Adrenalina Book Club Amsterdam

What gives life meaning when almost everything else has been taken away?

Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning is a short but extraordinarily powerful book about suffering, freedom, responsibility, resilience, and the human search for purpose.
First published in the aftermath of World War II, the book combines Frankl’s experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps with the psychological ideas that became central to his work. Rather than simply recounting what happened to him, Frankl asks a much bigger question: what allows a person to continue living — and to find meaning — even in circumstances they cannot control?
At the heart of the book is the idea that while we cannot always choose what happens to us, there remains a deeply human capacity to choose how we respond to it. Frankl develops this idea through logotherapy, his meaning-centered approach to psychotherapy, which sees the search for meaning as one of the fundamental motivations of human life.

### About the Author

Viktor E. Frankl (1905–1997) was an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, philosopher, and Holocaust survivor.
Born in Vienna, he studied medicine and became deeply interested in the relationship between psychology, philosophy, and the question of meaning. His work eventually developed into logotherapy and existential analysis, sometimes described as the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy, following the traditions associated with Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler.
During World War II, Frankl was deported to concentration camps, including Auschwitz. He survived, while his parents, brother, and wife were killed.
After the war, he returned to Vienna, became head of the Vienna Neurological Policlinic, and continued developing and teaching his ideas about meaning, responsibility, freedom, and human resilience. Man’s Search for Meaning went on to become his best-known work and one of the most influential psychological books of the twentieth century.

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