Man's Search for Meaning
Viktor Frankl's account of the camps and the logotherapy he built from it — meaning as the thing that survives when everything else is taken.
Two books in one: a first-person account of Auschwitz, and the clinical theory Frankl derived from it. The theory is only credible because of the account.
The central claim is that the last human freedom — the choice of one's attitude in any given set of circumstances — cannot be taken, and that meaning is found rather than manufactured: in work, in love, and in the stance one takes toward unavoidable suffering. Frankl is careful that this is not optimism. He is explicit that the best did not survive.
It sits next to Psalm 88 in my head for the same reason. Both refuse to make suffering instrumental, and both insist there is something left to do inside it anyway.
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