Survival In Man's Search For Meaning

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Man’s Search for Meaning was written by Viktor E. Frankl, a survivor of the Holocaust, who spent several years as a prisoner in the Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps in Southern Poland and Germany. Frankl discusses his quest to find meaning and hope in the midst of human cruelty and suffering. Because of this traumatic life experience where Frankl both experienced and witnessed horror, one of the central themes of Frankl’s book is the theme of survival. Man’s Search for Meaning focuses on how his time spent under the rule of the Nazi’s showed him the human ability to endure and survive against all odds. He demonstrates the resilience of the human spirit, even in the worst possible circumstances.
Frankel, with his psychiatric background, offers a unique perspective of his time in the Nazi concentration camps. He uses himself as a sociological experiment of sorts while enduring cruelties most cannot begin to imagine. He seems to minimize in a sense his horrific suffering, but is most compassionate about the suffering of his fellow prisoners. As an innately caring man, one can see how he was torn when it came to bettering his situation versus helping those in equal need around him. While physically surviving a concentration camp is partially due to luck …show more content…
This part of the story is told from Frankel’s perspective. “How was everyday life in a concentration camp reflected in the mind of the average prisoner?” (p. 21) In part one of the book; this is the main question Frankl tries to answer. He gives examples of some of his fellow prisoners who found hope as well as the will to keep going, even under the awful conditions: all of which, for Frankl, demonstrates the importance of what has become known as meaning making. In this attempt to dehumanize the prisoners, their role as “number” and less of individual was beginning. Frankel himself was not a physician at this point, but number 119,104 (p
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