Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning Book

A lot of this book is religious drivel. Frankl's main intent, I think, is to sell his come-to-Jesus mode of therapy. In the course of this, he does advance a few profound and interesting theses.

For those who don't find their street-corner proselytizer particularly compelling, I'd recommend reading chapters 1 & 2 (bear with his utterly disingenuous introduction of the spiritual as merely that which is unique to man, which he later labels the noölogical), page 43 (for artists), the first two pages of chapter 4, and chapter 8. There's a lot of neat stuff in chapter 8.

Frankl is convincing exactly when he's talking about therapy. Outside his field, he consistently misunderstands the ideas he argues against (the death of God, the white savior critique, materialism), and when he does understand someone (p. 64, Sartre), they trounce him in his own book. Regarding materialism, either he misunderstands it as a psychiatric theory, or he actually believes that therapy is prior to ontology. Either is pitiable.

Frankl's misunderstanding of the death of God is, I think, the biggest shortcoming of this book. Frankl understands the death of God to be something personal, rather than, to paraphrase a contemporary theorist, about the drying up of a wellspring of meaning, and with it a whole form of human life. A great deal of this book is concerned with assertion that a lot of psychological maladjustment entails from a lack of a sense of meaning in one's life. He is correct in blaming God's death for this modern loss of meaning. He just doesn't know what we mean when we say God is dead, like the child who thinks Grandpa will come back some day, not understanding that it is not a mere absence but that something fundamentally has changed in the world.