Man's Search for Meaning

I recently completed a master's in counseling and guidance and have been reading to find a set of books that will best address some of the disorders in the DSM-IV. Following is a list I have put together from my reading so far, and these are books that I would HIGHLY recommend. I would like to say up front that the DSM-IV is full of very normal behaviors that for some reason have become magnified or exaggerated in an individual to the point of causing a negative impact in their daily lives. Take OCD for example, it is quite normal and even preferable (from a safety perspective) to check and be sure that one has turned off all the burners on the stove after cooking, or to be sure the back door is locked before going to bed. But to continue checking time and again would be problematic and can lead to problems in an individual's life. Something is diagnosed as a disorder when it moves from being a "normal" activity to being something that causes dysfunction in daily living. So, one may read the DSM-IV and see themselves reflected in many of the disorders. The question is always: is this behavior negatively impacting my life? If so then that is when it crosses the line of normal and needs to be treated. Depression; I believe there are two sources for depression: one source is our own minds, we think ourselves into the depression - at least in this case we know where it is coming from and we should be able to step behind our thoughts and help ourselves move in a better direction. The other source seemingly comes from nowhere; one minute we are okay and the next we are thrown into the depths * Book = "Transforming Depression: Healing the Soul Through Creativity"- David H. Rosen" o I would recommend reading this at least through chapter 4, going further than that delves into some deep Jungian psychology which will not likely appeal to everyone. I certainly enjoy Jungian psychology and believe that Jung's work will become more and more important and critical to our understanding as we move forward in this field of psychology. Jung's psychology is really on the borderland between spirit/soul and the science of psychology and it is Jung's work that brought me into this field. However it is quite complex/deep/different and may lose some readers. For a very good intro to Jung's work, I would recommend "The Essential Jung" by Anthony Storr, but this is not light reading as is composed of excerpts from Jung's collected works. * Book = "Man's Search for Meaning" - Viktor Frankl o I would recommend this book for two primary reasons: one is it pushes very strongly the message that meaning is essential in our lives - as shown through Victor Frankl's imprisonment in Nazi concentration camps. Frankl comments on how he observed the individuals who gave up the fight and died, and the individuals who persevered - and most importantly what it was that he believes made the difference. The other reason I recommend this book is that it helps the individuals whose thoughts may have led them to depression to realize that things could be worse. Of course there are devastations we may face that can truly be to us, just as bad as a Nazi concentration camps, but for the most part, we often push ourselves into depression for reasons that are somewhat superficial compared to other realities. Depersonalization Disorder - essentially feeling like you are not really there * Book = "Feeling Unreal: Depersonalization Disorder and the Loss of the Self" - Daphne Simeon and Jeffrey Abugel o Excellent book which will help folks understand this disorder. This is for me a very interesting disorder, I think this is one disorder where the connection between our ego consciousness and perhaps what we are at a much deeper level is challenged. Normally we are locked into full belief in our reality - we believe we are very much a part of it and that we "are" the body in which we reside. This disorder forces us to question if we are the body we think we are. It would appear that whatever piece of our mind is keeping us in full belief is breaking down a bit, leaving us a bit outside of the "normal" feeling of being the body. Folks with this disorder can actually worry that they do not have control of their body and that this body may do something they do not want it to do. Driving a car for example can be quite traumatic if you think your body may be acting without your input. Bipolar disorder - the book I am recommending is focused on Bipolar II disorder - essentially swinging from manic (very happy and carefree) to severe depression. This book was actually required reading during the Masters program * Book = "An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness" by Kay Redfield Jamison o Excellent book written by a psychologist who suffers from this disorder. This book helps to understand the importance of medication for this disorder, as well as the path of destruction that can easily be paved during carefree, manic episodes. ADHD (attention deficit disorder) * Book = "Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates And What You Can Do About It" - Gabor Mate o This is not just a great book for folks with ADHD, but for everyone - as many of the lessons here translate to all of us. This is an extremely excellent book on ADHD and living in general. OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) * Book = "Tormenting Thoughts and Secret Rituals: The Hidden Epidemic of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder" - Ian Osborn o Excellent book on OCD - this book will help individuals with OCD as well as those who know someone with the disorder - to understand what is happening in the mind of a person with this disorder. This book will also help OCD folks realize that they are not alone and that many of the rituals or compulsions are shared by other folks with OCD. That is all for now, but I am still reading

Recommended reading for everyone. Valuable nuggets on knowing and living one's purpose, not living in a victim mentality, and embracing the reason God put you on this planet.

