About:

Man search for Meaning is a 1946 book by Viktor Frankl chronicling his experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps during World War II and describing his psychotherapeutic method, which involved identifying a purpose in life to feel positive about, and then immersively imagining that outcome. He hoped to cure through his writings the personal alienation and cultural malaise that plagued many individuals who felt an 'inner emptiness' or a 'void within themselves'.

Summary & More About Book:

Viktor Frankl was one of the few, who survived in the place, where your chances of dying are higher than those of living on any given day. After three years in various concentration camps, his camp Turkheim was liberated, upon which he returned to Vienna, where he was born.

Frankl spent the rest of his life teaching what he'd learned during the worst of times: that people can, and must, find meaning in their lives, even if all they know is tremendous suffering. It is called logotherapy and has made him one of the key figures of modern psychology.

Lessons From This Book:

Sometimes the only way to survive is to surrender to death.
Your life has its own meaning and it's up to you to find it in any given moment.
Use paradoxical intension to make your fears go away.

In order to survive, you have to be okay with dying at any moment.

This sort of indifference to death, the perspective of merely existing, not living, allowed prisoners to shield their minds from terrors around them and do what was necessary to survive.

All of the things we take for granted today were severely limited in the concentration camps: food, clothing, sleep, rest. By surrendering to the present and not spending one-second thinking of the future, prisoners summoned the apathy they needed to, for example, grab a vital pair of shoes from the dead body or hide in a pile of manure to avoid being to the gas chamber.

If you ask any Great chess player what the best move in chess is, they'll just stare at you with the puzzled face. There is no such thing. There is, however, the best move in any particular constellation of pieces on the board. Of course, there's the best move in any game situation, but no general move to beats all others.

The meaning of your life is the same way.

There's no general meaning of life and not even one, singular meaning of your own life. Your life's meaning is not only unique to you, it also depends on your decisions and situations.

This is what logotherapy claims and it flips the common misconception that you have to find your life's meaning first before you're able to live the best life, upside down.

Instead, how you act, and how much responsibility you bring to the decisions you make determines how big your sense of meaning in life is.

Another thing logotherapy does is enable people by focusing on their internal state of mind, instead of external factors, thus giving them a sense of control over their own life.

But by using something Frankl calls paradoxical intention, you can turn around and take control. In reality, you only start stuttering, because you're afraid you'll start stuttering. Paradoxical intention flips this around by getting you to try and force your fears to come true.