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A SCRAPBOOK OF STUFF I'M READING / LISTENING TO / LOOKING AT.

Sep 10, 2010

Man’s Search For Meaning by Victor Frankl (1946)

This was kind of a special reading experience, because this is my father-in-law’s copy of the 1968 paperback edition, complete with his perfect cursive notes and pencil underlining from when he was a teenager. My wife read the book when she was a teenager, too. When I was reading it, I wished that she’d underlined her favorite passages in a different color pencil, and then I would underline my favorite in yet another color, and we’d have this mini rainbow of underlines, showing what we each took from it. Maybe someday our kids could pick another color…

Wikipedia:

Viktor Frankl’s 1946 book Man’s Search for Meaning chronicles his experiences as a concentration camp inmate and describes his psychotherapeutic method of finding a reason to live. According to Frankl, the book intends to answer the question “How was everyday life in a concentration camp reflected in the mind of the average prisoner?” Part One constitutes Frankl’s analysis of his experiences in the concentration camps, while Part Two introduces his ideas of meaning and his theory of logotherapy.

My favorite passage in the book, on the tension between what we are and what we should become:

…mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, then tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being. We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. It is only thus that we evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency. I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or…a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.

Great read.