Around graduation time every year, I like to read a classic book on personal development. My mom seems to have read them all, so I turn to her for suggestions: Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, etc.
This year, she passed me a very dog-eared and underlined copy of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (first released in 1947). Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist, first tells of his struggle to find a reason to live while imprisoned in Auschwitz and other concentration camps. He then describes his pyschotherapy philosophy that grew out of this experience– logotherapy.
Logotherapy, in contrast to many of the psychological methods of the time, is future oriented. Unlike Freud and his contemporaries, who looked at one’s past as the source of pyschological issues, Frankl argues that lack of meaning produces psychological tensions. The mechanized era that produced an abundance of leisure time often leaves people lacking meaning in their daily existence.
Drawing from examples from the concentration camps and as therapist in the suicidal wing of a mental hospital, Frankl motivates his patients and readers to find purpose, even in desperate situations. This, he says, restores human dignity and leads to ultimate fulfillment.
It’s the perfect little book for graduates who are in the process of discovering their calling in life.