[McAdams is an American psychologist, educator, and author of The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self (1993). In the following review of Man's Search for Meaning, originally titled From Death-Camp to Existentialism, he focuses on the meaning Frankl's concentration camp experiences may have for a new generation of readers.]

In 1945, shortly after his release from a Nazi concentration camp, Viktor E. Frankl spent nine intensive days writing Ein Psycholog Erlebt das Konzentrationslager, a psychological account of his three years in Auschwitz, Dachau, and other Nazi prison camps. The original German version bears no name on the cover because Frankl was initially committed to publishing an anonymous account that would never earn its author literary fame. Expanded to include a short overview of "logotherapy," the English version of Frankl's book first appeared as From Death-Camp to Existentialism and finally under its well-known title, Man's Search for Meaning. Shortly after its first English printing in 1959, Carl Rogers called the book one of the outstanding contributions to psychological thought in the last 50 years. The Los Angeles Times said, "If you read but one book this year, Dr. Frankl's book should be the one." The public agreed with the critics. Now that the book has been translated into 21 languages and has sold more than three million copies in English alone, Beacon Press has reissued Frankl's classic account in a handsome, cloth-covered edition, complete with a new Preface from the author and the original English Foreword written by Gordon W. Allport.

There are at least three reasons why Frankl's book has enjoyed such wide appeal over the past 35 years. First, Frankl tells an unforgettable story about his experiences in the camps. In a beautifully laconic style that is never maudlin or sensational, Frankl describes events that are so chilling, so brutal, and in some cases so heroic that the reader is not sure whether to be more amazed by the events themselves or by Frankl's unfailing ability to find the right words to describe them. Almost 50 years after the Holocaust, these words have lost none of their power to capture the reader's consciousness and refuse to let go. Second, Frankl's psychological commentary on captivity and survivorship is full of deep insights and thought-provoking speculations. Frankl delineates three stages of psychological reaction to the concentration camps. He provides brilliant asides on the powerful roles of religion, friendship, and the longing for a lost lover in helping the prisoner wrench meaning out of his misery. He provides riveting examples of how meaning and hope sustain life, even in Auschwitz, and how many people are just unable to find meaning, unable to summon up any hope, and as a result, in Auschwitz they die.

The third reason for the book's enduring popularity is that it serves as a primer for Frankl's own brand of existential psychotherapy, what he calls "logotherapy" ("therapy of meaning"). It is this third reason that drew me initially to the book, as an undergraduate in the mid-1970s. As was probably true for many in my generation, Man's Search for Meaning and Frankl's (1955) The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy were my introduction to existential psychology and psychotherapy. Like Allport in the book's Foreword, I was thrilled by Frankl's insistence that psychologists go beyond drives, instincts, and habits to explore the realm of meaning and purpose in human lives. I was taken by the idea that life's meaning may be found in suffering and that each person—and each person alone—is responsible for the meanings that he or she can wrestle out of life. For me, Frankl's vision was appealing for its exquisitely tragic quality, like Freud's, and for its very non-Freudian call to personal heroism.

Reading the book again, almost 20 years later, I find less exciting today the last section (about 60 pages) in which Frankl outlines logotherapy. It seems that today many brands of psychotherapy concern themselves in one way or another with meaning in life, personal responsibility, and other central themes in existential thought. With the demise of drive-reduction theories and with the proliferation of approaches emphasizing object relations, the self, human cognition, affective scripts and stories, and a wide variety of concepts compatible with a meaning-centered approach to persons and personal psychotherapy, Frankl seems to be fighting old battles today, battles that he, in a sense, has already won. Furthermore, certain pieces in Frankl's arsenal seem outmoded in the 1990s. For example, to buttress his claim that contemporary men and women thirst for meaning in life, he relies on an attitudinal survey from the early 1970s showing that American college students are much more concerned with "finding meaning in life" than they are with "making money." Results from surveys like these have changed dramatically, however, in the last 20 years. Finally, some material on logotherapy simply does not fit well into the context of the overall book. Frankl's emphasis on "paradoxical intention" as a therapeutic technique—a technique that behavior therapy has also employed—seems far removed from existentialism and life meanings. Relatedly, the necessary connection between concentration camps and existential psychotherapy seems harder to discern today than before. It no longer seems necessary to justify an approach to therapy emphasizing life meanings by appealing to experiences as extreme as the Holocaust. Had the camps never existed, one would still be able to make a very strong case for logotherapy.

