A short note on Frankl
Man's Search for Meaning · Viktor E. Frankl
The book that did not change my life — it described it back to me.
I have re-read this book five times across twenty years. Each time, a different paragraph reaches forward and asks me a question.
The first time, I underlined the lines about choice between stimulus and response. The third time, I underlined the lines about a person bearing almost any how if they have a why. This last time, in my forties, I underlined nothing. I just sat with the chapter about the wife he kept writing to, and felt the room get larger.
The reason this book belongs in any psychology of self-knowledge: Frankl is doing fieldwork on the irreducible. He is asking, in the worst possible laboratory, what survives when everything has been taken. The answer is not pretty. But it is yours.