Man's Search for Meaning

Viktor E. Frankl: Fact? Fiction?..or TRUTH?

Viktor E. Frankl’s vivid memoir, Man’s Search for Meaning, has seriously riveted his readers since its publicationover 50 years ago. Frankl dives deep into uncharted territories of the psychological aspect of survival in some of the most fierce and gruesome venues in human history, the Nazi concentration camps. Frankl shows unprecedented inside psychological knowledge. This book is exceptionally important historically. It gives a vivid account of what a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp experienced and what mental state he was in during each phase of their imprisonment. He also goes into detail on the reasons why the survivors outlasted so much mental, emotional, and physical abuse, and why others did not. Unfortunately, to some, these experiences were first hand, so due to the severity of the both physical and mental anguish is biased to some extent. Even though Frankl states himself on the very first page of his memoir. “This book does not claim to be an account of facts and events but of personal experiences, experiences which millions of prisoners have suffered time and again” (1), I still feel that his teaching of the physical and psychological states of these concentration camps to be accurate without question.
      The book begins with the author's explanation of his reasons for writing Man's Search for Meaning. Frankl then transitions into the beginning of his horrific story. He states that many of the accounts and descriptions of his story are not those experiences in the larger well known camps but in the smaller ones where a great majority of the actual

extermination took place. Frankl goes on to explain the three mental phases of camp life. He begins with the initial shock experiences upon arrival.   Looking back over his own
personal entrance into Auschwitz, Viktor E. Frankl states, "if someone now asked of us the truth of Dostoevsky's statements that flatly defines man as a being who can get...