Man's Search for Meaning

Man's Search for Meaning joins Viktor Frankl's account of survival in the Nazi concentration camps to an exposition of logotherapy, the school of psychotherapy he founded. Its central claim is that the decisive power lies not in circumstance but in the meaning a person assigns to it, and that the will to meaning is the deepest human motivation.

The book moves from memoir to method. Against Freud's will-to-pleasure and Adler's will-to-power, Frankl argues that meaning can be found through work, through love, and even through unavoidable suffering, and that logotherapy treats the "existential vacuum" as a primary clinical concern. His most quoted insight holds that everything can be taken from a person but the last of the human freedoms—the freedom to choose one's attitude in any given circumstance.

One of the most influential psychological works of the century, it offers a clinical, hard-won statement of the perennial conviction that the inner stance, not the outer event, is decisive.