Man's Search for Meaning

What keeps this out of the category of ordinary Holocaust memoir is the second half, where Frankl steps back from testimony into theory, extracting logotherapy's central claim from what he'd just survived: that meaning, not pleasure or power, is the primary human drive, and that it can be located even inside conditions designed to strip it away. That pivot is also the book's most argued-over feature, some readers find the shift from witness to therapist jarring. But it's precisely that fusion that has kept the book in print and in curricula for eight decades.