Viktor Frankl and the Book of Job

A Search for Meaning

by Marshall H. Lewis

Book cover: Viktor Frankl and the Book of Job

Extent: 148 pages

Publisher: James Clarke & Co

Subjects: Biblical Studies

Language: English

Paperback (No longer our product)

(August 2020)

ISBN: 9780227177273

5.98 x 9.02 inches

Price: $29.00

In stock

An analysis of the Book of Job and its themes of meaning and suffering through the writings of the existential psychologist Viktor E. Frankl.


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.

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.

  • By (author) Marshall H Lewis

"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
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