Man’s Search for Meaning

What this book is, and who it's for

Viktor Frankl's 1946 account of surviving the Nazi concentration camps doubles as the founding document of logotherapy — the psychotherapy that takes meaning, rather than pleasure or power, as humanity's primary drive. The book is short, brutal, and stripped of decoration: Frankl writes about Auschwitz from inside Auschwitz, and the second half outlines what he later treated patients with for decades. The argument that survives compression: meaning is found, not given, and humans without an orientation toward something larger than themselves break under far less stress than humans who have one. Read this when you need to remember the floor argument.