This 2008 edition of Frankl's 1945 book is a must read for every human being who wants to lift their spirit in moments of despair. The book is structured in three different parts. The first one (Experiences in a Concentration Camp) and the Postscript (The case for a Tragic Optimism) fit beautifully together, and are the basis of Frankl's philosophy and psychotherapy system called Logotherapy. They are narrated in a very conversational way because they are, after all, a memoir. They differ greatly in style and tone from the second part (Logotherapy in a Nutshell), which is a summary of Frankl's therapy system, partially based on Frankl's experiences and observations as Auschwitz inmate, and partially on techniques and views of the world that he had started elaborating before he was sent to the camp. This part is drier in style, way more technical and not as approachable for the reader, unless the reader is really into therapy or a therapist. Harold Kushner's preface to this 2008 edition is a good summary of the book main points, while Frankl's preface to the 1992 edition summarizes well how the book and Logotherapy came to be. The book has many pearls of wisdom, and is very uplifting despite the brutality of what we read. In all honesty, I already expected that when I picked up the book. Some prisoner's stories are utterly poetic despite their tragedy. I'm glad that those people's historical memoirs had been so beautifully preserved. On the other hand, this is a survivor's first-person narration of the events, so that allows for invaluable insights into the reality of the extermination camps and into the inmates' mental/emotional state and fortune. Since we live in 2021 and we're pretty aware of the Nazis' atrocities, most of the things that Frankl tells about his experience are somewhat lessened by the impact on the reader of dozens of documentaries and movies on WW2. It might have been chilling reading the book in the postwar era, when all the details were still unfolding and the wold came to realize what had really happened. What we didn't know before reading the book is that a new therapeutic model, Logotherapy, was greatly influenced by the Jew's suffering in Auschwitz, and that there is hope even in the biggest moments of despair. For the rest, Frank's take on life is admirable and full of wisdom, whether you are into Logotherapy or not. I especially liked his comments on love, the youth and unemployment, as they are still, more than half a century later, valid. LOGOTHERAPY, SOME CORE PRINCIPLES AND POINTS I LIKE > The great task for any person is to find meaning in his/her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: Work (doing something significant), Love (caring for another person), and Courage in difficult times. > Suffering is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it. > You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you. > Logotherapy aims to curing the soul by leading it to find meaning in life. > What matters is to make the best of any given situation. > Man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life. > The aim of life is not to be happy as the seeking of happiness can increase someone's unhappiness. > Suffering is unavoidable, is part of life, and we need to accept it and re-frame it. > Tragic optimism, i.e., one remains optimistic in spite of the “tragic triad, or those aspects of human existence which may be circumscribed by: (1) pain; (2) guilt; and (3) death and that we should say 'yes' to life in spite of all that. > To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic. > Success cannot be pursued but it is an end result that the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. There are hundreds of pearls of wisdom that I cannot reproduce here because it would take too long, but those are the ones that made me read the book in the first place. SOME CRITIQUE Frankl poignantly mentions that despite all the inmates being subject to the harsh situations (food and sleep deprivation, hard-work labor, extreme cold, beatings, etc.) some died and some survived, and he ways that, many of those who died did so because they gave up on life and lose hope in getting alive out of the camps and resuming their lives after the war. I love most of what Frankl says and his attitude towards life. However, we cannot say that Frankl survived just because he had a specific mindset, hopes of getting alive, finding his family and publishing the basics of Logotherapy included in this edition, which he had already started writing before being taken to the camp. First of all, he was an intellectual and a psychiatrist, i.e. a person with a strong mind, mentally s stable with enough intellectual harnesses to re-frame anything in his head to give it meaning. He certainly was an optimistic, like it's in his nature. Not everyone was so well equipped mentally and emotionally. What's more, there must have been other people who, like him, had hopes of surviving, seeing their families and doing something with their lives in the outside world, but they never made it because, I can only hypothesize, their physique and immune system, as well as their mental state weren't Frankl's.

