This article is not a book review. At best, it’s a reflection of what stood out for me while reading this book.
If there is one quote from the book which I will remember, it’s this remark from Nietzsche which Frankl mentions multiple times.
He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.
Frankl takes us inside a concentration camp and tries to look at what are the psychological attributes of those who survived such camps. According to him, most of the survivors had some sort of “meaning” in their life. This “meaning” in life wasn’t a general-purpose meaning but a specific goal which “differs from man to man and from, moment to moment”. The second part talks about his self-defined theory of “Logotherapy”. I found this a stark departure from the usual Freudian way of looking at mental ailments and highly practical in nature. I particularly liked the concept of Noö-Dynamics which flies right in the face of commonly-held beliefs.
What man actually needs is not a tension-less state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him. What man needs is not homeostasis but what I call “noödynamics,” i.e., the existential dynamics in a polar field of tension where one pole is represented by a meaning that is to be fulfilled and the other pole by the man who has to fulfill it.
This book definitely requires a second read to get a deeper understanding of the concepts in Logotherapy that Frankl has proposed. However, it is definitely worth a read if you’re interested in deep diving into the mind of a concentration camp prisoner and taking away interesting insights from it.
To be honest, I felt this would be yet-another-psychology-self-help book. But I was pleasantly surprised.
Yash Tambawala 