Victor Frankl was a Jewish Austrian psychiatrist who was interned in a Nazi concentration camp during World War 2. He lost his wife and family yet he emerged in triumph.
Victor observed that many of the prisoners died when undergoing less hardship and suffering than those who survived. The survivors tended to be people who envisioned a future for themselves despite their present suffering, people who believed they had a meaning in life and did not surrender to despair. He say's "We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that 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, to choose one's own way." Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, can decide what will become of him - mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp".
The rest of the book is devoted to a discussion of Frankl's 'logotherapy' a form of therapy that has at its core the belief that man's primary motivating force is the search for meaning. He concludes that the meaning of life is found in every moment of living; life never ceases to have meaning, even in suffering and death. At the time of the author's death in 1997 this book had sold 10 million copes in 24 languages and belongs to a list of "the ten most influential books in the United States."
