Man's Search for Meaning

In the autumn of 1942, Viktor Frankl witnessed prisoners in Auschwitz giving away their last pieces of bread to help others. In that moment, he understood that everything can be taken from a person except the freedom to choose one's attitude toward any circumstance. This episode traces his entire life and philosophy, from his training under Freud and Adler in Vienna, through the loss of his family and his own survival in four concentration camps, to the nine intense days when he dictated Man's Search for Meaning. We explore logotherapy and its three pathways to meaning: through creative work, through the experience of love and beauty, and through the attitude one takes toward unavoidable suffering. Frankl diagnosed the modern age as suffering from an existential vacuum, a sense of emptiness left by the collapse of tradition and instinct, and offered a psychology built not on the will to pleasure or the will to power but on the will to meaning.