From the book *Man’s Search for Meaning*, Viktor Frankl emphasizes less on his personal experiences and more on how his time under Nazi rule revealed the remarkable capacity to survive and persevere against overwhelming odds. He provides examples of prisoners who discovered hope and the will to endure, even in the face of horrific conditions. Through these insights, Frankl illustrates the significance of what has come to be known as meaning-making, regardless of the situation.

Frankl, who survived the concentration camps, writes suffering is inevitable and to avoid suffering is futile.

Rather one should be worthy of one’s suffering and make meaning of it instead of surrounding to nihilism, bitterness and despair.

He uses poetic, moving anecdotes from concentration camps to illustrate those souls who find a deeper humanity from their suffering or who become animals relegated to nothing more than teeth clenched self- preservation.

Though not specifically religious, this book has a purpose to help us to find meaning.

Trauma is a psychological wound which cannot be controlled by the subject who has undergone through it.

A person can be traumatized by the unexpected events like rape, child abuse, accident etc. and experienced after the incident. According to Cathy Caruth, “ Trauma describes an overwhelming experience of sudden, or catastrophic events in which the response to events occurs in often delayed and
uncontrolled repetitive occurrences of hallucinations and intrusive phenomena”.

It is the wound of the soul and for many of those who have been affected by such trauma. It can be felt long after the wounds of body have been healed and occurred to a person repetitively as flashback and nightmare. Those events can be repressed in the unconscious and triggered by it.

At the period of holocaust many people went through trauma. They could not find their self. Even today people’s will to meaning is frustrated in world wide scale.

Prisoners in the camp were haunted by meaninglessness, often accompanied by a feeling of emptiness- which Frankl calls existential vacuum causing depression and it leads towards suicide.

Being a psychiatrist, Frankl shows mental and emotional response of the prisoners in the
camp; how ones psychology has been affected and they commit suicide. But he accepts all the challenges and being able to find meaning in life, he later publishes his theory on it and establishes himself as psychiatrist and theorist.

Frankl is optimistic in the camp which was surrounded by horrific circumstances in contrast with his other
inmates. He also shows sympathy and encourages other to take suffering as inner strength. By doing so he also prevents other inmates from committing suicide.

He shows human capacity to reduce suffering, trauma and terror through logotherapeutic process.

Logotherapy is based on the premise that human beings are capable of changing their attitudes towards the circumstances of their life. It is an analytical process that tries to make the patient realize that there is meaning in suffering, in life and even in dreadful situation.

It is future oriented and it focuses on will to meaning.

Frankl seems to be optimistic in such horrific circumstance in contrast with his other inmates.

“Logotherapy focuses on the meaning of human existence as well as on man’s search for meaning. This striving to find meaning in life is the primary motivational force in man”

Our life decisions are not only motivated by a search for meaning but by an inner need.

It is a therapy which dares to enter the specifically human dimension. Frankl emphasizes that “Life has meaning under every circumstances” and that this meaning was available “until last breath”.

He also states that ‘human life, under any circumstances never ceases to have a meaning and that this infinite meaning of life includes suffering and dying, privation and death”

The core point of Logotherapy is to show how even in tragic circumstances human
being can find meaning in life and turn their tragic life into an achievement.

He depicts the reality of holocaust and reveals how he became able to survive and endure
all pain and suffering. Even though all other freedom has been snatched from them, each prisoner could still choose an attitude towards this fate.

To search for meaning is to seek self –transcendence, which means to step out of ourselves and serve
something bigger than oneself.

In Man’s Search For Meaning, Frankl, with his own subjectivity, explores one can find meaning even in suffering situation with the one’s love, hope, courage and consciousness.

And one can heal trauma, anxiety, pain and depression through it.

Unlike other writers like Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel who show holocaust only as a passivism and as a reflection of dark humanity, Frankl is optimistic and seeks meaning in life.

Day by day, his inmates were losing their hope and found only way to escape from such traumatic circumstances is to commit suicide but protagonist, on the first day of camp, made a promise that whatever the situation will be he will not end his life.

It shows he choose optimism rather pessimism.

He shows his optimistic attitude towards such horrific circumstances and decides to struggle in order to find meaning in his life.

To support his idea Frankl in his theory asserts, “one can find meaning even in suffering through:

(a) by creating a work or doing a deed

(b) by experiencing something or encountering someone

(c) the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering”.

