My Creativity Professor gave all the students in our class a 60th anniversary edition copy of this book, not as an assignment but to read on our own time. I had heard of the book before but having the book at hand made it much easier to dig into it. The title is compelling - searching for meaning in our lives is something I expect that we all go through, and I felt that this break from school was a perfect opportunity to explore it.

Dr. Frankl is a psychiatrist that endured and survived the horrors of concentration camps. The book is split into 3 parts:

1) Experiences in a concentration camp
2) Logotherapy in a nutshell
3) Postscript: The case for a tragic optimism

I don't pretend to understand what the people held in concentration camps went through simply by reading this book, but in recounting his experience and his developed theory of logotherapy, Frankl raises a number of ideas, insights, and observations worth sharing and discussing.

Part 1
Frankl describes his experience in 3 stages - the period after arriving at camp, the period when one settles into camp routine, and the period after being released and liberated. In the period after arriving at camp, he describes a condition called 'delusion of reprieve' in which a condemned man thinks that he may be reprieved at the last minute and how he and his fellow prisoners went through the same emotions of clinging to hope that things wouldn't be so bad. In the second stage, Frankl describes an eventual blunting of feeling where prisoners would no longer care to look away from the beatings and punishments administered to fellow prisoners. And upon being liberated, Frankl describes the struggles - the road to overcoming the release of mental tension and pressure, bitterness, and disillusionment - to return to a former life.

Part 2
This section was added as a result of requests to further detail Frankl's developed theory of logotherapy. Rather than try to summarize, I'll leave this for the reader to discover  and explore and perhaps tackle some ideas that stood out to me both from this section and Part 1 on an individual basis.

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