Introduction
Man’s Search for Meaning is written by Viktor Frankl. The author talks about his personal experiences as a prisoner
in Holocaust. He was in a concentration camp. The story is presented in a form of an essay. In this essay, he is sharing arguments and analyses of himself as a psychologist and a doctor along with being a former prisoner. This paper is reviewing the story of Frankl along with the main arguments he had in his essay. It also evaluates the quality of the work by Frankl by having focus on the weak points in his essay.
Man’s Search for Meaning Analysis Review
The main aim of the writing is to present and analysis the normal prisoner’s psychological responses to the day to day life experiences at the concentration camp. The three leading arguments brought in this essay are the presentation and analysis of the psychological levels that are common in the concentration camps prisoner’s experiences. They include apathy, shock as well as depersonalization. The analyses in the essay are based on these levels and actions of prisoners along with the author’s thoughts and reaction that he experienced in the concentration camp.
The author argues that the second levels of apathy pushes the life of a prisoner down to a level that is primitive where all the efforts as well emotions are aimed at a particular task. The task is the keeping of one’s life as well as taking care of another colleague. The author based his theories on the experiences he had while he was personally in the camp. He is continuously using examples that he personally experienced in the concentration camp to bring out illustrations and add strength to the psychological arguments that are there throughout his essay.
Considering an evaluation of the essay, the author himself is a survivor of the Holocaust and he was also imprisoned in a concentration camp. Owing to these, the author has a personal insight that makes it easy for him to comment on the psychological conditions that a normal prisoner goes through. On the flipside, the experience that he has brings about an aspect of bias. Owing to his individual experiences, the author was not able to entirely maintain an objective writing and analyses. The author acknowledges bias in the introductory portions of his work. It is because of this that we understand that the author is aware of the bias though he still goes ahead to create a partiality that sways those who read the essay and at the same time serving as some sort of weakness in the authors style or writing.
At some points, the work is too technical and there is a lot of verbose in the essay. These aspects make the work kind of difficult to comprehend for the averages audience. Overly wordy sentences and complicated sentences make it hard for the readers to make understandings of what the author is writing about. The audience may easily feel frustration especially when they are toiling to decipher the meanings that the author was trying to bring out because of the technical language used by the author or because the author used complicated language in the work. These were leading weaknesses with the essay by Frankl.
Conclusion
Conclusively, this paper brought out an evaluation of Viktor Frankl. There are psychological theories that are presented in the essay that are quite interesting and the author does a wonderful work in giving illustrations of these theories based on his personal experiences. Other than this, the essay is weakened by the availability of biasness, there are assumptions that are overarching and at times the work contains terms that are technical and has verbose language.
Works Cited;
Frankl, Viktor E. Man’s search for meaning. Simon and Schuster, 1985.