Ayelet Schrek
Jerry Long Jr. was paralyzed from the neck down in a car crash when he was just a young man. He couldn’t move anything from the neck down. Yet he wrote to Viktor Frankl after reading his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, having to type by holding a stick in his mouth and using that to press the keys. And with the help of Frankl’s book, he managed to find meaning in his life. He became a clinical psychologist and married, all the while almost completely paralyzed. This is the kind of hope that Dr. Viktor Frankl, holocaust survivor, gave not only to his patients, but to the whole world.
Viktor Frankl was born in Vienna, Austria on March 26th, 1905. His father, Gabriel, from Moravia, worked as a government stenographer, and was later promoted to Director of the Ministry of Social Service. His mother, Elsa, from Prague, was descended from a long line of, some famous, rabbis. Gabriel and Elsa had three children, of which Viktor was the second.
Even from an early age, three to be precise, Frankl knew he wanted to be a doctor. And, unlike many a child’s wish to become a fireman or ballerina, Frankl’s passion only increased with time. He was very bright, and entered his first year of high school when he was only thirteen. During his high school years, Frankl turned his dreams of doctorhood into a reality. He joined his school’s Young Socialist Workers Organization, and made many a lecture to his class, focusing mainly on the mind. Even then, he had an interest in the meaning of life. In fact, when he was fifteen or sixteen, he had already come up with two basis ideas of logotherapy: what we give life, not what we take away from it, is what makes life meaningful, and ultimate meaning isn’t possible to find, or even meant to be found.
Frankl was so interested in the human mind that he eventually struck up a correspondence with Sigmund Freud. Freud was a great psychologist who took a reductionist view on the explanation of why people do what they do, meaning that he reduced motivation to one basic thing. In his case, he believed that all people are motivated by sexual urges. He and Frankl had a lot in common; they both were looking for what motivates people, and had great interest in the human mind. They even went to the same high school. But in some ways, they were very different. Not long after Freud published a paper (which Frankl wrote when he was 17) in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis for him when Frankl was 19, Frankl began to question Freud’s theories, and eventually moved away from them all together.
He then looked to Alfred Adler’s theories. Adler was also a reductionist, but he believed that people were motivated by their need for social superiority, or by the need for perfection. He was invited into the Society for Individual Psychology, where he met a man who he considered his mentor, Oswald Schwarz, who was studying psychosomatic medicine an the independence of the mind and body.
However, as with Freud’s, Frankl had some issues with Adler’s theories. The main problem was that he didn’t believe that a person’s motivation could be reduced to one sole thing. Eventually, his criticism caused him to be expelled from the Society along with Shwarz and another man, Allers. After the expulsion, Adler refused to speak with him.
In reference to his two greatest teachers, Frankl said, “Even a dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant can see farther.” (Redsand, p.29) Yet though Freud and Adler were two of his greatest influences, they weren’t his only. Frankl was also inspired by the writings of Max Scheler, a German philosopher. And he also states that “Whatever I am teaching—I have learned from my patient in the first place.” (Fabry, p.viii)
Frankl was trained as a psychiatrist and a neurologist. He was a ladies man, and had his first serious relationship with his first wife Tilly, whom he met at the hospital he had been working. Soon after, despite Tilly’s best efforts, they fell in love and got married. Frankl believed that “Love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.” (Frankl, p.49) Despite his slight build, when a friend introduced him to rock climbing, he immediately liked it and it became his preferred source of exercise for the rest of his life. Today, there are even climbing courses named after him.
Before the Anschluss of Austria, Frankl was working at his own private practice, but after Hitler took control of Austria, he, and all Jews, was stripped of his license. So in 1940 he came to work at the Rothschild Jewish Hospital. All around him, Jews were getting imprisoned and deported. He wrote his first book The Doctor and the Soul for a friend who was in jail. He himself was taken for “questioning” (Frankl knew he would probably be deported), but managed to save himself by helping the officer who was questioning him deal with his agoraphobia, fear of open spaces.
However, if you were a Jew in Austria at that time, you couldn’t escape Hitler’s impact on the country for very long. And although Frankl had a chance to escape to America, he couldn’t leave his parents. So he was given the number 119104 and sent off to what would be four camps in total. His last camp, Turkheim was liberated on April 27th, in 1945, but not until three grueling years after Frankl was first imprisoned.