Today's reader will still be moved, nonetheless, by the stories of the camps and inspired by Frankl's interpretations of his experience. For me, this time the most compelling passages in the book tell how whether one lived or died under the Nazis was often a matter of blind, stupid luck. Frankl writes, "We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles—whatever one may choose to call them—we know: the best of us did not return [italics added]." I have been haunted by this last statement. Who were the best who did not return? Were they the prisoners who put the welfare of others above their own? At one point, Frankl seems to suggest that they were:

On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves.

Yet the whole thrust of the book is to underscore how "man's search for meaning" can sustain human life even under the most harrowing and depraved conditions. Beyond luck, meaning played a part in survival too, Frankl maintains. Most of those who survived the camps had something to live for—some goal, some religious conviction, some person, some task, some hope about the future that they refused to give up. For Frankl himself, his undying love for his wife was a source of meaning, as was his vision of himself as a doctor and scholar. During some of the worst times, devastated by hunger and the cold, Frankl fantasized that he was delivering erudite lectures to his colleagues about the psychology of the concentration camp.

Those who lost the will to meaning usually lost their lives. Frankl reports that this sometimes happened quite suddenly and in a form that was familiar to many in the camps. A prisoner might wake up one day and refuse to get dressed, to wash, or to go out on the parade grounds. No threats or cajoling could change his mind. He simply gave up. "There he remained, lying in his own excreta, and nothing bothered him anymore." In one instance, a prisoner had a dream convincing him that the war would be over on March 30, and all inmates would be liberated. Although the dream provided him hope in the short run, he began to fade dramatically as the promised day drew near. On March 29th, he became ill and ran a high temperature. He was dead the next day. Many others in the camp lost hope more gradually. Frankl paints a stark contrast between those relatively few who managed to find meaning throughout it all and those many prisoners who did not. Those more likely to find meaning were often "sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life," and although they may have suffered great pain, "the damage to their inner selves was less" because "they were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom." Many others, though, lacked the inner resources to carry on. Frankl writes: "One could make a victory of those [concentration camp] experiences, turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did a majority of the prisoners."

It seems ironic and initially puzzling, indeed, that Frankl is able to make such a compelling case for a psychology of meaning in the wake of the Holocaust experience when, according to his account, a great many of the prisoners could ultimately do no better than "vegetate." Like Frankl, though, the reader ends up more impressed by the fact that anybody at all could find meaning in the maelstrom, and thus the exceptions powerfully override the rule. A second puzzle concerns the "best of us" who did not return. Who survived? Who did not return? Beyond luck, those who lived through the Nazi hell were doubtlessly younger and stronger than many who died. On the one hand, they may have also been more ruthless in their singleminded desire to survive, perhaps even at the expense of their fellow prisoners. On the other hand, they may have been blessed with those inner resources that empowered them to find meaning and persevere. In a passage so understated that the reader can easily miss its significance, Frankl describes how he would occasionally find a moment of solitude and peace by squatting in an abandoned water shaft surrounded by piles of corpses. "This shaft, incidentally, once saved the lives of three fellow prisoners." Frankl goes on to tell how, shortly before the liberation, three men escaped death by hiding in the shaft. As the guards walked by,

I calmly sat on the lid, looking innocent and playing a childish game of throwing pebbles at the barbed wire. On spotting me, the guard hesitated for a moment, but then passed on. Soon I could tell the three men below that the worst danger was over.

Frankl tells us that these men's lives were saved by the water shaft. But we see that, in fact, Frankl saved them. And it seems he saved many others too. Shortly before liberation and against the urgent advice of his friends, he volunteered for medical duty in another camp housing typhus patients. He was convinced that by doing this he would die in a short time.

But if I had to die there might at least be some sense in my death. I thought that it would doubtless be more to the purpose to try to help my comrades as a doctor than to vegetate or finally lose my life as the unproductive laborer I was then.

Frankl refuses to acknowledge his own altruism in this affair. "For me it was simple mathematics, not sacrifice."

But to me it suggests that Frankl was wrong all along. Clearly, at least one of the best of us did return.