This book served as my introduction to the Logos therapy of Viktor Frankl. I was pleased to see Frankl's abstract theories put into practical application. The authors explaination of the existential void was concise. I highly recommend this book for any counselors, therapists, or others interested in mental health who realize that therapy is moving beyond the couch and into the realm of advocacy.

This book is a spiritual journey of Edith Weisskopf-Joelson. Edith's family is Jewish, but the topic of religion is a taboo for her family.

As time goes on, she experiences more and more hatred and predjudice for being Jewish, that she feels that she can't have a life in europe. The year is 1937, and she decides to flee Europe.

Edith travels to America and becomes a well-known psychologist at Purdue University. She finds joy and an affectionate relationship in her married life with Mr.Joelson. But she becomes more and more drawn to the taboo of her childhood, and that is her religious feelings.

She begins to have more and more religious dreams and visions until she is unable to function in society. A priest at the college that she's teaching at helps committ her to a psychiatric hospital.

Edith experiences being a psychiatric patient. Unbenownst to her, one of her old students is interning at the hospital where she is a patient. He helps her to come to terms with her religious feelings and helps her believe that she can share the beauty of these experiences as a teacher outside of the hospital.

While Edith is a patient in the hospital, she receives an invitation from the University of Georgia to be a visiting professor and teach Clinical Psychology. She becomes a very controversial and beloved professor such that there is a waiting list to take her classes.

Edith feels that there are "strangers" and "natives". Strangers are people that have a strong desire to love someone that that person becomes central part of their existence in the world. They are able to transform a drab existence into a something of beauty by the one that they love. Material success isn't so important to them. Strangers can help natives discover love.

Henry Charrier was the man who made the first move to change things in my mind, so in my life with his book "Butterfly". Then, Frankl came up just to make me jump into a deep anxiety and depression but then took me out into a calm place brightened by sunlight inwhich i could see my past and self-created future...

This book will not give you a simple answer for the question above. It will ask you other more, indeed.

In spite of this, it will also show you how you could find the answers... by yourself.

I read this book the first time in junior high school (I found it accidentally), a period in which, you know, we all are full of questions about life, ourselves and so on. It helped me to make many things and thoughts clearer.

From then, I've read it at least five times more: Life always has questions, and you need to know how to answer them.

This book and Frankl's other popular book, "Man's search for meaning" offer a great deal of overlap. Yet I fond both extrememlty interesting and helpful. Frankl posits that we all have an innate tendency to mental/spiritual health which he calls the will to meaning. This is similar to the body's hedency to heal after any physical assault. He explains that good counselling focusses the will to meaning, or removes blocks which are preventing it from being expressed. Frankl's experiences in a NAZI death camp show how focussing on personal meaning and what little freedom of choice one does have, can enable mental health to survive even under the most pathogenic of circumstances.

An American doctor once asked Viktor Frankl to explain the difference between conventional psychoanalysis and logotherapy. Before answering, Frankl asked the doctor for his definition of psychoanalysis. The man said, "During psychoanalysis, the patient must lie down on a couch and tell you things which sometimes are very disagreeable to tell." Frankl immediately replied by saying: "Now, in logotherapy the patient may remain sitting erect but he must hear things which sometimes are very disagreeable to hear." By this he meant that in logotherapy the patient is actually confronted with and reoriented toward the MEANING of his life. The role of the therapist, then, is to help the patient discover a purposefulness in his life. Frankl's theory is that man's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a "secondary rationalization" of instinctual drives. Whereas Freudian psychoanalysis focuses on the "will to pleasure" and Adlerian psychology focuses on the "will to power" it can be said that Frankl's logotherapy focuses on the "will to meaning." Does man give in to to conditions or stand up to them? According to Frankl, the strength of a person's sense of meaning, responsibility, and purpose is the greatest determining factor in how that question will be answered. He believed that "man is ultimately self-determining" and as such, "does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment."

The first (and largest) section of this book is the searing autobiographical account of the author's experience as a longtime prisoner in a concentration camp. These camps claimed the lives of his father, mother, brother, and wife. Frankl's survival and the subsequent miracle of this book are a testimony to man's capacity to rise above his outward fate. As Gordon W. Allport states in the preface, "A psychiatrist who personally has faced such extremity is a psychiatrist worth listening to."

I agree, and highly reccommend this book. As the sub-title says, it is an "introduction" to logotherapy, and anyone who wants to go deeper into the principles and practical application of Frankl's existential psychiatry should go to his excellent "The Doctor And The Soul".

Frankl was fond of quoting Nietzsche's dictum..."He who has a WHY to live can bear with almost any HOW."

