Being and Nothingness for Sartre, and Man's Search for Meaning for Frankl. I think there is nuance in Sartre's thesis (nuance which, I felt, was lost in my classmates when we had to read it in my undergraduate's core coursework requirement), but his description of the despair of atheism/existentialism and, subsequently, the observation that this despair is actually a source of hope and liberation is quite explicitly what Phrossack is talking about. I dunno. Most of my classmates found it extremely depressing, but I found it very motivating/liberating/hopeful. The irony, to me at least, is that Frankl presents essentially the same argument in Man's Search for Meaning (seeking external motivation/permission for meaning will only result in despair; the discovery and pursuit of internal motivation is the only path to true self-worth) and that book was received far more enthusiastically by my classmates, with those same people who wrote off Sartre as depressing talking about how deeply inspirational Frankl was. Granted, saying "find something you love and do that," is far more rhetorically compelling when it's coming from a Holocaust survivor who is literally telling you the reason he didn't die in Auschwitz, rather than coming from an eminently French French Academic.
