Man's Search for Meaning

The Library Essay

The Last Freedom Held

Viktor Frankl was a Viennese psychiatrist who spent three years in the camps, Auschwitz among them, and wrote this book in a matter of days after the war. Its first half reports what he observed there, in the flat voice of a clinician: that survival tracked meaning, and that the one freedom no circumstance removed was the choosing of one's own attitude toward it.

The second half sets out logotherapy, the school of psychiatry he built on that observation, which treats the human need for meaning as primary rather than decorative. Published in 1946 and translated across the world, the book has sold many millions of copies, and when the Library of Congress surveyed American readers it stood among the handful of books they said had most shaped their lives.