Man's Search For Meaning, Gift Edition

A sense of drive and mission. When the Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl was imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, he noticed that the men who tended to survive the longest had usually made a commitment to something outside the camps—a spouse, a book project, a vision of a less evil society they hoped to create. Their sense that... See more

Regarding our “provisional existence” as unreal was in itself an important factor in causing the prisoners to lose their hold on life; everything in a way became pointless. Such people forgot that often it is just such an exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself. Instead of taking

... See more