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An excellent book, sir, and a good recommendation.
I offer my recommendation in turn for Man's Search For Meaning, by Viktor Frankl, a German psychoanalyst who went on to become one of the founders of Humanistic Psychology. The first part of the book is a searing and sobering account of the author's suffering in Auschwitz. The second part is a brilliant and unbelievably relevant and useful discussion of the author's theory that those who survived Auschwitz were those who clung to something meaningful-- anything, be it religion, hate for the Nazis, a desire for vengeance, a desire to return to their home, to find their family, to play music again...anything, as long as it was something. Those for whom all lost meaning died or allowed themselves to die or took their own lives. Thus, he argues, meaning is what ultimately drives us all, and when we look within ourselves for what motivates us to keep going, we are really asking what is most enduringly meaningful to us. A gorgeous piece of work.
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Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.
(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)
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