I had put off reading this book for years, an act of avoidance that I now see has been my loss. I shied away from details of his life in concentration camps (thinking - I know it was terrible. I don’t need to read more about it) but it’s actually a book full of hopefulness as well as suffering.

75 years after Auschwitz was liberated, it was time to read this book. It offered  a perspective on ‘the meaning of life’ that I seem to need just now. It has inspired and comforted me, and moved me to action, in several ways that I look forward to sharing with you over the next weeks.

Frankl was a young psychiatrist when he was imprisoned. The book relates how his approach to mental health was shaped by his terrible experiences in concentration camps. He survived to develop his ‘logotherapuetic’ approach to psychiatry, which centres around our need for meaning in our lives. To find a meaning for one’s life, he says, to have a future goal, is what keeps us alive.

If you’re reading this blog, you’ve already made living a poetic life into part of your life’s meaning, or you have an inkling that you would like to. I find Frankl’s work offers important new perspectives on how this can be, and I’ll be sharing four key points from Frankl’s work with you:

1.     Finding meaning in our lives is, for each of us, our own particular task.

2.     Meaning is always available to be found.

3.     Suffering offers a meaningful goal – “to turn one’s predicament into a human achievement”.

4.     What we have done in the past remains, like a storehouse of “deeds, joys, and sufferings”, and still matters.