Embracing Hope: On Freedom, Responsibility and the Meaning of Life

The late Viennese psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor applies his humanistic psychology to the horrors of the Holocaust and modern anomie in this resonant collection of lectures and articles. In a lecture from December 1946, Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning) outlines the roots of a modern worldview that relieves people of “individual responsibility,” against which he asserts the individual’s power to create meaning, even in the hellish confines of concentration camps. Three other pieces—a 1955 article in an Austrian medical journal, a 1977 interview from a Canadian TV program, and a 1984 lecture—delve deeper into these themes and his “logotherapy,” a “meaning-centered approach to mental health” that calls for personal growth through purposeful work, love, and the transcendence of suffering. To illustrate the latter, Frankl provides moving case studies of people who surmounted personal trials, including a young man paralyzed below the neck who took psychology courses—using a stick clenched in his teeth to type—and became a counselor. Though there’s a noticeable lack of rigor in Frankl’s theorizing, the message is moving and his lyrical prose will stick in readers’ minds (“Life is a constant process of dying, the continuous withering away of something... a constant farewell”). It’s an inspiring introduction to Frankl’s thinking. (Aug.)