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What Does Man's Search For Meaning Mean

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Man's Search for Meaning Paper In his novel “Man's Search for Meaning” Victor Frankl relates his experiences of being imprisoned in multiple concentration camps during the Second World War. He also gives a brief overview of his existential therapy logotherapy. Frankl was a psychiatrist trained in Freud’s theories before he was imprisoned in the concentration camps under the Nazi regime. Their he started observing his own and fellow prisoners behaviour and continued working on his theory that developed into logotherapy. Logotherapy concerns itself with a human's need to find meaning within their lives. Frankl believes it is vital for a human to find meaning in their life. He would often observe that those people that lost their meaning in life, while imprisoned in the concentration camps, would wither away due to their lost will to life (Frankl, 1984). …show more content…

This would require the person to concentrate on their future. However many of Freud's theory is based on a person's past experiences. This does not apply to Frankl's understanding of human nature and their will to find meaning within their lives. He also believes that every humans has their own personal meaning in life and that therefore not one universal truth exists about the meaning in people's lives. This also was not compatible with Freud’s theory since he tried to understand the collective reason for human behaviour. Therefore Frankl developed his own theory to match the observations he made and his believe on human

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From the small town of Sighet in Transylvania to the huge concentration camps of Auschwitz. Elie Wiesel, the author and victim of the book Night, the horrifying experience of the Holocaust. Wiesel is a 15 year old Jewish boy who was captured by the Germans or “Nazis” during WWII. He went through an overwhelming amount of trauma, like when he got separated from his mother and sisters and watching his father suffer an unbearable amount of pain that eventually killed him. The fact is, power is a tool that can corrupt itself and others, it can ruin people’s lives and it can do that without people even realizing it.

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The heart wrenching and powerful memoir “Night” by Elie Wiesel depicts Elie’s struggle through the holocaust. It shows the challenges and struggles Elie and people like him faced during this mournful time, the dehumanization; being forced out of their homes, their towns and sent to nazi concentration camps, being stripped of their belongings and valuables, being forced to endure and witness the horrific events during one of history’s most ghastly tales. In “Night” Elie does not only endure a physical journey but also a spiritual journey as well, this makes him question his determination, faith and strength. This spiritual journey is a journey of self discovery and is shown through Elie’s struggle with himself and his beliefs, his father

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Elie Wiesel was a young boy when he did survived the holocaust.. In his memoir Night, we follow his journey as a Jewish boy in a time where expressing your religion could mean life or death. Between living under the watch of Nazi regimes, trying to keep his father alive, and surviving the inhumanity of others, Elie’s had fought and lived through the genocide unlike any other. However, surviving the holocaust does not come without a price. Wiesel lived at the sacrifice of his faith and identity, which were left in fragments after the existence of evil that left a permanent scar on his life. At the start of life, a person will be given an identity that they will be able to shape and mold through experiences and beliefs.

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The severely cruel conditions of concentration camps had a profound impact on everyone who had the misfortune of experiencing them. For Elie Wiesel, the author of Night and a survivor of Auschwitz, one aspect of himself that was greatly impacted was his view of humanity. During his time before, during, and after the holocaust, Elie changed from being a boy with a relatively average outlook on mankind, to a shadow of a man with no faith in the goodness of society, before regaining confidence in humanity once again later in his life. For the first 13 years of his life, Elie seemed to have a normal outlook on humanity.

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“A traumatic experience robs you of your identity” (Dr.Bill). Concentration camps during the agonizing Holocaust disallowed their prisoners to obtain a personal identity. The renowned memoir, Night, written by Holocaust survivor, Eliezer Wiesel, published in 1954 expands the apprehension of the life altering challenges and torment the Jewish society encountered from 1933 to 1945. Identity consists of an individual's distinctive characteristics, beliefs and mannerisms which was forbidden for the Jewish hostages of the Holocaust to attain. Elie’s identity was shaped and reshaped by the traumatic experiences the Jewish community persevered through.

