Description

Viktor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning sold over 10 million copies and was translated into over 30 languages and was deemed by a survey of the Library of Congress one of “the ten most influential books in America”. This volume introduces and presents translations of a number of important but less well-known writings by Viktor Frankl, translated from the original German, in which he forthrightly relates psychology to religious concepts. These cast a strong, new light on the generally received understanding of Frankl’s contribution to psychology – “logotherapy” – and its relationship to the soul and universal ethics.

About the authors: Rabbi Dr Shimon Cowen, son of a former Governor-General of Australia, Sir Zelman Cowen OBM, has a dual background in secular and religious studies. He has a PhD in social philosophy. He has been a Senior Research Fellow at Monash University and Program Director of a postgraduate Rabbinic Institute, the Kollel Menachem Lubavitch in Melbourne. In 1998 he “fused” these strands in the establishment of the Institute for Judaism and Civilization as its founding Director.

Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl  is famous for his celebrated 1946 memoir Man’s Search for Meaning  – an examination on what the gruesome experience of Auschwitz taught him about the primary purpose of life: the quest for meaning, which sustained those who survived, and is a vital tool in psychological practice.