The first camp he visited was Theresienstadt, but his time there was brief. At this point, he was still with his wife. When he was to be transported “East,” to Auschwitz, and Tilly was not, she volunteered to join the transport, despite Frankl’s pleas for her to stay in the less harsh camp. Yet they rode together towards Auschwitz, and then parted into gender categories when they got there. It was the last time he would ever see her.
Upon arriving at Auschwitz, Frankl and his fellow prisoners experienced delusions of reprieve, due to the cheery, well-fed prisoners that greeted them. This was, of course, only a pretense, but, like a person sentenced to death, they believed that at the last moment something or someone might save them. Then they were made to leave their belongings and form a line. A man assessed each individual and pointed to either the left or the right, but much more frequently to the left. In fact, about 90% of the prisoners were sent left. This was the first “selection,” and those of the prisoners that went left were murdered immediately. The 10% that went right soon found themselves in such miserable circumstances that many wished they had been part of that majority. Frankl himself was sent to the left, and, with no knowledge at the time of the fact that had he stayed there, he would have died, snuck into the right line to be with his coworkers.
They were then ushered to the cleansing station, where they were surrounded by “friendly” officers who, as well as continuing the delusion of reprieve, sweet talked them out of their few valuables. The valuables that remained were thrown on to blankets on the ground. They were then told to strip quickly, and were shaved all over their bodies, including their heads. They showered, and all were relieved to see real water flowing from the taps.
Life at Auschwitz came down to one basic thing: survival. As Frankl himself says in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, “…they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves. We who have come back, by the aid of lucky chances or miracles—whatever one may choose to call them—we know: the best of us did not return.” But can you blame the prisoners for this? As Frankl says, “No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honestly whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.”
It was a constant battle among the prisoners to survive. But not all were up to this battle. Many prisoners committed suicide, although Frankl, after some consideration, promised himself that he wouldn’t. Some didn’t even bother to take the trouble of ending their own lives; these people, the ones who gave up, either because they couldn’t handle the physical labor or because they lost all hope, never survived for long anyway. After two or so weeks, Frankl noted, most prisoners became “emotionally dead.” They were treated like animals, no, worse than animals, they were treated like dirt. They were beaten for no reason at all, and the unfairness of this hurt even worse than the actual pain. The prisoners became “primitive”; the survival instinct ruling over everything else, making their needs and desires very basic.
Besides the struggle to survive, the most prominent event in Auschwitz was death. Death was everywhere. Every moment held an opportunity for death, and prisoners were constantly dying, even more often from the environment they were living in then from being sent to the gas chambers. After a while, death became predictable; the prisoners could tell who would die and when. Death was just part of the daily routine.
But that isn’t to say that death was the only part of their routine. Not everything in the camps was suffering. Because of his desperate situation, Frankl was able to really enjoy the beauty of nature. He attended the prayer services that we held by his fellow prisoners, and there was plenty of art and singing. Every day, they would make up funny stories and tell them to each other, and so there was humor as well. Not all of the prisoners were strong enough to find the meaning that still existed in their lives, but those who did retained their humanity, a thing that the Germans were trying to take from them, and in some ways, by forcing them to behave in ways that were less than human, had. They took away almost everything. But as Frankl said when recounting his time in Auschwitz, “Everything can be taken away from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to chose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to chose one’s own way.” And those prisoners chose to see the positive in their situation, which is what ultimately allowed many to survive.
There’s a story that Frankl tells in his book Man’s Search for Meaning that for some reason, I just can’t get it out of my head. It has to do with fate. The officers were rounding up a group of sick prisoners to go to a “rest camp,” which could be an actual rest camp, or another work camp, but was most likely straight to the ovens. Frankl, being a doctor, was on the list. He was told by the chief doctor that he could get his name crossed of the list, but Frankl declined, saying that he’d rather let fate take it’s course. He left with the transport, and they were taken to what turned out to be a real rest camp. Shortly after, famine hit Germany, and Auschwitz was one of the hardest hit. In fact, the famine was so bad, that cannibalism broke out there. If he had stayed, Frankl most likely would have died. After this he mentions another, related story, a Persian tale. “A rich and mighty Persian once walked in his garden with one of his servants. The servant cried that he had just encountered Death, who had threatened him. He begged his mater to give him his fastest horse so that he could make haste an flee to Teheran, which he could reach that same evening. The master consented and the servant galloped off on the horse. On returning to his house the master himself met Death, and questioned him, ‘Why did you terrify and threaten my servant?’ ‘I did not threaten him; I only showed surprise in still finding him here when I planned to meet him tonight in Teheran,’ said Death.”
