May Audiobook: Man's Search or Meaning

With the height of COVID-19 lockdown in place (even in Florida), there isn't much to write about. On the positive side, I did finish another book on pace.

This month I listened to a classic in psychotherapy, Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl.

It is a relatively short book divided into two parts. In the first half, the author presents an autobiographical account of his time spent in several Nazi concentration camps during WWII. He acknowledges that much has been written from survivors (even in the time of the book's initial publication in 1946), so he chose to focus on the psychological effects during his imprisonment. As a psychologist and neurosurgeon before the War, he had a unique perspective of analyzing the horrors first hand, which, is the reason he chose to write the book in the first person rather than anonymously as he originally intended.

The second half of the book Frankl calls, Logotherapy in a Nutshell. This is his personal thesis on psychology which has often been placed in the category of existentialism. I found parts of this half interesting, including studies which scientifically confirm several tenants of the Law of Attraction, even without intending to. His methods discussed sometimes gave patients an immediate cure by providing them with a new perspective of how to view their "problem" or their reason for living.

As a psychologist starting out in Vienna in the early 1900s, Frankl was naturally a student of Fruedian theory. One part I considered particularly profound was his comments on Frued's thesis that if men were stripped of their role in civilization, down to their natural essence, they would work together to solve common problems such as hunger. Frankl returned to his experience in the holocaust and showed the opposite is true. When stripped from civilized society, man is unmasked and their true nature is exposed. Good men can become evil and simple men can rise to hero.

April Audiobook: A New Earth

I have completed several books since the last blog post about my monthly reading/listening but will skip right to April's featured audiobook:

Last month I completed A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle. I've already listened to The Power of Now twice, so moving on to Tolle's next significant book was natural.

This book was full of even more powerful lessons on living a better life. There are more examples of how to achieve happiness and inner peace: by doing nothing. In this book, Tolle goes on to explain how we don't need anything extra in our lives to achieve happiness or find meaning, we already have that which we need. He expands the discussion of this philosophy at the macro level and continues to draw on a wide variety of different religious and philosophical teachings from Eastern and Western cultures as well as anecdotes from his own life.

This is a book I will come back to again one day in the future.