The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult
2018: reading Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning five pages a day, over 28 days.
28 parts, 2018, in order.
- Part 1
The Viktor Frankl 5-a-day Book Club: Day 2
These first pages (p17-21 in my 2004 Rider edition) of Part 1: Experiences in a Concentration Camp contain the most chilling passage I think I have ever read…
- Part 2
The Viktor Frankl 5-a-day Book Club: Day 1
Gordon W Allport opens his preface to Man’s Search for Meaning with an anecdote about Viennese psychiatrist-author Victor Frankl. Apparently he used to ask all…
- Part 3
The Viktor Frankl 5-a-day Book Cult: Day 3
These five pages (p22-26 in my 2004 Rider edition) begin with the first phase of the inmates mental reactions to life in a concentration camp. Unsurprisingly,…
- Part 4
The Viktor Frankl 5-a-day Book Cult: Day 4
Today’s pages mark Viktor Frankl’s transition from naive optimism to the moment he ‘struck out’ the whole of his former life and started his bare fight for…
- Part 5
The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 5
In this section (p31-37), Viktor Frankl moves onto the second phase of the psychological response to incarceration: apathy, a ‘kind of emotional death’.
- Part 6
The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 6
In today’s pages (p37-41), Viktor Frankl describes how even the most hardened concentration camp prisoner can be roused through insult to rash – and…
- Part 7
The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 7
Today’s pages (p41-45) are largely concerned with food, notable for its paucity in concentration camps such as Auschwitz.
- Part 8
The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 8
Today’s pages (p45-51) are some of the most touching in the whole book.
- Part 9
Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 9
The prisoners’ inner life was so important to their survival, whether it was the mundane nostalgic memory of catching the bus or answering telephone, or the…
- Part 10
The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 10
Today’s pages (p55-60) start with what must be one of the most shockingly apposite analogies in literature.
- Part 11
The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 11
Today’s pages (p60-64) start with the observation that, in the desperate fight for survival, the inmates could easily lose the feeling of being an individual…
- Part 12
The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 12
Today’s pages (p64-70) concern Viktor Frankl’s attitude to fate.
- Part 13
The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 13
Today’s pages (p70-74) bring us to the end of the Nazi rule of the concentration camp where Viktor Frankl was kept prisoner.
- Part 14
The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 14
In today’s pages (p74-78), Viktor Frankl sets out the first principles of his theory of logotherapy: addressing directly the question of man’s search for…
- Part 15
The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 15
In today’s pages (p78-83), Viktor Frankl addresses the dangers of the past, the sufferings of the present and the promise of the future.
- Part 16
The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 16
In today’s pages (p84-88), Frankl addresses head on the question of the meaning of life.
- Part 17
The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 17
Today’s pages (p88-91, a wee bit shorter) are recollections of a speech that Viktor Frankl gave to his fellow prisoners at the end of a particularly hard day.
- Part 18
The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 18
Today’s pages (p91-96) address the psychology of the camp guard, and the psychology of the prisoner after his liberation from a concentration camp.
- Part 19
The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 19
Today’s excerpt is a little shorter (p96-100), as we reach the end of Part 1 of Man’s Search for Meaning .
- Part 20
The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 20
Today’s pages (p103-108) mark the beginning of the second part of Man’s Search for Meaning : Logotherapy in a nutshell.
- Part 21
The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 21
Today’s pages are some of my favourite in the whole of Man’s Search for Meaning . I say that not lightly.
- Part 22
The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 22
Today’s pages (113-119) begin boldly, with the sub-heading The Meaning of Life . But of course, Frankl has no catechistic answer.
- Part 23
The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 23
Today’s pages (p119-125) begin, strangely enough, with something of a lament for the loss of clergymen as a professional resource for treating a loss of…
- Part 24
The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 24
Today’s pages (p125-131) address the logotherapeutic treatment of anticipatory anxiety, the excessive anxiety we all sometimes feel in anticipation of a…
- Part 25
The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 25
Today’s pages (p131-136) conclude the second part of Man’s Search for Meaning , ‘Logotherapy in a Nutshell’.
- Part 26
The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 26
Today’s pages (p139-144) open the final part of Man’s Search for Meaning , written as a postscript to the book in 1984: ‘The Case for Tragic Optimism’.
- Part 27
The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 27
Today’s pages (p145-149) address the question of the meaning of life itself. Finally – the promised land!
- Part 28
The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 28
Today’s pages (p149-154) commence with the second aspect of Viktor Frankl’s ‘tragic triad’: guilt.