This is exactly the right book to read during the coronavirus pandemic of 2020. Viktor Frankl was a prisoner of multiple Nazi concentration camps and, although our conditions are not nearly as dire, most of us have felt like prisoners in our own homes for at least some period of time this year. With that correlation in mind, this book offers many great insights into why we should continually get out of bed in the morning. I myself have been out of a job and quarantined for over nine months. I have seen some friends descend into overwhelming anxiety and depression and have seen others take wonderful advantage of their new found time. “Even though conditions such as lack of sleep, insufficient food and various mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways,” Frankl writes “in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone.” We become the person we tell ourselves we are. This book is all about finding and choosing to actively pursue a life of meaning. Dr. Frankl is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who is widely credited with establishing the field of logotherapy (from the Greek word logos meaning “reason”) as a psychiatric technique that uses existential analysis to help patients resolve their emotional conflicts. According to logotherapy “we can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.” This was how he survived the Holocaust, and how we can learn to find our own meaning in times of perceived meaninglessness. When he was arrested in 1942, Frankl had a partially finished manuscript that he was forced to leave behind. On those days when he felt apathy creeping in, he reminded himself of his desire to someday finish the book, and this purpose towards the future motivated him to keep going. Also when he was arrested, so was his family and pregnant wife, and similarly on those days when he felt supreme despair, he thought of his loved ones and found purpose in continuing on with the hope of someday reuniting with them. “It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking into the future” Frankl contends, and further writes of his time in the camps that “the prisoner who had lost faith in the future—his future—was doomed.” It seems true to me that without something promising to look forward to, despair at one’s current situation quickly sets in. One of the messages in this book that resonated most with me was the sentiment that the meaning of life must come from inside each individual and be unique to them. There is no all encompassing meaning of life, but each of us has our own meaning that we are meant to discover and pursue on our own. We must all make choices about the people we want to be and the people we want to become. Having a sense of meaning and a true purpose in life is like having an existential North Star. As long as every choice, big or small, points in the direction of your North Star, you will never be lost in life. Find your North Star my friends.

Amazing book! A must read for everyone! I learned a lot about myself. The book left me absolutely grateful and with a motivation to continue following my purpose

