Man's Search for Meaning

The author describes in detail the thoughts and feelings that allowed him to maintain his belief in his life’s meaning. He attributes his survival to his unshakeable belief in that meaning.

First, and most obvious, was Frankl’s love for his wife. They were separated, and she was quite possibly already dead, but Frankl kept alive the hope of seeing her again. Later, when this hope dimmed, he was boosted by a mental image of his beloved. She was still in his mind, and his love for her helped him.

Frankl also believed that a drive to achieve, to accomplish something and make a contribution, provides essential meaning in life. In his case, he had already developed an early version of his approach to psychotherapy and had drafted a book about his theory. When he arrived at Auschwitz, the manuscript was hidden underneath his clothes.  When he and the other prisoners were stripped and their clothing taken away, he lost the pages. But motivated by the hope that his work would still be published somehow, he reconstructed parts of it on scraps of paper in the camps. This provided him with a sense of meaning: he, Victor Frankl, would achieve a breakthrough in understanding human psychology, and his theories would lead to innovations in therapy that would change people’s lives.