the concentration camp residents being killed by the Nazis, but many also took their own lives, having given up on the life that fate had dealt them. Frankl discusses his techniques of surviving his ordeal which he calls logotherapy. At the foundation of this idea of logotherapy is the idea that everything can be taken away from someone except his thoughts and inner mind. This inner self carried Frankl through one of history’s greatest atrocities in modern times.

The first part of this book entails his time in the concentration camp. It begins with him pulling up to the camp on a train. After riding on the train for days he and all the other cramped in prisoners exited the train all covered in filth and dirt. They were then separated into two groups, and his group was led away to an area in which they were stripped of everything they had. Not only their possessions and their clothing were taken, but they were completely shaved from head to toe. This was when he was confronted with the first of three psychological reactions that he describes in his book. The first psychological reaction he states as the shock of initial admission to the camp. The second of these psychological reactions he describes as apathy of the camp life and all the misery it entailed. The only thing one values is what help him and his friends survive. He noticed this reaction one day as he was eating a bowl of soup and a dead body was laying just on the other side of a window next to him. The body’s eyes were still open and seemed to be staring at him. He had no feelings about the body, as at this point, death seemed common place and lost its dark stigma in which most people in this situation would have felt. The last...