The first section of this book (which makes up over half of the text) consist of Victor Frankl's account of his experiences in the concentration camp. This section seems unique among the Holocaust accounts that I've seen and read because Dr. Frankl approaches the topic from a psychological perspective. He discusses the ways in which the different prisoners react to their (note: men and women were seperated at the camps, so Frankl is mainly disscussing his experiences with the men in Auschwitz) imprissonment. He writes about the psychological effects of being completely dehumanized; of losing even your name, and becoming simply a number. Also he disscusses the effects of not being able to contact loved ones, or even know is they are still living. Another issue that Dr. Frankl talks about in this book is the idea that none of the prisoners of the concentration camp had an idea as to when there imprissonment would end (if ever). Thus, they were faced with the thought of living the rest of their lives as workers at the camps. Dr. Frankl discusses how people can find meaning to life in these conditions. He also describes how finding meaning in life, or a reason to live, was extraordinarilly important to surviving the camp.

One of the most interesting, and disturbing, issues in the book was the idea of the Capo. These were were people put in charge of their fellow prisoners, in order to keep them in line. Dr. Frankl describes these people as, often, being more harsh than the actual guards. This seems to be a disturbing lesson in the abuse of power. This also goes along with Dr. Frankl's discussion of how the camps brought out the true personality of the people within it (after all the social trapping had been stripped away): The cretins, the saints, and all of those in between.

The second half of the book is made up of two sections "Logotherapy in a Nutshell," and "The Case for Tragic Optimsism." These two sections basically describe Dr. Frankl's theory on as to how to conduct therapy (Logotherapy). The idea behind this therapy is that man is driven by his search for a meaning in life. This differs from the psychoanalysis perspective (driven, at this time, by the ideas of Sigmund Freud) in that the psychoanalytic school believed that humans were driven by their unconscious desires. For Frankl, the need for meaning seems to outway the unconscious. In fact, he goes into detail about the negative effects that the abscence of meaning, or what he calls the "existential Vacuum," has on people. To illustrate many ideas, he often uses his experiences in the concentration camps, as well as various cases for treatment (which help to solidify his view of life, and therapy).

I would recomend this book to almost anybody. I feel that it's interesting, and worthwhile. I would especially recomend this to people interested in psychology, as well as those who wish to learn something about the experiences within the concentration camps.

Dr. Frankl's book is divided into two parts. In the first part, he eloquently describes how he survived a Nazi concentration camp. He took this horrible "opportunity" to learn how people survive crises and deprivation and horror. This section will be valuable to anyone, and especially to those of us who have survived tragedy and trauma of any kind (in other words, just about anyone again).

The second part of the book describes the philosophy of life and the existential theory of psychology that Dr. Frankl derived from his experiences. I am a practicing clinical psychologist and, while Dr. Frankl probably would not label my brand of psychotherapy as his logotherapy, I credit this book as providing me with a framework that had been missing in my work. Through my education, I learned many techniques that were useful to me, and I read about many theories of psychology and psychotherapy that were interesting, but I ended up with a set of tools but no toolbox to put them in. "Man's Search for Meaning" gave me the toolbox, or the framework that tied everything else together. Read it; it will challenge you and probably change you.

This is a book about finding meaning in life. The book makes a very clear distinction between having a successful life and having a meaningful life. Frankl uses many good examples to illustrate the difference between the two. He cites Harvard graduates, many of whom lead successful lives yet at the same time are overpowered by a sense of futility. Although they have achieved financial and social success, their lives are lacking genuine fulfillment.

The second and third chapters of the book are slightly confusing. The second chapter is a critique of pan-determinism. Although many of his arguments seem compelling, unfortunately he does not explain the definition of pan-determinism so a lot of the chapter was unintelligible. The third chapter is a critique of pure encounter, and suffers from the same problems as the second.

The book addresses a number of interesting issues. The books asks "How can life have meaning when human existence is such a temporary affair?" The book also points out that in an increasingly affluent society, people have more time and money to spend but nothing meaningful on which to spend it. The part of the book I enjoyed most was this quote from Ludwig von Bertalanffy

"The expanding economy of the 'affluent society' could not subsist without such manipulation. Only by manipulating humans ever more into Skinnerian rats, robots, buying automata, homeostatically adjusted conformers and opportunists can this great society follow its progress toward ever increasing gross national product."

The above quote illustrates how we have been duped into believing that materialism is the path to meaning and happiness in life. However, this is not the truth but merely an illusion fed to us by clever manipulators.

The main thing I disliked about the book is its extensive use of philosophical and psychological jargon. From the style of the prose, I don't think the book was targeted at a general audience.

