The will to meaning, Frankl explains, is a drive which all humans share: the need to make sense of one's personal situation, to discover or create a purpose for living, a raison d'etre. .
Everyone wants a reason to keep hope alive and keep going. Frankl shows how to find it or create it. His life and work stand as powerful evidence for this innate human necessity: imprisoned by the Nazis, threatened by death and disease for months on end, he nonetheless found the purpose and sense of direction to create Man's Search for Meaning, his most influential work. In his trademark no nonsense, down-to-earth style, he explains how anyone even someone who is terminally ill can not only find meaning in his or her life but also make a valuable contribution to society.
One of my favorite books is Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. Frankl was a Jewish psychologist who was placed in a concentration camp by the Nazis in World War II. He survived the war, and wrote Man's Search for Meaning as a reflection on his experiences and what he had learned.
The first part of the book is a description of the camps: the death, the torture, the starvation, the way that people lost hope in life and died, and the ways the prisoners turned on each other in the dog-eat-dog struggle to survive.
The second part of the book is a reflection on what Frankl learned. While Freud would say that the most basic motivation for human beings is the desire for pleasure, and Nietzche would say that it is the desire for power, Frankl believes that, more than anything else, we need to see a meaning in our lives. Whether the meaning is found in doing a job, or in family, or in religious devotions, Frankl believes that all human beings need to feel some meaning, and that the lack of meaning will lead to self-destructive behaviors.
When he was taken to the prison camp, the Gestapo confiscated and destroyed the manuscript of his first book, which contained some ground-breaking psychological insights.
