Viktor Frankl

Who was Viktor Frankl? Who was this man who survived the Holocaust,

and through his sufferings changed the face of psychology forever. It takes a great man who through horrid conditions can take adversary and find the positive to convey to others.

In September of 1942, a young doctor, his new bride, his mother, father, and brother, were arrested in Vienna and taken to a concentration camp in Bohemia. It was events that occurred there and at three other camps that led the young doctor -- prisoner 119,104 -- to realize the significance of meaningfulness in life.

One of the earliest events to drive home the point was a significant moment that came while on a predawn march to work on laying railroad tracks, another prisoner wondered out loud about the fate of their wives. The young doctor began to think about his own wife, and realized that she was present within him:

“The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved”(1963, p. 59).

And throughout his tribulations he could not help but see that, among those given a chance for survival, it was those who held on to a dream of the future, whether it be a significant task before them, or a return to their loved ones, that were most likely to survive their suffering.

It would be, in fact, the meaningfulness that could be found in suffering itself that would most impress him:

“There is also purpose in that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man's attitude to his existence, and existence restricted by external forces.... Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete” (1963, p. 106).

That young doctor was Viktor Emil Frankl!

Life before the concentration camp could not have prepared him for the atrocities and the mayhem that awaited him. Frankl was born in Vienna into a Jewish family of civil servants. His interest for psychology surfaced early. For the final exam in Gymnasium, he wrote a paper on the psychology of philosophical thinking. After graduating from Gymnasium in 1923, he studied medicine at the University of Vienna and later specialized in neurology and psychiatry, while concentrating on the topics of depression and suicide. He had personal contact with Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler.

In 1924 he became the president of the Sozialistische Mittelschьler Цsterreich. In this position he offered a special program to counsel students during the time they were to receive their grades. During his residence, not a single Vienese student committed suicide. The success of this program grabbed the attention of the likes of Wilhelm Reich, who invited him to Berlin.

From 1933 to 1937 he headed the so-called Selbstmцrderpavillon, or "suicide pavilion", of the General Hospital in Vienna. Here, he treated over 30,000 women prone to suicide. Yet, starting in 1938, he was forbidden from treating Aryan patients due to his Jewish ethnicity. He moved into private practice until starting work in 1940 at the Rothschild Hospital, where he headed its neurological department. This hospital, at the time, was the only one in Vienna in which Jews were still admitted. Several times, his medical opinions saved patients from being euthanised by the Nazi euthanasia program.

Viktor Frankl’s theory and therapy grew out of his experiences in Nazi death camps. Watching who did and did not survive, he concluded that the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had it right: “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how” (Friedrich Nietzsche, quoted in 1963, p. 121). He saw that people who had hopes of being reunited with loved ones, or who had projects they felt a need to complete, or who had great faith, tended to have better chances than those who had lost all hope.

He called his form of therapy logo therapy, from the Greek word logos, which can mean study, word, spirit, God, or meaning. It is this last sense Frankl focuses on, although the other meanings are never far off. Comparing himself with those other great Viennese psychiatrists, Freud and Adler, he suggested that Freud essentially postulated a will to pleasure as the root of all human motivation, and Adler a will to power. Logo therapy suggests a will to meaning.

Frankl also uses the Greek word noцs, which means mind or spirit. In traditional psychology, he suggests, we focus on “psychodynamics,” which sees people as trying to reduce psychological tension. Instead, or in addition, Frankl says we should pay attention to noцdynamics, wherein tension is necessary for health, at least when it comes to meaning. People desire the tension