Viktor Frankl

Viktor Frankl (born March 26, 1905, Vienna, Austria—died September 2, 1997, Vienna) was an Austrian psychiatrist and psychotherapist who developed the psychological approach known as logotherapy, widely recognized as the “third school” of Viennese psychotherapy, after the “first school” of Sigmund Freud and the “second school” of Alfred Adler. The basis of Frankl’s theory was that the primary motivation of an individual is the search for meaning in life and that the primary purpose of psychotherapy should be to help the individual find that meaning.

Frankl’s father was a civil servant in Vienna. The younger Frankl showed an early interest in psychology, and in secondary school he studied psychology and philosophy. As a teenager, he entered into a correspondence with Freud, who asked permission to publish one of his papers. While he was a student at the University of Vienna Medical School, Frankl studied Adler’s theories and delivered lectures on individual psychology. He took a particular interest in studying depression and suicide, and he set up youth counseling centers in Vienna in a successful effort to decrease teen suicide in the city.

After earning a doctorate in medicine in 1930, Frankl joined the staff of the Am Steinhof psychiatric hospital in Vienna, where he headed the female suicide prevention program from 1933 to 1937. He subsequently established a private practice but, he being Jewish, was forced to close it after Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938. He then became chief of neurology at Vienna’s Rothschild Hospital, which served the Jewish population. Antisemitism was on the rise, however, and in 1942 Frankl and his family were sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where his father perished. In 1944 the surviving Frankls were taken to Auschwitz, where his mother was exterminated; his wife died later in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. As Frankl observed the brutality and degradation around him, he theorized that those inmates who had some meaning in their lives were more likely to survive; he himself tried to recreate the manuscript of a book he had been writing before his capture.

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Following liberation, Frankl returned to Vienna, where he became head of the neurological department at the General Polyclinic hospital. He produced the classic book Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationslager (1946; “A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp”; published in English as Man’s Search for Meaning), which he dictated to a team of assistants in nine days and which went on to sell millions of copies in dozens of languages. Frankl also taught at the University of Vienna until 1990 and at a number of American universities. A few months before his death, he published Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning and Recollections: An Autobiography. The Viktor Frankl Institute in Vienna was founded in 1992 to further his work.