View a FREE sample

This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What does Frankl term supra-meaning?
(a) A spiritual understanding that transcends our ability to describe it in words.
(b) A level of understanding meaning that transcends the individual and can only be understood within groups.
(c) He does not use this term.
(d) An ultimate meaning that transcends man's intellectual capabilities.

2. How does the existential vacuum manifest itself?
(a) Anxiety.
(b) A sense of guilt.
(c) Boredom.
(d) Depression.

3. What caused former prisoners to feel bitterness?
(a) The lack of response from people in prisoners' former hometowns.
(b) That the SS also went free.
(c) That they lost the company of their former prisonmates.
(d) The fact that they lost nearly all of their material wealth, and had to start anew.n

4. What are the ways that logotherapy believes meaning in life can be found?
(a) Through meditation and following an inner voice.
(b) Through deeds, experiencing a value, or suffering.
(c) Through love and service.
(d) Through art, love, and meditation.

5. What happened to the senior block warden who had a dream that he would be free on March thirtieth?
(a) He committed suicide a month prior.
(b) He had another dream on March thirtieth that they would be freed on July third.
(c) He fell ill on March thirty-first and died a month later.
(d) He died on March thirty-first.

6. What choice does the author claim that people can control in difficult circumstances?
(a) "We can all always choose our breathing patterns, which influence our mood, and that influences our actions."
(b) "In any circumstance... man can choose his own reaction, we can all choose to focus on love."
(c) "People, even in these horrible circumstances, can control the way that they treat others."
(d) "Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, or independence of mind..."

7. What does Frankl term "pan-determinism".
(a) The psychoanalytic tendency to ignore that man makes some decisions.
(b) This is not a term used in the text.
(c) The idea that religious ideas are unimportant.
(d) The tendency in therapy for patients to blame others rather than taking responsibility for their own lives.

8. Why does Dr. Frankl describe that he sits next to corpses "crawling with lice" but they did not bother him?
(a) He was thankful, as he looked at these corpses, that he had not yet died.
(b) He was happy, sitting near these corpses, thinking about the lives that he was able to save as a doctor.
(c) He mentions this to illustrate the ideas that he was so emotionally detached that he simply didn't care who was near him.
(d) This was a space where he could find short periods of solitude.

9. What does Frankl write was the most depressing feature of life in a concentration camp?
(a) Feeling impotent to affect the future.
(b) Stress in general.
(c) Losing a sense of individuality.
(d) Not knowing how long the imprisonment would last.

10. How did Frankl himself realize he was free?
(a) He returned to work, and was treated with respect by his clients for the first time in years.
(b) He saw a former fellow prisoner, and they realized how different they each looked.
(c) When walking down the street, someone called his name, and he realized that he had his identity back.
(d) Walking alone in a field, he fell to his knees, recalling his former prayers for freedom.

11. What does Frankl write about the moral drive?
(a) When it is not addressed serious, it can have serious consequences.
(b) It is an important drive.
(c) No such drive can ever exist.
(d) It was ignored by Freud, but Frankl discovered it.

12. What "deep concern" does Frankl write helped him to survive Auschwitz?
(a) His desire to serve others.
(b) His desire to get even with the SS.
(c) His desire to find his mom.
(d) His desire to rewrite a manuscript.

13. What kind of statue does Frankl argue should compliment the Statue of Liberty?
(a) A Statue of Hope.
(b) A Statue of Meaning.
(c) A Statue of Responsibility.
(d) A Statue of Memory.

14. What importance does Frankl give to the numbers assigned to prisoners?
(a) The use of numbers was part of a program to erase the prisoner's name, history, and past.
(b) These were assigned because they were simpler and more economical to tattoo on prisoner's bodies than full names.
(c) This was a method devised at Auschwitz in order to easily track prisoners that were transported from one concentration camp to another.
(d) This was just one more humiliation.

15. What does Frankl write about those with very difficult circumstances, such as being diagnosed with a terminal illness?
(a) He believes that people can rise above his outward fate.
(b) Frankl believes that these circumstances would cause anyone to suffer terribly.
(c) He believes that those who are discreet and do not complain can die with dignity.
(d) He writes that these circumstances create martyrs.

Short Answer Questions

1. What is the existential vacuum?

2. What happened, according to the author, to the instinct to violence in the prisoners?

3. What does Frankl call "existential frustration"?

4. What role does suffering play in life, according to Frankl?

5. What did Frankl try to teach a former prisoner who felt that he could trample crops in a field because he had been through so much himself?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 1,015 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample