In "Man's Search for Meaning" Victor Frankl contends that every individual has an innate tendency to search for the meaning of his or her existence. The author's experiences in several s mall NAZI death camps are used quite effectively to illustrate how focusing on the reasons behind a situation rather than the results that follow, allows a person to survive even the most torturous of circumstances. He writes of all the horrors, tragedies, sufferings and torments that he and his fellow prisoners experienced yet he recounted it in a way that seemed so gentle and light but in actuality its depth is profound. When asked why he wrote this book he said "I had wanted simply to convey to the reader by way of a concrete example that life holds a potential meaning under any condition, even the most miserable ones." (Victor Frankl). .
At the outbreak of World War II, Viktor Emil Frankl was director of therapy in a large mental hospital in Vienna and the organizer of a group of successful youth guidance centers. Frankl, along with his family and many other doctors, were soon sent to a Nazi concentration camp. He carried with him the manuscript for his first book, which was taken from him and destroyed at Auschwitz. Ironically, the desire to reconstruct and rewrite that volume on psychotherapy helped him endure three harrowing years of prison life. For Frankl, the situation confirmed Friedrich Nietzsche's words, "He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how." From his observations in the concentration camp and his knowledge of psychology and philosophy, Frankl originated the school of logotherapy, or existential analysis. "Man's Search for Meaning" is both an introduction to that theory and an absorbing personal account of the most appalling event in modern history.
Frankl does not dwell unnecessarily on personal hardship, but he uses his experience and observations to illustrate the life of the ordinary prisoner.