Man's Search For Meaning By Viktor E. Frankl

In his novel Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl discusses his experience of being imprisoned in multiple concentration camps during the Second World War. Due to Frankl’s profession as a psychiatrist he gained insights on the camp life and human psychology that other people might not have been able to gain. This gives his account of his time in a Nazi concentration camp a specific perspective that is seldomly found in other reports. One of the major things Frankl focuses on in his novel is how the prisoner survived inside the camps. While Frankl’s standpoint was that a person needed a meaning in life in order to survive, he also describes different aspects of camp live and the human mind that allowed people to cope with and survive the horrors of the concentration camps. These different aspect where both factors within a person, as well as outside factors, and included the different mechanism the human mind started using to cope
While outside factors could play an important role in enhancing survival chances, many internal mechanisms played their part to allow the prisoners to deal with the trauma and horrors of their daily lives. No matter what phase of his experience a prisoner was going through, these mechanisms were used. One of these mechanisms was apathy that desensitised the prisoners and allowed him to cope with punishments and the terror of concentration camps. Other mechanisms, similar to apathy, detached the prisoner from his surrounding or distracted him from his suffering. Without these mechanisms a person's suffering would have been unbearable and would have lead to his certain death. While finding a meaning in life was important to survive and to withstand the trauma a prisoner experienced, other factors and mechanisms also played a very important role in the struggle for survival that all prisoners of concentration camps