While his experiences in the camps definitely influenced his idea of logotherapy, it started way before that, back when he was still in school. Logotherapy was basically the idea that meaning can be found in life in even the most desperate of situations, and that people can use that meaning to better their lives. In Frankl’s own words: “Life holds potential meaning under any conditions, even the most miserable ones.” (Frankl, p.12) Logotherapy literally means meaning therapy. Frankl strongly believed in human potential, and helped people live up to that potential by helping them find meaning. “Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.” (Frankl, p.85) He thought there were three main ways to find meaning. Meaning through action/creation, meaning through experience/a human encounter/love, and meaning through suffering. He treated his patients with a sort of caring toughness, compassionate yet stern. When dealing with a patient who was suffering from some sort of phobia or obsession, he used paradoxical intention, which means that instead of shying away from the problem, he’d tell a patient suffering from arachnophobia to imagine themselves covered in spiders, or a patient suffering from acrophobia to picture themselves leaning over the edge of a twelve story building. He found that by dealing with the fear directly, the patient was more likely to be able to conquer it.
Frankl knew from the very beginning that he wanted to be a doctor, but he wasn’t entirely sure what kind. He credits his decision to specialize in psychology to a friend, stating that “It is difficult to believe what decisive turns in our lives we sometimes owe to even casual remarks made by another person.” (Redsand, p.25) He also worked in neurology, but the majority of his work was in the field of psychology. In fact, he was thought of as the “third school” of Viennese psychology, along with Freud and Adler. One of his greatest achievements pre-Holocaust was setting up youth counseling centers in seven different cities in Europe, focusing on students who would commit suicide due to the highly stressful, strenuous exams they went through to graduate. Two years after these centers were set up, there were no student suicides in Vienna for the first time ever.
Out of all of Frankl’s experiences, the one that most influenced his ideas on life was the Holocaust. It showed him that there is meaning in death and suffering as well as life, and that suffering is an inescapable part of life. He believed that how a person deals with their suffering shows whether they deserve their suffering or not. In the camps, Frankl chose to look at their suffering scientifically, which not only helped him form these opinions, but also helped him deal with what they were going through.
One of the worst things a prisoner could do was give up hope. Hope in the camps was everything; hope for the future is what kept many a prisoner alive. Often, the prisoners would have inferiority complexes, and the capos, the prisoners who were in charge of the other prisoners, would form elusions of grandeur. Everything warped. Yet Frankl believed that people could rise above circumstance. “Man’s inner strength many raise him above his outward fate…Everywhere man is confronted with fate, with the chance of achieving something through his own suffering,” he says in his book Man’s Search for Meaning. He believed, and experienced, that one can do what’s necessary to survive, can live in unlivable situations.
And the situations truly were unlivable. Every day, Frankl would walk through rain, snow, or whatever else the weather chose to throw at him, to work outside the camp on railway lines for the war. In fact, it wasn’t until shortly before liberation that he worked as a doctor, volunteering to treat typhus patients.
After he was liberated, Frankl went back to Vienna. He wrote his most famously book, Man’s Search for Meaning, in nine days, dictating it to several assistants. At first, he was going to publish it anonymously, but after the urging of many people, published it under his own name. In one of his later books, he states how strange he finds it that the one book he was planning to publish anonymously is the book that made him famous. Today, Man’s Search for Meaning has been translated from it’s original German into 27 different languages, and has sold more than 4 million copies in English alone. It was a five time American book of the year. But Man’s Search for Meaning isn’t the only book he wrote. In fact, he wrote 32 total books, which have been translated into 32 different languages.
After liberation, Frankl learned of his wife Tilly’s death. He was distraught, but later remarried Eleonore “Elly” Schwindt, and with her had a daughter. He returned to working in a hospital, and became Head of the Neurological Department at the Polyclinic Hospital. His next job was teaching at the University of Vienna, which he continued until he was 85 years old. He has lectured at 209 universities spanning 5 continents, and held chairs at many American universities. He published his last two books, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning and Recollections: An Autobiography only a few months before his death in 1997, dying of heart failure at age 92. He continued rock climbing to the last of his days.
