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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What is the name of the school of therapy that Frankl stands for?

2. What is the existential vacuum?

3. What did Frankl speak to his fellow prisoners about when their morale was low?

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

5. How does Frankl define the difference between how he and Jean-Paul Sartre define the meaning of our existence?

Short Essay Questions

1. What is the meaning of love in logotherapy?

2. What were some of the negative things that former prisoners had to deal with after their release?

3. What does Frankl write happened to prisoners who lost hope in the future?

4. What does Frankl argue should supplement the Statue of Liberty and why?

5. In what way does Frankl argue that prisoners could retain "the last of the human freedoms?"

6. How does Frankl describe the character of the prisoners and the guards?

7. What prompted Frankl to speak to the prisoners about hope? What did he say?

8. What happened when a patient who had been through psychoanalysis went to logotherapy? What difference between these approaches does Frankl illustrate with this account?

9. What was the third stage of a the prisoner's mental reaction? How does Frankl characterize this?

10. What is the importance of suffering for Frankl?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Frankl writes of how two men who were contemplating suicide seemed to have lost meaning in their lives. He writes, "In both cases it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them." How does Frankl understand and describe those who commit suicide? What role does finding the meaning in their lives play for him? Does he sympathize with their despair over their feeling of meaningless and suffering? Does he understand suicide to be a choice, or a simple reaction to unfavorable circumstances? Is this understood as characteristic of neurosis?

Essay Topic 2

Frankl writes, "Noogenic neuroses do not emerge from conflicts between drives and instincts but rather from conflicts between various values; in other words, from moral conflicts, or, to speak in a more general way, from spiritual problems." What role do Noogenic neuroses play in his theory of logotherapy?

Essay Topic 3

Frankl writes about the importance of the malnutrition, or starving, of the prisoners at Auschwitz; What consequences did this have in terms of the prisoner's daily speech? How did it affect their dreams? What does Frankl argue that this starving of the prisoners prevented in camp life?

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