Instead of focusing on past, it focuses in choice and future oriented accepting the meaningfulness in life.

So, applying these techniques he reduces his trauma within camp and also suggests his inmates to find meaning even in suffering rather than to be coward.

Within camp many prisoners suffer from dark inhumanity and pessimism towards life losing their self.

And also the survivors couldn’t claim their identity. Pain and suffering always haunts them and found their fragmented self in the concentration camp.

All human beings want to live with meaningful life and also want to die with meaning and purpose.

Frankl respond his traumatic self by imagines his wife and his love towards her in order to avoid suffering.

He narrates:
I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was the beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me; saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to
rise.

He imagines his wife secretly encouraging him and to find meaning in his suffering and making him aware of his capabilities.

He gets his will power because of love. Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire.

The salvation of man is through love and in love. So through love he endures the camps, rethinking
constantly of his wife who has been separated from him. Even in the hardest part of the day he found salvation in love that he had for his wife. He learnt, love can conquer all and it did not matter what the SS guard do to him. Similarly, by experiencing and encountering challenges one can get meaning
in his life.

David Guttmann in his book viewpoint: “each situation in an individual life is unique. It cannot be substituted for by someone else’s . . . every moment that we live or every time that we encounter a unique situation requiring a decision offers us an opportunity to finding meaning”

Under the influence of art and beauty he forgets his frightful circumstances. He was also careful to remind his fellow prisoners that, regardless of their circumstances, there remained before them a choice of responding circumstances.

Even though, his freedom has been snatched at the camp, he had a spiritual freedom to react on it either to lose hope and commit suicide to get rid from such torturous life or to struggle to preserve his ‘Self’.

He endures all pain and miseries and yet asserts that it does not matter if we have nothing to expect from life. We can still find meaning.

One must think, future will be bright and there is the light at the end of the tunnel. He became able to endure the horrors of the camp and he perseveres at the situation where other perished. His other inmates who do not keep hope and did not take suffering as inner strength die at sudden. But Frankl successes in changing attitude towards the unalterable fate as from that time one could at least see a meaning in his suffering. The basic tenet of Logotherapy is that the man’s concern is not to
gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life. He narrates:

Suffering is in the part of our everyday life.
No human beings can exist without suffering and pain.

It is the part of our life.

So, he thought life is challenging and must overcome such challenge. The prisoners in
the camp could not tolerate suffering and many prisoners commit suicide being traumatized. They cannot respond to their fate. Suffering often consists of violence, destruction and cruelty. This combination of the subjective experience often results in the traumatic shock and they lost all reason of living. And they turn into ‘moslem’ and usually went to the gas chambers. He further narrates that due to unbearable tortures and traumatic experiences in the camp he and his inmates felt themselves as a dead man who could not response to anything “We felt more dead than alive”.

After frankl was compelled to live in concentration camp he loses his home family and everything he possesses. He was separated from his wife and family which cause depression on him but also he does not lose hope and take suffering as an inner strength beyond such circumstances.

He decides his purpose of living.
The life of Frankl was dismantled within camp because he finds meaning in bearing unavoidable conditions. Though he is living in such traumatic circumstances he is focusing on healing through finding meaning in life. He changes his attitude and takes this suffering as strength to make an achievement. According to Moklebust;

“Logotherapy is oriented to future and focuses on enhancing and discovering personal strength and makes the person responsible for his attitudes and change . . . remember the details of stressor event , self – transcend to transform their suffering into human
accomplishment, and guilt into meaningful contribution to the world”

To endure pain, he would crack jokes, recite poems and create humour with his inmates. Creating humour is also one of the techniques of Logotherapy to endure suffering in order to find meaning in life.
Humour is one of the means, to use in actively fighting tension as well as coping with the problems and stresses.

Prisoners in the camp developed humour and used it to survive all the horrors and terrors in their lives. Guttmann views “Humour and laughter are seen today as therapeutic, relaxing, and enjoyable values that helps to face difficulties, hardship, distress, stressful life situations and even calamities and traumas”.

It helps to reduce the traumatic pain within difficulties by giving a sense of relief. It is also creativity. By the means of humour fear can be reduced. Humour is one of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation. Supporting this idea, he explains:

While we were waiting for our shower, our nakedness was brought home to us: we really had nothing now except our bare bodies-even minus hair: all we possessed, literally, was our necked existence… we knew that we had nothing to lose except our so ridiculously naked lives. When the showers started to
run, we all tried very hard to make fun, both about ourselves and about each other.

