Viktor Frankl Critical Essay | Critical Review by Dan P. McAdams

SOURCE: "The Best of Us Did Not Return," in Contemporary Psychology, Vol. 39, No. 2, February, 1994, pp. 130-31.

McAdams is an American psychologist, educator, and author of The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self (1993). In the following review of Man's Search for Meaning, originally titled From Death-Camp to Existentialism, he focuses on the meaning Frankl's concentration camp experiences may have for a new generation of readers.

In 1945, shortly after his release from a Nazi concentration camp, Viktor E. Frankl spent nine intensive days writing Ein Psycholog Erlebt das Konzentrationslager, a psychological account of his three years in Auschwitz, Dachau, and other Nazi prison camps. The original German version bears no name on the cover because Frankl was initially committed to publishing an anonymous account that would never earn its author literary fame. Expanded to include a short overview of "logotherapy," the...
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