The final chapter discusses paradoxical intention and dereflection. Paradoxical intention is a process by which "the patient is encouraged to do, or to wish to happen, the very thing he fears". For example, instead of trying to stave off anxiety, Frankl suggests to his patient that he embraces anxiety and attempts to heighten the sensation, thereby making it subside. Dereflection appears to be another form of paradoxical intention targeted at curing sexual ailments.

Ultimately, the book concludes that each person must find his own meaning in life. However, in a slight twist the author also demonstrates that in some cases the harder you strive for something, the more it eludes you. The more you search for happiness, the more it slips from your grasp. I thoroughly recommend this book for anyone who is facing a crisis of meaning. It certainly will not unlock the key to the meaning of life but it certainly will provoke thought and perhaps point you in the right direction.

Famed psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl returns to the humanism that made Man's Search for Meaning a bestseller around the world. In these selected essays Dr. Frankl illustrates the vital importance of using a wide range of subjects -- including sex, morality, modern literature, competitive althletics and philosophy -- he raises a lone voice against the pseudo-humanism that has invaded popular psychology and psychoanalysis. By exploring mankind's remarkable qualities, he brilliantly celebrates each individual's unique potential, while preserving the invaluable traditions of both Freudian analysis and behaviorism.

<------------------ Straight from the back cover

If you were to name the three biggest challenges man faces today, chances are, they would be addiction, depression, and aggression. In The Unheard Cry for Meaning, Viktor Frankl, convincingly argues that they all stem from one source: man's search for meaning.

Victor Frankl is someone who understands man's make-up as very few secular scholars could. He was a professor in two fields, neurology and psychiatry and a survivor of four concentration camps, including Dachau and Auschwitz. In his own words, "I bear witness to the unexpected extent to which man is capable of defying and braving even the worst conditions imaginable."

In Frankl's experience, the desire to give life meaning enables man to transcend his condition, even in the face of crisis. His book, the Unheard Cry for Meaning, explores that theme while demythologizing sports, sex, literature, and other areas of our so-called "enlightened" society.

In a media-crazed world filled with violence, addiction, and depression, Frankl's Unheard Cry for Meaning is an oasis of reason and humanity. As such, it should be read by everyone you know.

If you like reading a lot of technical manuals and don't mind re-reading every other sentence than you'll like this book. Frankl relies heavily on a very informed reader and I presume you must read most of his other books before this one.

Frankl's logotherapy enables people to once again discover the quality of life. Frankl believes that the first two schools of Viennese psychotherapy (Freud and Adler), which he calls the depth psychology, must be complimented the logotherapy - the height psychology. His therapy explores man's future instead of his past. Summarizing the Freudian concept as the will to pleasure and the Adlerian concept as the will to power, Frankl points out that man's basic motivation in life is neither pleasure nor power. Each person lives to discover the meaning of life and thereby to fulfill it - the will to meaning. Life is too meaningful for man to comprehend: it is essentially incomprehensible because it lies on a higher realm than that of man's. During the World War 2, Frankl survived four concentration camps including Auschwitz. In the camps, most of the inmates despaired that if they did not survive the camp, there was no meaning in suffering. Frankl, on the other hand, believed that if there was no meaning in suffering, there was no point in surviving the camp. In other words, the meaning of life was either unconditional regardless of the situation one was facing, or it was none at all. In the camps, Frankl would console his inmates telling them, "Someone looks down on each of us in difficult hours ?a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead ?and he would not expect us to disappoint him. He would hope to find us suffering proudly ?not miserably ?knowing how to die.? He would explain to them that it was not them asking the meaning of life. It was life asking them the meaning, and they had to answer to it. What Frankl witnessed in the camps contradicted Freud's theory that if people were left without food for few days, their wants would be reduced to the common desire for food. While some inmates behaved according to their instincts, as Freud predicted, there were also others who lived up to this challenge. Frankl witnessed people who gave away their last piece of bread and others who organized religious activities, which resulted in execution if they were caught. One of logotherapy's techniques to help people discover values is to have them imagine their lives from their deathbeds and look back on them. During such exercises people often find that their current definition of success differs significantly from that on their deathbeds. They realize that they do not wish they had made more money, had more sex. It is interesting to note that virtually everyone points to relationship as their most cherished value. They wish that they had spent more time with people they care about. Logotherapy bases its therapy on the fact that man is a self-transcendent being. Psychotherapy which views man as a self-contained being is bound to fail. Frankl's favourite analogy regarding this matter is the eye. The function of the eye is to transcend itself: healthy eye does not see itself. The more it self-transcends, the more it actualizes itself. Only when there is a problem, such as glaucoma, does it notice itself. Man actualizes himself in the same way. Self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendent. Man is most human when he is occupied with something other than himself - when he is serving others?needs. The best time to take a picture of man is when he is least conscious of himself. How unnatural the picture looks when he is told to say cheese, to notice himself. Man neither lives by himself nor for himself. Man who views himself as a self-contained being is bound to live in despair. If he were to weigh the suffering and joy in life, he will find that the suffering outweighs by far. Every approach to suicide prevention needs to be grounded on the irreducibility of the unique human phenomenons and the self-transcendent nature of man. Only then can he find the meaning in suffering and thereby meet the challenge. He then realizes that life expects something from him in every situation. This "mere?realization in itself may even put an end to suicidal thoughts. Painting green the leaves of a dying tree lasts only so long, while watering its roots naturally turns them green. Frankl warns us of the serious consequences of reductionism. And his logotherapy thoroughly deestablishes the reductionism in psychotherapy and reinstitutes the human realm in psychotherapy. Logotherapy has a significant contribution to make in our world where more and more people are seeking psychotherapy to address this human realm. Logotherapy, then, is a psychotherapy for the man in the street ?all of us.

