Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

Not every book is worth mentioning and not every author is worth quoting, but Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Emile Frankl is a rare exception to both rules. Everyone should read his classic psychiatric text “Man's Search for Meaning.”  

Frankl begins this narrative with a moving personal account of a daily life in Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps, where he was imprisoned for approximately five years.  Despite the horrific conditions and daily struggle to survive, Frankl concentrated on philosophical observations of prison life, in which he found transcendence and reasons to continue living and refining one's attitude.

The second part of the book is dedicated to Frankl’s “life’s work” - psychotherapeutic method called "Logotherapy”.  Frankl developed "Logotherapy” as a result of his experiences in the Nazi camps and describes it as  a will to meaning as opposed to Adler's Nietzschean doctrine of will to power or Freud's will to pleasure. 

Frankl created Logotherapy as a way to engage people in perpetual and deliberate confrontation of existence.  In “Man's Search for Meaning,” Frankl presents his readers with an opportunity for choice to make life meaningful. When one’s life has no meaning, Frankls demonstrates that it becomes empty and leads to a certain "existential vacuum" - a state of inertia, the biggest symptom of which is boredom. 

In Frankl's view, our modern social situation helps foster boredom, which we fill with food, activities, work, sports, drugs, violence, but in the end remain unfulfilled.  His explanation for this existential vacuum is a decline in our animal instincts and traditions, such as religion, responsibility, family, and community and an increase in passive values such as conformity, pleasure seeking, obeying orders, and otherwise engaging in pursuits that are essentially unsatisfying.

Frankl further argues that our lack of meaning and responsibility leads to depression, aggression, addiction, and empty sexual promiscuity. As such, the goal of Logotherapy is to give people a perception of living for a higher purpose and assuming responsibility for one’s actions.  Frankl's imperative cannons of Logotherapy can by summed up as follows: 

On Choosing One's Attitude

“Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”

On Committing to Values and Goals

"Logotherapy...considers man as a being whose main concern consists in fulfilling a meaning and in actualizing values, rather than in the mere gratification and satisfaction of drives and instincts."

"What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him."

On Love

"Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true." 

On Suffering

"But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer." 

"In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice." 

"For what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn one’s predicament into a human achievement. “

On Happiness

"Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue." 

On Discovering the Meaning of Life

"The meaning of our existence is not invented by ourselves, but rather detected."


"What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general, but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment."

"We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by doing a deed; (2) by experiencing a value; and (3) by suffering."

"It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual." 

On Fulfilling One's Task

"A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how."

“Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated, thus, everyone's task is unique as his specific opportunity to implement it.”

On Responsibility

"Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”

"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves." 

"By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. I have termed this constitutive characteristic "the self-transcendence of human existence." It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself--be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself--by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love--the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence." 

Source: Man’s Search for Menaing by Victor Emil Frankl