Generally speaking, this is a weak book. At times, so weak that I have to be extremely careful with my wording not to diminish the author's achievements. This review concerns only this particular book, not all the author's works, and certainly not the author personally.
About the Author
First, a few words about the author. Viktor Frankl was an Austrian psychologist who was imprisoned in a concentration camp during World War II and survived. He is considered the founder of logotherapy. Unlike Freudian theory (focused on pleasure) and Adlerian theory (focused on power), logotherapy asserts that the main motivation of a person is to find meaning in life. Moreover, Frankl derives the word “logos” from the Greek “logos” (word, meaning), emphasizing the importance of dialogue and the power of speech. The author claims that his concept doesn’t contradict Freud or Adler but rather complements them.
Structure
Now let’s talk about the structure of the book. It roughly consists of three conceptual parts: the basics of logotherapy, the experience of being in a concentration camp, and reflections on the meaning of life. While there are no issues with the part about the concentration camp — it’s the only section that is easy to read, evokes empathy, and doesn’t cause confusion — the other parts raise quite a few questions. In fact, these three conceptual parts are very blurred in the book, and it’s not always easy to tell where one ends and another begins. Still, the overall structure is okay and serves as a guide.
Cons
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The first part of the book is incredibly difficult to read. It feels like it was written for psychologists rather than regular readers (though even professionals might struggle). There are many complex terms and hard-to-follow sentences. It might be partially due to translation, but I assume it’s fairly accurate. Here are some examples of the sentences:
And about half the book is written like this."It is rooted in the polar structure of a tension field existing between the poles of object and subject, which are the precondition that makes cognition possible. In short, within this tension field lie the origins of all noodynamics."
"In our opinion, the world-project is not, in fact, a subjective projection of a subjective world but rather a fragment, albeit a subjective one, of the objective world."
"In other words, what really oppose each other are pandeterminism and determinism, not determinism and indeterminism."
"Does that mean that the self is nothing more than deoxycorticosterone acetate?"
"Spiritual being can not only co-exist with a different being. In particular, it can also co-exist with another being equal to itself, another spiritual being. This co-existence of one spiritual being with another, we will call co-being."
- The book contains almost no illustrations. While they aren’t essential, with such a difficult text, illustrations could help a lot — or at least bring back the motivation to keep reading.
- I’ve long nurtured the idea of conveying my worldview through simple analogies. But after reading this book, I realized my analogies could be inappropriate or incorrect. The author also tries to use analogies accessible to the average reader — for example, spatial dimensions. But when a humanities scholar (and philosophers or psychotherapists are classic humanitarians) begins to use concepts from the hard sciences, it often ends up sounding unconvincing, if not ridiculous.
- The book has a noticeable religious undertone. Although the author claims that finding meaning doesn’t necessarily involve religion, he himself, apparently, became very religious after surviving the camp and doesn’t even consider the idea of a world without God. He frequently points out the flaws in the teachings of Freud and other psychologists or scientists, but never questions his own ideas.
- The author discusses the meaning of life, love, work, suffering, and death. He claims that all of these have meaning. Even if you agree — why did he choose exactly those aspects? Most likely, they had the greatest impact on him personally. But there are many other important aspects of life that the author probably ignored simply because he never encountered them himself.
Pros
- Not everything in this book is so bad that there’s nothing to praise. The concept of existential vacuum — a loss of life’s meaning — is indeed a real and timeless problem, which perhaps neither Freud’s nor Adler’s schools have solved.
- The book includes many individual thoughts with which I completely agree, even if they don’t always relate to the main message.
- Despite being difficult to read, some of the author's reflections are quite interesting. Even when I disagreed, it was still intriguing to understand how he arrived at those conclusions. Frankl is a smart person whose concepts are at least worth studying. Whether to accept them or not is up to each reader.
- The main idea of the book — that meaning is the primary motivator in life and that with meaning, a person can endure anything — is hard to argue with.