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Every life knows tragedy. While some tragedies may be greater than others, it is tragedy all the same. In his book Night, Elis Wiesel brings light to one of the most tragic events in our history The Holocaust. Wiesel describes his torturous treatment in the concentration camps, a place which stole everything from him: his home, his family, and even his faith in God. After seeing people tortured, gassed, and burned, Wiesel states, “my eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in the world without God, without man.

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The human condition is a very malleable idea that is constantly changing due to the current state of mankind. In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, the concept of the human condition is displayed in the worst sense of the concept, during the Holocaust of WWII. During this time, multiple groups of people, most notably European Jews, were persecuted against and sent to horrible hard labor and killing centers such as Auschwitz. In this memoir, Wiesel uses complex figurative language such as similes and metaphors to display the theme that a person’s state as a human, both at a physical and emotional level, can be altered to extreme lengths, and even taken away from them, under the most extreme conditions.

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As the time went by inside the camps, many wondered if it would be better to just give up, give up and forget all the misery they have gone through. To just let go and fall in the arms of god. However, for some that was not the case, they fought until they no longer had a sense of what they were doing and if it was the right thing to do. They had hope, hope that made them feel as if this was not real, that it would all pass soon. For example, Elie Wiesel said ”I pinched myself: Was I still alive?

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One such piece of literature is Elie Wiesel’s Night, a memoir illustrating his own experiences in German concentration camps, where every day was dominated by the impulse to stay alive. As Wiesel demonstrated repeatedly in his novel, during the Holocaust, self-preservation forced millions of victims to abandon family members and friends; commit desperate, sometimes suicidal, acts; and blinded many victims to the reality of their situations throughout the genocide. One of the most psychologically destructive aspects of the Holocaust was the forced isolation and selective targeting of Jewish victims, many of whom were killed or separated from one another. However,

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Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night tells the personal tale of his account of the inhumanity and brutality the Nazis showed during the Holocaust. Night depicts the story of a young Jew from the small town of Sighet named Eliezer. Wiesel and his family are deported to the concentration camp known as Auschwitz. He must learn to survive with his father’s help until he finds liberation from the horror of the camp. This memoir, however, hides a greater lesson that can only be revealed through careful analyzation.

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In the span of a lifetime one often faces many adversities that stand within their path.  While some challenges will be overcome easily, others will take a lot more tenacity. When in the face of adversity it is key not to give up. One should always strive to persevere through their hardships, no matter how severe they seem to be. The author of the memoir “Night” Elie Wiesel, vividly describes his experiences in the concentration camp of Auschwitz.

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His story displays how, though experiences affect decisions, it is the individual who chooses to either find purpose when there does not seem to be a clear objective, or allow one’s anguish to be fruitless. This concept is further explored with psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s idea of logotherapy, and discussed in Elie’s interview with talk show host Oprah Winfrey decades after the Holocaust. In Night, Elie is overwhelmed by his suffering, as he experiences a deprivation of individuality, degradation of faith, and drainage of emotion, but he manages to find a way to channel this affliction into productivity and become a survivor rather than a victim. It is easy to misunderstand how devastating life in a concentration camp was, but through Elie’s loss of identity and distrust in God, the reader can discern the

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Through character’s hope and perseverance in his memoir Night, Elie Wiesel conveys the theme that the love one holds for another is what fuels their will survive under strain. The Jews displacement by the Nazi’s downgraded them from their homes to filthy, plague-ridden, sewer like boxes of concrete that was Auschwitz. As a result of this many forgot their purpose to be alive. Wiesel shows that the need to survive those conditions was only supported by a sense of duty to one’s family to be there. When Stein says “Were it not for them, I would give up,”(45) he shows that their survival is the only thing keeping him upright.

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At times, it appears unviable for one’s life to transform overnight in just a few hours. However, this is something various individuals experienced in soul and flesh as they were impinged by those atrocious memoirs of the Holocaust. In addition, the symbolism portrayed throughout the novel Night, written by Elie Wiesel, presents an effective fathoming of the feelings and thoughts of what it’s like to undergo such an unethical circumstance. For instance, nighttime plays a symbolic figure throughout the progression of the story as its used to symbolize death, darkness of the soul,

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