PREFACE TO THE 1992 EDITION

But when circumstances cannot be changed, the remaining question is the stance you take—and what kind of person you allow yourself to become.

The memoir comes first because theory without pressure is cheap. The ideas are meant to earn their right to exist.

Frankl uses this late preface to tell the book's own strange success story against its thesis. He wrote the manuscript in nine feverish days in 1945 and intended to publish it anonymously, with only his prisoner number on the cover, so it could never make him famous. Precisely the book that was meant to carry no author's name became, in his words, the accidental achievement of his life — proof of the very rule he teaches his students.

That rule is the preface's core instruction: do not aim at success, and do not make happiness a target. Success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue — it arrives only as the unintended side effect of dedication to something larger than oneself, a cause to serve or a person to love. The harder you chase it as an end in itself, the more certainly you miss it. Frankl tells his students to listen to their conscience and carry out its demands as best they can, and to let success take care of itself.

There is a quiet demographic argument here too. Frankl notes that by the 1990s the book had been translated into dozens of languages and adopted in classrooms far from Vienna, and he reads that demand as a symptom rather than a triumph: if millions reach for a book whose very title promises a search for meaning, then the mass condition of the age is meaninglessness — the existential vacuum he diagnoses in Part Two.

The practical takeaway survives outside psychotherapy: orient your effort toward the task in front of you and the people it serves, not toward the applause it might generate. In Frankl's accounting, that reorientation is not just more decent — it is the only strategy that reliably works.

He closes the preface by dedicating the edition's message to a new generation: each era's readers, he says, bring their own hunger to the book, and the fact that young people with no memory of the war still underline its pages confirms that the vacuum it answers is not a postwar condition but a permanent human one.