Viktor Frankl - Man's Search for Meaning

Despite a demanding schedule, Frankl also found time to take flying lessons and pursue his lifelong passion for mountain climbing. He joked that in contrast to Freud’s and Adler’s “depth psychology,” which emphasizes delving into an individual’s past and his or her unconscious instincts and desires, he practiced “height psychology,” which focuses on a person’s future and his or her conscious decisions and actions. His approach to psychotherapy stressed the importance of helping people to reach new heights of personal meaning through self-transcendence: the application of positive effort, technique, acceptance of limitations, and wise decisions. His goal was to provoke people into realizing that they could and should exercise their capacity for choice to achieve their own goals. Writing about tragic optimism, he cautioned us that “the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.”

Frankl was once asked to express in one sentence the meaning of his own life. He wrote the response on paper and asked his students to guess what he had written. After some moments of quiet reflection, a student surprised Frankl by saying, “The meaning of your life is to help others find the meaning of theirs.”

“That was it, exactly,” Frankl said. “Those are the very words I had written.”

WILLIAM J. WINSLADE

William J. Winslade is a philosopher, lawyer, and psychoanalyst who teaches psychiatry, medical ethics, and medical jurisprudence at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston and the University of Houston Law Center.

BEACON PRESS

25 Beacon Street

Boston, Massachusetts 02108-2892

www.beacon.org

Beacon Press books are published under the auspices of

the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.

© 1959, 1962, 1984, 1992, 2006 by Viktor E. Frankl

Foreword © 2006 by Harold S. Kushner

Afterword © 2006 by William J. Winslade

All rights reserved

First published in German in 1946 under the title

Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationslager.

Original English title was From Death-Camp to Existentialism.

Composition by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Frankl, Viktor Emil.

[Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationslager. English]

Man’s search for meaning: an introduction to logotherapy /

Viktor E. Frankl; part one translated by Ilse Lasch

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-0-8070-1428-8

1. Frankl, Viktor Emil. 2. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—

Personal narratives. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—

Psychological aspects. 4. Psychologists—Austria—Biography.

5. Logotherapy. I. Title.

D810.J4F72713 1992

150.19’5—DC20 92-21055

v3.0