I followed Viktor Frankl diligently in his journey from the gas ovens of Auschwitz into the hospitals of Vienna after he beats the 1 in 20 odds of his surviving a German concentration camp. He writes that the single most important self-determinant in his survival was his deep inherent conviction under the worst of all possible conditions that life has meaning: even here under constant risk of typhus, wearing the recycled prison garb of those who had been sacrificed to the ovens, starving, freezing, beaten, demonized and dehumanized. If one can still find meaning here and survive because of it, then under better conditions meaning should be possible to find. Frankl believes that there are three sources of meaning: 1) one's work 2) other people whom you love 3) rising with dignity and integrity from a hopelessly tragic diminishment. He found that in the camps the survivors had a positive attitude, which reinforced their search for meaning and gave them hope in a hopeless situation. In Vienna hospitals he debunked theories of Freud and Adler with "logotherapy" which helps others to find the meaning in their lives and heal from thoughts of suicide, psychoses and neurotic behavior. "Logos" is Greek for "meaning" and if you can find it in your own life, then essentially it seems you are as invincible as Frankl, who not only survived Auschwitz but also lived into his 90's, is the living proof of his own thesis. Ultimately, when asked what was the meaning of his life, he wrote that the meaning of his life was to help other people find the meaning in their lives. He is an existentialist but he has a positive outlook on life unlike, for example, Camus or Sartre or the usual champions of this dark philosophy, which sprang out of the widespread, bombed-out wreckage of WWII. He writes that the Nazis proved what man was capable of and Hiroshima proved how high the stakes are. So the search for meaning is important therapy not only as it heals individuals but also because it has a healing and uplifting effect upon humanity as a whole and may well be one approach to saving the human race from its own self-destruction. Frankl had a visa and train ticket out of Vienna before the Nazis rose into power but decided to stay there to help his aging parents who had no such respite. Like Frankl, his pregnant wife and parents were taken to the camps and on the first day after he came home to Vienna he learned that all three had been lost there. He wrote "The Search for Meaning" in only nine days and described how his positive attitude and search for meaning enabled him to survive. He describes how this process of autobiography helped him to begin his own healing, a term which he describes as "autobibliotherapy." By virtue of writing down one's findings in the search for meaning, one serves to find meaning in one's own life and to help others find it in their lives. He prescribes no formulas and believes that every individual must find his or her own meaning in life despite diminishments and suffering and death which accompany every life. With incredible, calm clarity he writes that for everyone "suffering and death are necessary to complete life." He believes that suffering clarifies the meaning of life and, while he doesn't believe we need to bring it upon ourselves, the average life generally provides sufficient circumstances for us to know that suffering is an inevitable aspect of life. So why not learn from it? As Nietzsche wrote: "Suffering is the origin of consciousness." He is not advising us to bring it upon ourselves as a form of sadomasochism but to rise above it with heroic integrity and see it as an opportunity to learn from it. He believes that such life lessons ultimately hold the keys for understanding and overcoming the diminishments of life itself. He writes that man always has a choice of action in reacting to the circumstances no matter how dire they may be. So it seems that readers, when they read great books, are searching for meaning and this search has healing powers for them. Further, it seems that when writers search for meaning in creating their work, they have an opportunity to experience the same healing benefits of autobibliotherapy. So keep reading and writing the good stuff for all the good it can do to you and by all means, read this brief, brilliant book by an Auschwitz survivor as it has life altering implications for you: this book will change your outlook on life and may well, thereby, save it through mastery of the art of living.

I had the great good fortune to visit Northern France in the Alsace region recently. During my visit, I had the opportunity to hear presentations by two young German students who provided tours, in cities along the Rhine, occupied throughout WWII. During the tours we walked over bronze plaques imbedded in cobble stone streets. The plaques held the names of individuals (primarily Jewish) who had lived near by and died in concentration camps. It is a very moving testimonial to the surrounding community for its acceptance of their history. It was not so much an of guilt, which I never heard from the two young Germans, but an acknowledgement of mass hysteria that gave rise, throughout the population, to the terrible tragedy that was the holocaust. Having just reread this amazing treatise, I understand Victor Frankel’s thoughts so much more.

A MUST-READ!! ABSOLUTELY PSYCHE-SHATTERING!! A little slow at the start, BUT SO WORTH IT! I don't think I've ever learned more in relation to how many pages there are, seriously, it's so short, but insightfully and perfectly concise. Infact, theres basically only 2 chapters (one being the longest one I've ever read--92 pages!!) This book follows the authors life while he lost human rights under the National Socialist regime, and the understanding of suffering which helped him form his own therapy method--Logotherapy. "Logotherapy focuses rather on the future, that is to say, on meanings to be fulfilled by the patient in the future. (98)" This is easily my most highlighted book (and I didn't start highlighting until page 66), so here's some of my favorite things from the book I highlighted: "In *Man's Search for Meaning*, he hastens to add that suffering is not necessary to find meaning, only that meaning is possible in spite of suffering. (159)" "to suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic. (159)" "The prisoner who had lost faith in the future--his future--was doomed. (74)" (This booked quotes Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky most!) "How is it possible that men of flesh and blood could treat others as so many prisoners say they have been treated. (84)" "A man who for years had thought he had reached the absolute limit of all possible suffering now found that suffering has no limits, and that he could suffer still more, and still more intensely. (92)" "... after all he has suffered, there is nothing he need fear anymore--except his God. (93)" "Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas in the chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered the gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips. (134)" "Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost for of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. (111)" "Nietzsche's words, 'He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,' could be the guiding motto for all psychotherapeutic and psychohygenic efforts regarding prisoners. (76)" "Frankl was once asked to express in one sentence the meaning of his own life. '...the meaning of your life is to help others find the meaning of theirs' (165)" *one of the last sentence in the book*