Viktor Frankl and the Book of Job: A Search for Meaning

by Marshall H Lewis

Overview

As a Holocaust survivor, neurologist and psychiatrist Dr Viktor E. Frankl had a personal stake in the effectiveness of his approach to psychology: he lived the suffering about which he wrote. With this new reading of the Book of Job, Lewis further develops Frankl's concept of Logotherapy as a literary hermeneutic, presenting readers with the opportunity to discover unique meanings and clarify their attitudes toward pain, guilt, and death. Key issues emerge from the discussion of three different movements, which address Frankl's concept of the feeling of meaninglessness and his rejection of reductionism and nihilism, the dual nature of meaning, and his ideas of ultimate meaning and self-transcendence. Discovering meaning through participation with the text enables us to see that Job's final response can become a site for transcending suffering.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780227177273
Publisher:	James Clarke & Co. Ltd
Publication date:	08/27/2020
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x (d)

About the Author

Marshall H. Lewis is a psychotherapist and logotherapist who has practiced for over thirty years. He is a frequent speaker on Viktor Frankl's theory and serves on the faculty of the Viktor Frankl Institute of Logotherapy. His graduate training in psychology and doctoral training in Bible, culture, and hermeneutics led him to write this book.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations v

Foreword Alexander Batthyány vii

1 The Terrible Paradox of Suffering 1

2 Viktor Frankl's Logotherapy 22

3 Logotherapy and Hermeneutics 39

4 Job and Frankl's Existential Vacuum 57

5 Job and Frankl's Will to Meaning 82

6 Job and Frankl's Self-Transcendence 103

7 The Eyes of a Child 119

Bibliography 125

Index 131

Illustrations

Figure 1 Frankl's Dimensional Ontology 30

Figure 2 Frankl's First Law of Dimensional Ontology 32

Figure 3 Frankl's Second Law of Dimensional Ontology 33

Editorial Reviews

"Applying Victor Frankl's logotherapy to the book of Job, Marshall Lewis sees Job as one forced to make sense of what appears to be an absurd situation. A fresh reading of both Frankl and Job, Lewis, following Frankl, argues that while any experience can be made meaningful, in the end we are sometimes better off accepting a world in which suffering has no meaning, at least at present. A bold and ambitious reading that respects the text of Job as much as it does the texts of Frankl, the book uses Frankl to construct a new hermeneutic of reading." C. Fred Alford, Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland, College Park, and author of After the Holocaust: The Book of Job, Primo Levi, and the Path to Affliction

From the Publisher