Man's Search for Meaning
Frankl survived Auschwitz, Dachau, and two other camps, then emerged to write the founding text of existential psychology. His concept of logotherapy, built from the ruins of the worst thing humans have done to each other, argues that meaning itself is the fundamental human drive. Over 16 million copies sold.
Part Two, the formal case for logotherapy, is where readers who were devastated by the memoir stop, calling it “a medical journal that is pedantic and repetitive” and “excruciating to muddle through.” Some feel bait-and-switched, one concluding “I would have been better off reading Elie Wiesel.” Read decades after 1946, the thesis that people need purpose to endure now strikes many as obvious rather than revelatory: “this may have been new in the 1940s.” And the sharper critique, Langer's, is that attitude-determines-survival edges toward suggesting the dead had given up, while Rollo May's is that the method “hovers close to authoritarianism,” handing the patient a goal rather than helping them find one.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
