Am I a complete freak? I just read this book because it is required for one of my classes, and I was not impressed. Not with his account of the Holocaust, nor with his logotherapy. Now I have to write a timed, in-class essay on it on Thursday, and I don’t know where to begin. I can’t write 6 pages of “I thought this book sucked.”
Did anyone else have this experience? Can anyone give me some advice to perhaps see it in a different light? I’m going to reread it tomorrow to be better prepared for this essay, so maybe getting some of your opinions will help.
I don’t know. I worked in the 4th largest Holocaust museum in the U.S. for a while, so along with reading a lot of Holocaust memoirs I was also surrounded by things like a boxcar from Auschwitz and, of course, actual survivors.
I just didn’t like this book. Help!
“Liking” the book doesn’t have anything to do with it. “Man’s search for Meaning” is a point of view and a discipline. Treat it as a person that you’re arguing against. What is it with the book that you think sucks? Do you agree with the ideas behind logotherapy or don’t you? Do you see how Frankl comes up with his ideas or do you think he’s a nutcase?
Wow not a very popular book I see.
I’m just surprised by the majority of people in my class or elsewhere that talk about this book like it’s the greatest thing ever. I thought it was really bland, dry, and boring. And I don’t agree with most of his logotherapy techniques- it seems a bit like quackery to me.
Not sure if you’ll see this message before your test. Sometimes it helps to consider what the author’s ideas contributed to their time, even if you’re not finding them very groundbreaking or relevant today.
Your familiarity with Holocaust literature and survivors have probably taken some of the impact of his story away. As Harry the Spry says, you have to take the argument he makes in the context of the wider debates within psychiatry. His logotherapy is much more spiritual than the Freudian and behavioral therapies which dominated at the time. The emphasis of logotherapy on the future is radically different than that of Freudian analysis which emphasizes the past. To read about how logotherapy works in real life, try the book Love’s Executioner by Irving Yalom.