Read pages 97 to 134 in MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING and Upload a Reading Log
For those of you reading ebooks, page 97 is the section entitled “Logotherapy in a Nutshell” which begins with the words “Readers of my short autobiographical story” and ends with the words “Shima Yisrael on his lips.” Make sure to watch this short video introductionLinks to an external site. to this section – it will help you understand it.
Reading Log Instructions for Man’s Search for Meaning
Remember, as you read, that one of the most important skills you can cultivate in college is the
ability to tolerate ambiguity. The ability to tolerate ambiguity is the ability to keep reading
(or writing an essay or participating in a discussion) even when you are not sure you
understand everything you are learning about and/or when you are not sure what you
think about what you are learning about. In other words, it means to keep exploring a
topic even when it’s confusing to you. You will feel confused when you are reading. Try to be
patient and keep reading. After a while, you will start to see you understand more than you think
and that you don’t need to understand everything all the time to learn and develop your skills.
Remember: this assignment is graded only on thoughtful completion. You don’t have to be
“right” about anything here. You just have to be honest. Do your best, but don’t worry about
being perfect.
1. What Schema and Vocabulary You Learned: Jot down 5 words or references you
looked up on the Britannica link on our Canvas page, and put in your own words what
they mean or refer to.
2. What Makes Sense to You – Jot down 3 or 4 things you think you understand from this
part of the reading. It could be something Frankl is telling us about his experiences in the
concentration camps or something else – whatever seems clear.
3. What Confuses You – Pick a sentence or a paragraph from the reading where you felt
especially lost and indicate which one it was here. You don’t have to copy it down. Just
write “third paragraph on page 29” or “the sentence that begins with … on page 32.”
Then try to form 2 or 3 questions about it – e.g. “What does he mean when he says …?”
You might use one of the sentence frames from the sentence frame handout to help you
form your questions.
4. What You Think This Part of the Book is About – Whenever a writer writes
something, it is because he or she is trying to change our thinking in some way. What do
you think Frankl is trying to show us or explain to us about his experience in the camps?
What does he most want us to know that we might not have known before?
5. Your “Golden Line” and Why You Picked It – Pick a sentence or two from the reading
that stands out to you. It could stand out to you because you agree with it, because it
reminds you of something in your own experience, because you hate it or disagree with
it, or for some other reason. Jot it down here and write 2 or 3 sentences about why you
picked it.
Sentence Frames You Might Want to Use in Your Reading Log or to Contribute to the
Discussion
What does __________ mean?
Why is _____________ doing that?
What does ___________ mean when he says _______________?
Something that really confuses me is ________________.
One question I have is …
I don’t know what ______________ means, but one guess I have is … because …
What the author is trying to say here is …
This part surprised me because …
This part confused me because …
I think what is going on here is that …. but what I still don’t get is ….
I thought this was funny because …
This reminded me of … because
One thing I wondered about is …
Students, I just wanted to say a few things about the very last part of Man’s Search for Meaning which you’re going to be, you’re going to be reading
Got two more readings in the book, but
For Sunday, you’re reading this section about logo therapy, which is the school of psychology logo therapy, in a nutshell, which is the school of psychology that
Viktor Frankl developed and founded after you get out of the concentration camps and there’s a lot of kind of technical language in this section. And so I wanted to say just a few things about it. And the most important thing you need to know is that Viktor Frankl was Austrian and he
Was a student of psychiatry.
In the 30s and 40s and at that time. Many of you probably already know this.
Psychology is a field in general was very dominated by Freud Sigmund Freud. I wonder why my computer there.
And Sigmund Freud.
Found you know sort of discovered the subconscious. The idea that
Sometimes what we’re doing we’re doing for reasons that even we don’t understand. So it really over simplified version of
A psycho analytic way of looking at something or looking at a problem, a person faces is like, let’s say,
A woman was raised when she was a kid. Her father was an abuser. And he’d beat up.
Her mother and maybe he beat her up when she was a kid and so
Often, and I mean this is there’s data on this often people who grew up in abusive homes. If they don’t have some get some kind of help or counseling, they often repeat those patterns so
For example, a woman might fall in love a woman who’s grown up in an abusive home might fall in love with a man who or woman who is abusive.
And Freud would say that’s because people sort of unconsciously are still trying to work out conflicts from childhood. So that’s a very general.
Description of a psychological psychoanalytic approach.
To, you know, problems is this idea Sigmund Freud, we have that said we have the subconscious and we don’t you know
When we make choices that don’t seem that rational, it may be because there’s something we have this hidden part of our mind that we don’t understand ourselves and we don’t consciously think I’m going to go out and I’m going to marry a guy like my dad.
But sometimes we do
So,
Freud was a believer and it’s certain kind of personal counseling called psycho analysis and it was very focused on talking about your family and your childhood and what your childhood was like, and for I believed that
You know, you know, if we will, if we have if we have
That it may be because this the roots of those problems came from our child.
So the reason I’m telling you all about Freud and an English class is because Viktor Frankl when he started practicing psychiatry and everything that psychiatrists did
Was very dominated by this idea that we have a subconscious that we don’t understand. And if we want to solve our problems, we need to
Talk about our childhood and try to find the root causes of our problems. So a lot of what Viktor Frankl is doing in this next section of the book is saying, you know, psycho analysis is fine, but here’s this other way of helping people with their problems. So
I think that’s it. I just want you to understand that historical context Frankel is basically saying, not every personal problem can be traced to our parents or our family or her childhood some personal problems.
Have other root causes and
He promotes logo therapy as sort of an alternative to psychoanalysis. So I hope that helps you with this next section of the book, and we’ll be talking about it. Okay.
