Man's Search for Meaning - Review

This is the only book I read during Covid. I some how couldn't manage finishing it in a period close to 2 years. Yes that's how my reading habit deteriorated but I managed to finish reading this book recently. This is the only book I read about life in Nazi Concentration camps. The book in a very balanced tone explains the living conditions of people, suffering, the psychology, understanding their mind, logotherapy and so on.

The entire premise of the book revolves around the fact - "

“Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.”

I am glad I picked this book during Covid - a crisis time, when a will to be active and be happy was actually quite less (funnily this is the reason I couldn't finish the book all these days). As I understood the atrocities of the Nazi camp during WWII, I felt a kind of shame that I can do better than what I was doing.  Victor Frankl himself is a neurologist, psychiatrist and a holocaust survivor - hence his analysis and tips work like magic. If nothing they induce optimism and some hope in you when you feel defeated in life! His theory of Existential Analysis is so unique and made me realise why some people behave how they do . Existential therapy/ analysis helps a person find a way to live by giving inner consent to their own actions. In a way it is an affirmation of life!

In such dire situations where you have so much uncertainty about what would happen the next moment - whether you would move to a better group or die in a gas chamber, gathering so much strength feels impossible but the author says that even in such dreadful moments - one can overcome it by training the mind, by thinking of the future and the people who would be waiting and by just imagining them in their best self. The living conditions of camp, the typhus patients, the conversations, their high - low spirits and deaths are intricately explained!

source : here

The last two chapters of the book - Logotherapy and Tragic Optimism are also explained quite logically and would even work as a basic guide for any psychotherapist as it gets little technical. Some of the events in the book like how you would feel happy by just getting an extra piece of bread, how your watery soup with 2-3 more peas would make your day, how you become thick skinned to the authorities' lashings, punishments and learn to survive - go to show that even in severe conditions you can choose your attitude! People were treated so brutally that they start feeling less human like. In extreme situations when you feel there is no way out,  whatever the author writes helps you to sail through the horror!

“But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.”

The book is so unique as the person who suffered wrote transparently about that suffering and how you can try and overcome it - No words minced. If you really want to find a meaning, hope and optimism in life - I recommend you this book. On reading and knowing the lives of those brave men and women of Auschwitz camp you will learn a lesson or two. There are so many atrocities happening every day, some happen openly and some don't make it to the headlines of TV or newspapers. I hope all such people come out of suffering some day and renew their lives!.

Few Influential quotes from the book:

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

“No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.”

“A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease."

I am participating in Blogging from A-Z challenge 2022 and this is my M post. I am taking up this challenge after many years as I want to talk about Covid life and the daughter diaries!

Some interesting blogs you can visit:

www.noloveforfatties.com

http://sweetteareads.blogspot.com/

https://www.literacious.com/ 

https://momandideas.com/