A bright light in the abyss – Book review

This one doesn’t sit well beneath any of the banners that decorate bookshop windows in airports. Unless you are going on a Mediterranean break with a particularly difficult mother-in-law, Man’s Search for Meaning might be a bit heavy for the holidays.

But not every book can or should endeavour to be the literary equivalent to a packet of Skittles. Some vital nourishment takes a bit of swallowing. I will desist from following this food metaphor to the point of ‘eat your greens’ or ‘take your medicine’. Suffice to say, this is an important book.

This book was written by Viktor Frankl, who, chances are, you haven’t heard of. Before picking up this book, I certainly hadn’t.

But Frankl is said – by people who have a clue – to have made the most important contribution to our understanding of the human mind since Freud and Jung. Where Frued’s psychoanalysis obsesses over the tension between the conscious and unconscious, sleuthing around in dark recesses of the mind for the questions and clues, Frankl’s logotherapy sets about the seemingly simpler task of locating the meaning in a person’s life.

Published in 1946, Man’s Search for Meaning is part biography, part psychological study. Through what he observed of human nature during his years as a Jewish prisoner in a series of Nazi concentration camps, Frankl interrogates states of happiness and sadness, contentment and anguish, emptiness and meaning. The book also has surprisingly pragmatic insights about faith, memory as a place that preserves the present and our ability to keep loved ones alive in our mind.

Before reading this I would have thought that anybody who was forced to gaze upon the hellscape of a concentration camp would have lost all faith in mankind. However, after having witnessed the camps, in all their evil, Frankl’s conclusions are optimistic and useful for all of us.

If the power goes out during an episode of Coronation Street, this probably isn’t the book to read by the candlelight for an evening of light entertainment. However, I think it is certainly worth reading. The horrors of life in a camp are grotesque and hideous, but completely fascinating. And this idea of meaning being the engine of life seemed absolutely true. Give it a go. Maybe you’ll agree.