Adler thought all human motivation was based on the will to power, manifesting itself in men's desires to get rich and to exercise dominion and women's desire to marry such men. Freud thought all human motivation was based on the will to sex, that is to say the will to procreate the manifestations of which we see in our sex obsessed society. Frankl shows that the misplacement of these desires in the center of human life causes all of the psychological turmoil under which our society suffers. He shows that by putting (dare I say) God, and the purpose for which He created each individual at the center of human existence (the will to meaning), love (misunderstood as the will to sex) and creativity (misunderstood as the will to power)are put into a proper perspective. Frankl's treatise makes the insights of Adler and Freud useful to the religious individual who consider either of these great psychologists secular humanist riff-raff. More over it renders the endless the tangled web weaved by psychoanalysis unnecessary as it shows how understanding oneself as a purposeful being one can alleviate all the binding ties of compulsion, addiction, and irrational fear. INCREDIBLE.

I odered this book a LONG time ago from one of the used Book Dealers.

As one of Dr. Frankl's medical students at the Poliklinik in 1948 I found this book of great interest. It is well written and detailed. Although I had always admired Frankl for not falling victim to hate after his concentration camp experiences I was unaware of the profound influence his second wife Elly (the first wife,Tilly, died in Bergen-Belsen) had in his recovery from the tragedies and the help she had given him in the propagation of logotherapy.
Anyone who is familiar with some of Frankl's book will enjoy reading about the fascinating and colorful personal lives of these two truly extraordinary people. Dr. Klingberg is to be congratulated for his efforts in making them available to us.

This history of Frankl's life, thoughtfully and respectfully told, provides much of the context which breathed even more life into Frankl's work for me.

Viktor Frankl has presented us with snap shots of the key events in his life. These recollections were never intended for publication but through the encouragement of his publisher this slim volume was made available for readers. Thus begins our journey in looking at the life of the founder of Logotherapy and the author of "Man's Search for Meaning."

Frankl's life is filled with interesting portraits. We learn of his mother's patrician background and the fact that she was descended from a family of prominent rabbis. His father was a struggling student and was director of the government's Ministry of Social Services.

We get to see this inquisitive young man as he is impacted by Freud, Hirschmann, Schilder and Adler as he begins to step int the field of psychoanalysis. Through his philosophical questionings and debates with these giants in the field we find Frankl developing his own methodology. March of 1938 became a turing point for the young man as his country is invaded by the Nazis and he is placed in a concentration camp. From that experience wee see a new personality arising who meets the psychological, emotional and spiritual tensions in his life with utmost grace.We see a man who has the opportunity to leave Austria and avoid the concentration camps but he elects to stay and care for his parents.

Unfortunately this memoir is not a full autobiography of Frankl. You receive sketches of his life and end up wanting more. Read in conjunction with Man's Search for Meaning, the reader can gain further insight on this great personality. I believe this book serves as a supplemental text for the author's Man Search for Meaning." Hopefully a full scale biographical work will come out on Frankl. Until then, this slender volume will whet your appetite to learn more about this great man.

"Recollections" is episodic, much like sharing a cup of coffee with a casual acquaintance and trying to divine their life story from those conversations. Dr. Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" is a landmark book for many seekers--including me--and I jumped at the chance to read this so-called autobiography of a giant in the field of diagnosing modern society's malaise. The book is a pleasant read, with Dr. Frankl's humor guiding the narrative. There's not much in the way of how Dr. Frankl coped with returning from concentration camps to find every member of his family--including his young wife--dead. The late Dr. Frankl's narrative is light and episodic, like afternoon conversations instead of Freudian analysis.