Viktor Frankl was a Jewish doctor in Vienna. He treated many patients, mostly on a psychological level, and set up highly successful youth counseling centers. He created logotherapy, and wrote many books on it. His most famous book is called Man’s Search for Meaning, a book documenting his time in various camps, mainly Auschwitz, in the Holocaust. He also passed his knowledge along to the next generation, teaching at the University of Vienna for the majority of his life.
At first, there was very little response to his work. I think this is because people were still adjusting to the horror of the Holocaust, and so much of his work had to do with it. However, when the response came later in his life, it really came. He won 19 different awards, including the Oskar Pfister Award, and received honorary doctor degrees from 29 different universities. But the greatest response was the way that individuals were influenced by his work.
Joseph Fabry was a Holocaust survivor. He lived locally in the Bay Area, and, although he is now dead, was very influenced by Frankl’s work. He knew Frankl personally, and they grew quite close. Fabry wrote a book, explaining and expanding upon logotherapy. Also, Abraham Maslow, an American psychologist, believed that meaning in life was key to finding full “self-actualization.”
Yet Frankl’s influence goes far deeper than that. Every single person today is influenced by his work. Many therapists have adopted his techniques, and our general outlook on life is affected.
A little while ago, I picked up a book called The Bar Code Tattoo. It’s a story about our world in the future, where this one huge company has taken over, and has issued these bar code tattoos that people can get to make their lives easier. Instead of paying with a card, just scan the bar code. Everyone’s getting one. But they hold a terrible secret. They’re dangerous. It was a decent book, and held some very intriguing ideas about conformity vs. individualism. But at the very beginning of the book, there’s a quote. “Everything can be taken away from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms- to chose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to chose one’s own way.” –Viktor Frankl.
Another book example: I recently read the book Tuesdays With Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life’s Greatest Lessons. Morrie, Mitch’s old teacher is dying of ALS, a horrible, paralyzing disease. He goes to him, and they begin the last class of Morrie’s life. Morrie shares with him all of the lessons life has taught him, and their relationship steadily progresses along with the disease. One of Morrie’s main lessons is how we must find meaning in our lives. And, when many wonder how he can be so optimistic with a death sentence hanging over him, he responds that he still has so much to live for, and that he can’t change him predicament, but he can chose how to respond to it, whether that means withering away spiritually, or doing all he can while he still can. Remind you of anything? Again, it ties back to the previously mentioned quote, and ultimately ties back to the idea that meaning in life is what sustains us.
Today, the number one way logotherapy is used is in therapy. Therapy used to be look at as a bad thing, something to be ashamed of. Logotherapy popularized therapy, and now almost everyone sees a therapist at least once in their lifetime. Also, logotherapy can be used in social work.
But most importantly, we use logotherapy everyday. Logotherapy has given people a whole new way to look at their lives. And logotherapy isn’t just used to dispel the bad things; back in the 70s and 80s, when self-meditation was very popular, people would use logotherapy everyday in order to center themselves. They may not have called it logotherapy, but the concept was there. And to this day, people read Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning, and come away from it with tears in their eyes and a more positive outlook on life.
Dr. C. George Boeree. “Abraham Maslow 1908-1970.” Shippersburg University. 1998, 2006. <http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/maslow.html>
Dr. C. George Boeree. “Alfred Adler 1870-1937.” Shippersburg University. 1997, 2006. <http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/adler.html>
Dr. C. George Boeree. “Viktor Frankl 1905-1997.” Shippersburg University. 1998, 2002, 2006. http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/frankl.html>
Fabry, Joseph. The Pursuit of Meaning. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968.
“Frankl, Viktor.” Britannica Online.
Frankl, Viktor. Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1959, 1962, 1984, 1992.
Frankl, Viktor. Recollections: An Autobiography. New York, London: Plenum Press, 1997.
Klingburg Jr, Haddon. When Life Calls Out to Us. New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Auckland: Doubleday, 2001.
Redsand, Anna S. Viktor Frankl: A Life Worth Living. New York: Clarion Books, 2006.
Stanislava Sevcikova. “Logotherapy in Use of Social Work.” Masaryk University Information System. 16 June 2008 12:46.
Viktor Frankl Institute. <>
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