Product Description

Even in the degradation and misery of Dachau concentration camp Viktor Frankl retained the belief that the most important freedom of all is the freedom to determine one's own spiritual well-being. He wrote the international bestseller 'Man's Search for Meaning' as a result of that experience while in 'The Doctor and the Soul' Dr Fankl revolutionised psychotherapy with his theory of logotherapy. Viktor Frankl's work has been described as "the most important contributions in the field of psychotherapy since the days of Freud, Adler and Jung". In 'The Doctor and the Soul' Dr Frankl maintains that the individual's most important need is to find meaning in life and the frustration of this need results in neurosis, suffering and dispair. A doctor's work lies in finding personal meaning in a patient's life, no matter how dismal the circumstances of the life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #46419 in Books
• Published on: 2004-04-19
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

'Positive Health'
"His most important book... gives an existential and spiritual dimension to
the work of psychotherapy."

'Psychologies'
"Viktor Frankl's writings are an inspiration... We learn most from those who suffer most."

About the Author
Dr Viktor Frankl was the leading figure of the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy. He was born in Vienna in 1905 and on being freed from Dachau concentration camp found that his family had been almost entirely wiped out in the Holocaust. He went on to hold professorships at universities around the world, including Harvard University and the University of Vienna.

Customer Reviews

A shining light in the darkness of the moral relativsm.
Adler thought all human motivation was based on the will to power, manifesting itself in men's desires to get rich and to exercise dominion and women's desire to marry such men. Freud thought all human motivation was based on the will to sex, that is to say the will to procreate the manifestations of which we see in our sex obsessed society. Frankl shows that the misplacement of these desires in the center of human life causes all of the psychological turmoil under which our society suffers. He shows that by putting (dare I say) God, and the purpose for which He created each individual at the center of human existence (the will to meaning), love (misunderstood as the will to sex) and creativity (misunderstood as the will to power)are put into a proper perspective. Frankl's treatise makes the insights of Adler and Freud useful to the religious individual who consider either of these great psychologists secular humanist riff-raff. More over it renders the endless the tangled web weaved by psychoanalysis unnecessary as it shows how understanding oneself as a purposeful being one can alleviate all the binding ties of compulsion, addiction, and irrational fear. INCREDIBLE.