“Man’s Search for meaning”; A Beacon of Hope for the Suffering and the Depressed.

Viktor Frankl’s book “man’s search for meaning”, published in October 23 1984, has proved to be outstanding, inspiring, interesting and an eye opener for many people in their difficulties. He is one of the greatest minds of the 20th century and is well known as a psychiatrist, psychologist and philosopher. Thrown into a Nazi death camp in 1942, he, by his spiritual strength and his will to life, had managed to survive and thus became a living proof of the main thesis of his philosophy: one can live only for so long as one's life has a meaning. He entered the Nazi concentration camp as a psychologist, and found himself stripped of everything external, including his wife, his family, his life’s work, his home, his country, and even his identity.

The author encourages his fellow prisoners through his inspiring thoughts, stirring words and especially trough his loving concern and caring attention towards the other. Despite showing us how brutal humanity can be with regard to the concentration camps, Frankl manages to raise the listeners to search for the meaning in all the suffering. What distinguishes Frankl from Freud is his conception of love. For him it is the thoughts of their loved ones were an important component of that will to meaning that enabled people to survive. The truth is that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. A man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. He says "I knew only one thing - which I have learned well by now: Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved".

Frankl concludes that the meaning of life is found in every moment of living; life never ceases to have meaning, even in suffering and death. One who reads the book gets a new aspiration and vision of life. For him, what was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves, and furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.