Man Frankl really got to me. First of all I read it without TV or music on in the background which has been increasingly uncommon as my attention span slowly dies. Then when my dad got home I took the car and went to Book Table to buy the full book. The man has a really interesting tale on psychology and he has this interesting school of psychology he developed called logotherapy which he attempts to sum up in a sentence: “the patient. . . must hear things which sometimes are very disagreeable to hear.” The principle of the theory is that man has a “will to meaning,” that’s the primary motivation in life.
I don’t really have any meaningful analysis I can write about our except but I think that’s part of what makes the text so special. And maybe that’s the point. But two things that I really appreciated were the attention to detail (“tenderly touching a piece of bread in one’s coat pocket, first stroking it with frozen gloveless fingers, then breaking off a crumb and putting it in one’s mouth”) and Frankl’s ability to provide psychological analysis of the concentration camps. He keeps referring to a “second phase” of life in Auschwitz-Birkenau of relative apathy, that includes “abnormal reactions” to “abnormal situations” and an “emotional death.”
The depiction of that makes it all the more devastating when emotion comes into play. While Frankl and another man think about their wives in silence, he sees her: “But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.” I don’t know what to say about that but it’s powerful.
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