Man's Search for Meaning is a 1946 book by Viktor Frankl chronicling his experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, and describing his psychotherapeutic method, which involved identifying a purpose to each person's life through one of three ways: the completion of tasks, caring for another person, or finding meaning by facing suffering with dignity.
The book intends to answer the question "How was everyday life in a concentration camp reflected in the mind of the average prisoner?"
According to a survey conducted by the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Library of Congress, Man's Search for Meaning belongs to a list of "the ten most influential books in the United States.
[2][3] The book's original title is Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationslager ("A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp").
The book's common full English title is Man's Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy, although this subtitle is often not printed on the cover of modern editions.
Frankl concludes from his experience that a prisoner's psychological reactions are not solely the result of the conditions of his life, but also from the freedom of choice he always has even in severe suffering.
Only after the partial replenishing of the body is the mind finally able to respond, as "feeling suddenly broke through the strange fetters which had restrained it" (p. 111).
[8] Gordon Allport, who wrote a preface to the book, described it as a "gem of dramatic narrative" which "provides a compelling introduction to the most significant psychological movement of our day".
Richard Middleton-Kaplan has said that this implies, whether intentionally or unintentionally, that those who died had given up and that this paved the way for the idea of the Jews going like sheep to the slaughter.
[13][14] In his book Faith in Freedom, psychiatrist Thomas Szasz states that Frankl's survivor testimony was written to misdirect, and betrays instead an intent of a transparent effort to conceal Frankl's actions and his collaboration with the Nazis, and that, in the assessment of Raul Hilberg, the founder of Holocaust Studies, Frankl's historical account contains distortions akin to Binjamin Wilkomirski's memoirs, which were translated into nine languages before being exposed as deeply problematic (and according to the most radical interpretation 'false') in Hilberg's 1996 Politics of Memory.
[17] Comparison between Frankl's memoirs and Wilkomirski's memoirs leveled by Szasz, however, could legitimately be dismissed altogether as an inapt and misleading analogy insofar as questions arose (and remained) as to whether or not Wilkomirski had ever been an inmate at a concentration camp, whereas this was never a question in Frankl's case: there is no doubt that he is a survivor.
Briefly: Conflicting views about the nature of memory under extreme conditions, as well as the sort of instinctual opportunism (for the sake of survival) or positive thinking mentality that often (one might even say 'usually' or 'almost always') correlated with long-term survival in the Nazi death camps, makes the memoir an important document of witness during the holocaust but also highlight the way in which it displays the cognitive and psychological limits of representing a situation like the Nazi extermination from an 'impartial' first person perspective.