The 3 best books by Viktor Emil Frankl

Psychiatry and literature always come together with a point of darkness when it comes to fiction. Because nothing better than getting lost in the recesses of the mind to discover a disturbing labyrinth of drives, inner voices and endless dream scenes. There are a thousand novels and movies about madness, obsessions or any pathologies that reveal to us the wonderful and disturbing stridencies of our universe within the brain.

In a middle ground, with much more informative intention than narrative, but with the same charm, we find the fascinating Oliver sacks and his literature of experimentation. Nothing better than the practical example and the daring with which to open new channels of science to finally attract lay people to the field of each one.

Today it is time to undertake the bibliography of another great neurologist and psychiatrist. A Victor Emil Frankl whose regrettable circumstances led him to the least expected experimentation. Because in the concentration camps where he survived for 3 years he unfortunately approached the limits of psychic degradation from the merely functional due to starvation, to the naturally emotional due to the brutality of the experiences.

From authors such as Sacks or Frankl we can approach psychiatry as something more than disclosure. or even as a source from which to discover aspects of sublimation, resilience, or everything that may provide relief and a spring with which to cope with sorrows or hardships.

Top 3 Recommended Books by Viktor Emil Frankl

Man's Search for Meaning

Becoming in this world has little sense in itself. The thing is not to lose taste in things and to enjoy precisely what is peremptory. Finding answers is better the less you do. But that goes against the human condition, curious ad nauseam.

Something very different is that, without the slightest sense of things, you discover, as Viktor Frankl confirmed, that the world is a gray space, as if it were made of sinister fog. And then yes, the questions inevitably come because every day, every hour, every second, could be the last. And faced with the imperative of existence hanging by a thread we can only have doubts. We find all of them and their answers in this book of disturbing lucidity.

Man's Search for Meaning is the shocking story in which Viktor Frankl tells us about his experience in the concentration camps. During all those years of suffering, he felt in his own being what a naked existence meant, absolutely devoid of everything except existence itself. He, who had lost everything, who suffers from hunger, cold and brutality, who was on the verge of being executed so many times, was able to recognize that, despite everything, life is worth living and that interior freedom and human dignity They are indestructible.

As a psychiatrist and prisoner, Frankl reflects with words of surprising hope on the human capacity to transcend difficulties and discover a profound truth that guides us and gives meaning to our lives. Logotherapy, a psychotherapeutic method created by Frankl himself, focuses precisely on the meaning of existence and the search for that meaning by man, who assumes responsibility before himself, before others and before life.

What does life expect of us? The man in search of meaning is much more than the testimony of a psychiatrist about the facts and events lived in a concentration camp, it is an existential lesson. Translated into fifty languages, millions of copies have been sold worldwide. According to the Library of Congress in Washington, it is one of the ten most influential books in the United States. "One of the few great books of humanity." Karl Jaspers

Man's Search for Meaning

The ignored presence of God

God did not exist for that 12 or 13-year-old friend who was already coming to life with the certainty of his uprooting. And it is that one discovers, more in the mirrors of the first good friends than in the parents, at least the first doubts that sustain the pillars of a life that only faith gives some paradoxical coherence to our reason.

God is the one who doesn't listen to you when you beg very loudly for something. Or maybe it's just that he saves it for the end, like great novels and their twists. In exchange only faith and hope remains. And of course, a survivor of the Nazi holocaust knows a lot about imploring and believing so as not to succumb to the horrors. Then you can theorize about God and propose premises or axioms towards faith, like mathematical formulas. It's all a matter of science and reflections of impossible empiricism.

Viktor E. Frankl, known worldwide for his work Man's Search for Meaning and as the founder of Logotherapy, also known as the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy, shows us in this book that man is not only dominated by an unconscious impulsivity, as Freud claims, but there is also an unconscious spirituality in him. Starting from the model of consciousness and the interpretation of dreams, enriched with examples from his clinical practice, Frankl manages to persuade the reader, by empirical means, that a religiosity underlies man that implies "the unknown presence of God." .

The ignored presence of God

Before the existential emptiness. Towards a humanization of psychotherapy

In the end there is always a component in psychiatry of will for the cure. This "medice cura te ipsum" is an appeal to us, doctors to ourselves. Hence the strenuous effort of psychiatry to reinforce the fact of medical consultation. Because we are so stubborn as to need the feeling that someone guides us in all therapy. To finally discover that everything depended on us, except finding the key, of course ...

Besides a "deep" psychology there is also a "higher" psychology. The latter is the one that Frankl wants to present to us in this work: the one that includes the will to meaning in his field of vision. Each age has its neuroses and each age needs its psychotherapy. Today we are faced with an existential frustration charged with a lack of meaning and a great feeling of emptiness.

The society of opulence only satisfies needs, but not the will to make sense. The radical tendency of man seeks the meaning of life and tries to fill it with content. This short volume offers the reader a content of dense and, at the same time, resplendent humanism, copiously documented, with critical judgments so considered, that it deserves a careful reading.

Before the existential emptiness. Towards a humanization of psychotherapy
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