In the death camp, they gave him a number: 119104.

But the thing they tried hardest to kill became the very thing that saved millions.

1942. Vienna.

Viktor Frankl was 37 years old, a respected psychiatrist with a growing practice, a manuscript nearly complete, and a wife named Tilly whose laugh could fill a room.

He had a chance to escape to America. A visa. A way out.

But his elderly parents couldn’t come with him. So he stayed.

Within months, the Nazis came for them all.

Theresienstadt. Then Auschwitz. Then Dachau.

The manuscript he’d spent years writing—sewn carefully into the lining of his coat—was torn away within hours of arrival.

His life’s work. His purpose. Reduced to ash.

His clothes were taken. His hair shaved. His name erased.

On the intake form, there was only a number: 119104.

But here’s what the guards didn’t understand:

You can take a man’s manuscript. You can take his name. You can take everything he owns.

But you cannot take what he knows.

And Viktor Frankl knew something about the human mind that would keep him alive—and give birth to a revolution in psychology.

He noticed a pattern.

In the camps, men didn’t just die from starvation or disease.

They died from giving up.

The moment a prisoner lost his reason to survive—his why—his body would collapse within days. The doctors had a term for it: “give-up-itis.”

But the men who held onto something—a wife to find, a child to see again, a book to write, a debt to repay, a promise to keep—they endured unthinkable suffering.

The difference wasn’t physical strength.

It was meaning.

So Frankl began an experiment.

Not in a laboratory. In the barracks.

He would approach men on the edge of despair and whisper:

“Who is waiting for you?”

“What work is left unfinished?”

“What would you tell your son about surviving this?”

He couldn’t offer food. He couldn’t promise freedom. He had nothing material to give.

But he offered something the guards could never confiscate: a reason to see tomorrow.

One man remembered his daughter. He survived to find her.

Another remembered a scientific problem he’d been working on. He survived to solve it.

Frankl himself survived by mentally reconstructing his lost manuscript—page by page, paragraph by paragraph, in the darkness of the barracks.

April 1945. Liberation.

Viktor Frankl weighed 85 pounds. His ribs showed through his skin.

Tilly was gone. His mother—gone. His brother—gone.

Everything he’d loved had been murdered.

He had every reason to despair. Every reason to give up.

Instead, he sat down and began writing.

Nine days.

That’s how long it took him to recreate his manuscript from memory—the one the Nazis had destroyed three years earlier.

But now it contained something the original didn’t:

Proof.

Living, breathing, undeniable proof that his theory was true.

He called it Logotherapy—therapy through meaning.

The foundation was simple but revolutionary:

Humans can survive almost anything if they have a reason why.

“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” (He borrowed the words from Nietzsche, but he had proven them in hell.)

1946. The book is published.

In German, the title was “…trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen”—”…Nevertheless Say Yes to Life.”

In English, it became “Man’s Search for Meaning.”

The world wasn’t ready for it. Publishers initially rejected it. “Too morbid,” they said. “Who wants to read about concentration camps?”

But slowly, quietly, it began to spread.

Therapists read it and wept.

Prisoners read it and found hope.

People facing divorce, disease, bankruptcy, depression—they read it and discovered that their suffering could have purpose.

The impact was seismic.

The book has now been translated into over 50 languages.

It’s sold more than 16 million copies.

The Library of Congress named it one of the ten most influential books in America.

But here’s what matters more than sales numbers:

Countless people—people whose names we’ll never know—have picked up this book in their darkest moment and found a reason to keep going.

Because Viktor Frankl proved something the Nazis tried to disprove:

You can strip away everything from a human being—freedom, family, food, future, hope—and there will still be one final freedom remaining:

The freedom to choose what it all means.

You cannot control what happens to you.

But you can always control what you make of what happens to you.

Today, Viktor Frankl is gone.

But in hospital rooms, in therapy offices, in prisons, in quiet moments when someone is deciding whether to give up or keep going—his words are still there:

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”

The Nazis gave him a number.

History gave him immortality.

Because the man who lost everything taught the world that meaning is the one thing no one can ever take away.

Prisoner 119104 didn’t just survive.

He turned suffering itself into a source of healing.

And somewhere tonight, someone who’s barely holding on will read his words and decide to hold on one more day.

That’s not just survival.

That’s victory over death itself.