Man's Search for Meaning Summary & key ideas explained

In October 1944, a Viennese doctor steps off a train at Auschwitz. Hidden in his coat is the manuscript of his first book, the work of years. Within hours the coat is gone, the manuscript with it, along with his clothes and his hair. Soon even his name will give way to a number.

His name was Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who had spent his career asking why people lose the will to live. He had let an American visa expire rather than leave his elderly parents behind in Vienna. Between 1942 and 1945 he was held in four camps: Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and two subcamps of Dachau. His father died in Theresienstadt. His mother and his brother were murdered at Auschwitz. His wife, Tilly, died in Bergen-Belsen.

Back in Vienna, in 1946, he dictated this book in nine days. The first part is his testimony: not a history of the camps, but a close look at what happened inside the minds of the prisoners. The second part is the theory that grew out of it, logotherapy, from the Greek word for meaning.

Frankl never claimed that meaning could save anyone from the gas chambers. Survival there depended largely on chance. But he saw, again and again, what it did to a person's inner life to have something to live for, and what happened when it was gone.

So what does a person go through when everything familiar is taken away in a single afternoon?