As its title suggests, Man’s Search for Meaning is principally about how to maintain or find purpose in life, even when external circumstances are at their worst. In recounting his experiences in the concentration camps, Viktor Frankl describes in detail the thoughts and feelings that allowed him to maintain his belief in his life’s meaning. He attributes his survival to his unshakeable belief in that meaning—a belief so strong that he would go on to build an entire form of psychotherapy around the human need for meaning.

Frankl establishes the depth of this need by exploring what happens in its absence. During his time in Auschwitz and other concentration camps, Frankl witnessed his fellow prisoner workers endure beatings, starvation, sickness, and the death of their loved ones. While he does not discount the role of chance in determining who lived and who died, he suggests that there was another critical factor at play: Those who lacked essential meaning in their lives also lacked motivation to survive. Frankl describes some of the signs that a prisoner had succumbed to the will-sapping despair of losing all meaning in their life. The prisoner would give up the daily struggle for survival, the quest for food and warmth and shelter. They would no longer care about preserving resources. For example, there was no point in saving a precious cigarette, which could be used as currency to buy a bowl of soup. The prisoner in despair would simply smoke the cigarette for the few moments of pleasure it afforded. Very often, the smoker would be dead by the next morning, implying that despair was as lethal as any external hardship.

Frankl ultimately identifies three primary avenues of meaning and stresses that all are available even in the direst conditions, using his own experiences as proof. First is love. Frankl and his wife were separated, and he knew that she was quite possibly already dead. Nevertheless, he was boosted by a mental image of his beloved, recognizing that she still existed in his mind and that no external force could touch his love for her. Second, Frankl believes that a drive to achieve, to accomplish something and make a contribution, provides essential meaning in life. In his case, he had already developed an early version of his approach to psychotherapy and had drafted a book about his theory. When he arrived at Auschwitz, the manuscript was hidden underneath his clothes. When he and the other prisoners were stripped and their clothing taken away, he lost the pages but, motivated by the hope that his work would still be published somehow, reconstructed parts of it on scraps of paper in the camps. This provided him with a sense of meaning: He would achieve a breakthrough in understanding human psychology, and his theories would lead to innovations in therapy that would change people’s lives. Finally, the author observed meaning in the dignity and courage with which his fellow prisoners faced suffering and death. He witnessed countless people die bravely, and he saw how the prisoners maintained their essential sense of self despite their captors’ efforts to dehumanize them. 

This final source of meaning proves particularly key to the theory of logotherapy (literally, “meaning therapy”) that Frankl propounds in the book’s second half. Here, Frankl acknowledges that suffering is inseparable from the human condition but argues that it need not preclude finding purpose and fulfillment in life; suffering, from the guilt that motivates a person to change for the better to the recognition of life’s fragility that drives another to make the most of their life, can actually fuel meaning-making. Frankl’s wartime experiences, though extreme, thus become a template for readers from all walks of life to follow.