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If there is one person who is qualified to talk about life and purpose, it is Viktor E. Frankl. I had not heard of this book until recently. As soon as I did, I bought it!

The edition I own has an excellent introduction by Daniel Goleman. Additionally, the book contains three lectures from Viktor Frankl.

Viktor Frankl seems to have delivered these lectures soon after World War II ended. This experience would shatter most people. But he went on with his life, resuming his work in therapy. Maybe this was therapy for him.

He has dedicated the first two lectures in the book to suicide. Why do people commit suicide, he asks? Is it cowardice, or do they just lose hope? Possibly, as he suggests, they have lost their sense of purpose.

In the last lecture, he draws lessons from his experiences in the concentration camp. When you read Viktor Frankl, it is important to remember he faced some horrifying experiences in the concentration camps. He lost his family during the War. But for a strong sense of purpose that kept him alive, he would have perished.

I found a deeper connection with his other book, ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’. His description of his experiences was deeply emotional. Moreover, he did not curse or abuse the Germans. Nor was there any rancor in his narrative. Yet, despite the almost calm manner in which he wrote the book, it affected me deeply.

In contrast, the lectures in the book are dry. They are precise, almost medical lectures. He has treated the subject rather intellectually. Yet, you will find some deep lessons that you can learn.
You just need to read this little book slowly and with patience.

Having said all this, “Yes to life In Spite of Everything” is a powerful title. It is about life and purpose. The title calls to you and asks you to hold on to courage and faith.

There is light at the end of the tunnel you can find. But for this, you must possess the courage to hold on to your purpose in life. ( )

This is the text of a series of three lectures given in 1946 by Viktor Frankl, the Auschwitz survivor famous for his book Man's Search for Meaning about his philosophy of finding a sense of purpose and meaning even in the direst of circumstances a human being can live through. These lectures further elaborate on his philosophy, raw and fresh barely a year after his liberation from the camps. He had managed to survive through his belief in an ultimate sense of purpose in life, a belief that every human being, must find and live out their own sense of purpose, be it big or small, to live their lives fully.

He saw this as the positive extrapolation of Friedrich Nietzsche's declaration that "Whoever has a why to live can bear almost any how. " Frankl saw in this "an explanation for the will to survive he noted in some fellow prisoners. Those who found a larger meaning and purpose in their lives, who had a dream of what they could contribute, were......more likely to survive than were those who gave up." Ultimately while the Nazis were able to take away a camp inmate's possessions, name and very identity, the one thing they could not take was a person's freedom of choice to decide how they would react in a given set of circumstances, by retaining some inner hope for the future, however slim it might objectively seem to be realisable.

He concludes: "when the inmates in the Buchenwald concentration camp sang in their song, ‘We still want to say yes to life’, they did not only sing about it, but also achieved it many times – they and many of us in the other camps as well. And they achieved it under unspeakable conditions, external and internal conditions that we have already spoken enough about today. So shouldn’t we all be able to achieve it today in, after all, incomparably milder circumstances? To say yes to life is not only meaningful under all circumstances – because life itself is – but it is also possible under all circumstances." A strong lesson in positive thinking that we all could usefully benefit from in today's very challenging and harrowing, but clearly less extreme, circumstances, and especially poignant in the week of Holocaust Memorial Day. ( )

He spent three years in concentration camps, including Auschwitz. His entire family ,including his pregnant wife were killed in the camps. Despite this, months after liberation Frankel gave a series of lectures in the purpose and sanctity if life. This book is a concentrated telling of three of those lectures. The amazing part is that his talks still have value, not only to remind us of the past but the application to our current life, the situation in which we know find ourselves.

"our perspective on life's events-what we make of them-matters as much or more than what actually befalls us. "Fate" is what happens to us beyond our control. But we each are responsible for how we relate to those events."

"Pleasure in itself cannot give our existence meaning; this the lack of pleasure cannot take away meaning from life, which already seems obvious to us.

Hard won wisdom from a special man.. ( )

Der von mir sehr verehrte Viktor Frankl schildert aus psychologischer Sicht seine Zeit im KZ. Beeindruckend. ( )