Man's Search for Meaning

About the book

Part memoir of Frankl's years in Nazi concentration camps and part introduction to logotherapy, the school of psychotherapy he founded. Its central claim is that the primary human drive is not pleasure or power but the search for meaning, and that meaning can be found even in suffering you cannot avoid.

About the author

Viktor Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who founded logotherapy.

Key ideas

• The last freedom no one can take is your choice of how to respond to what you cannot change.
• The deepest human drive is meaning, not pleasure or power. That idea is the basis of logotherapy.
• Meaning shows up in three places: in work, in love, and in the stance you take toward unavoidable suffering.
• A person with a reason to live can endure almost any hardship. Losing that reason is what breaks people.

My take

Hard to write anything glib about this one. The idea that the last freedom is choosing your response to what you cannot change is something you half-know already, until someone who survived the camps says it and it carries real weight. The logotherapy half is lighter, but the memoir half stays with you.