"When we are no longer able to change a situation - we are challenged to change ourselves" ~Victor Frankl

The book I am now reading is called Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl. This book is about Victor's daily life when he was in the Holocaust.  During the Holocaust he was put in the Auschwitz concentration camp. While surviving through the horrors of Auschwitz, Frankl observed other people to try to find the common bond between the survivors and discover the personality traits of survivors. Frankl used his will to survive to figure out what was going on in people's minds every day.  He created Logotherapy, which is a psychological perspective that has been compared to Sigmund Freud's Psychoanalysis, but differs in some major ways.  

Victor Frankl was obsessed with watching people and deciphering their thoughts and actions.  He came to the conclusion that those who survived the Holocaust were not physically strong, but those who were aware of their environment and those who truly believed they would survive.  Frankl created the term "Sunday neurosis," which refers to the end of the working week when a person realizes how empty and meaningless his or her life is.  He argued that having this subconscious set back would most likely lead to binge eating and drinking, excess stress, and not a happy lifestyle. 

Frankl created the Theory of Logotherapy. This theory looked directly at the sense of mental health tension between what one is and what one would become.  Frankl says that the modern person has way too much freedom in his or her life to deal with.  This means that we no longer live through instinct and rarely rely on tradition. Logotherapy is different from Psychoanalysis because of how logotherapy looks mainly into the future and how what we do now changes the outcome of our future. Psychoanalysis takes what has already happened and what you were born with to explain the way you are now.  For example, if you had parents that beat you when you were young, it is inevitable that you will in the future beat your children.  This theory digs deep into the subconscious of why we act the way we do now. Logotherapy instead looks at how we are shaping our lives every day.

This book was a great book to read because Victor Frankl took every day of his life to create the basis for this theory.  I really enjoyed reading this book because it dove deeper into the Holocaust than most books I have read about that subject.  This book really made me understand what people were going through, besides the obvious terror and constant death.  Frankl's whole family was murdered immediately when they arrived to Auschwitz. I found it remarkable that Victor Frankl could look past what was going on right in front of his eyes and really find the meaning to living and of his own existence.