Viktor Frankl

Born on March 26, 1905, in Vienna, the second of three children in a Jewish civil servant’s family, Viktor Emil Frankl demonstrated an early fascination with psychology, corresponding with Sigmund Freud as a teenager and publishing his first psychoanalytic paper at the age of nineteen. He studied medicine at the University of Vienna, where he was influenced by both Freud and Alfred Adler before developing his own approach , logotherapy, from the Greek logos, meaning “meaning” , which held that the primary drive in human life is not pleasure or power but the search for purpose. He organized youth counseling centers in Vienna during the 1930s and headed the neurological department at Rothschild Hospital, the only hospital in Vienna still admitting Jews. In 1942 he, his wife Tilly, and his parents were deported to Theresienstadt; he was subsequently transferred to Auschwitz and then to Kaufering and Türkheim, satellite camps of Dachau. His father, mother, brother, and wife all perished. Liberated in April 1945, Frankl returned to Vienna and dictated in nine days the manuscript that would become Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), which recounted his camp experiences and outlined logotherapy’s core insight: that even in the most degrading circumstances, humans retain the freedom to choose their attitude. The book has sold over sixteen million copies and been translated into more than fifty languages. He rebuilt his career, becoming professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Vienna, lecturing worldwide, and writing thirty-nine books. He died on September 2, 1997, in Vienna, at the age of ninety-two.