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Viktor Frankl
I do not forget any good deed done to me, and I carry no grudge for a bad one.1 (V. Frankl)
Viktor E. Frankl was born in Vienna, Austria, on March 26, 1905. It was the day Beethoven died, and in Frankl’s autobiography he is quick to note this coincidence and reveal his sense of humor by sharing a comment made by one of his schoolmates: “One mishap comes seldom alone.”2 Frankl’s father, who had been forced to drop out of medical school for financial reasons, was a public servant who instilled in the young Viktor a firm sense of social justice. For thirty-five years Viktor’s father worked for the department of child protection and youth welfare. Viktor’s mother, with whom he was very close, helped him develop his emotional side—the feelings and human connectedness that would inform his work as deeply as did his rationality.
Frankl was the second of three children, and at an early age he was afflicted with perfectionism. “I do not even speak to myself for days,” he said, referring to his anger at himself for not always being perfect. His astonishing and precocious interests in learning about human motivations led him to write to the well-known Viennese psychiatrist and “father of psychoanalysis” Sigmund Freud, with whom he had a correspondence throughout his high school years. Unfortunately this correspondence was lost years later to the Gestapo, the secret-police organization in Nazi Germany and German-occupied Europe.
Young Frankl’s own search for meaning was already under way. He had become convinced that the human spirit is what makes us unique and that reducing life and human nature to “nothing but,” along the lines of many existentialist philosophers and psychiatrists of his time, denied or discounted any such spirit. At sixteen, he gave his first public lecture, “On the Meaning of Life.” Two years later, he wrote “On the Psychology of Philosophical Thought,” for his high school graduation essay. It was almost as though on some level Frankl was preparing for the tragedy that lay ahead and the future role he would play in giving hope to all of humankind after the hopelessness and despair of the Holocaust.
In 1924, at Freud’s request, Frankl published his first article in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. He was nineteen years old and had already developed two of his fundamental ideas: First, we ourselves are responsible for our own existence, and we must answer the question that life asks us about the meaning of our own lives. Second, although ultimate meaning is beyond our comprehension and must remain so, we must have faith in meaning as we pursue it. Also in 1924, Frankl started his medical studies, and his growing professional recognition included a developing relationship with renowned psychiatrist Alfred Adler. It was Adler who invited him to publish another article, this time in the International Journal of Individual Psychology. Frankl still was only twenty years old.
Logotherapy
A year later, during public lectures in Germany, Frankl used the word Logotherapy for the first time. He chose this name for his unique approach to a humanistic form of psychotherapy, which came to be known as the “Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy” (the predecessors being the Freudian and Adlerian Schools). This system of psychotherapy paved the way for us to know meaning as the foundation of our existence. Frankl chose this name with direct reference to the Greek word logos $$$$$$$$$$$(λ?γος) for several reasons. One was the fact that the most frequent, though rough, English translation of logos as “the meaning” best fit his paradigm of “therapy through meaning.” We should mention that Frankl was not referring to our modern interpretation and use of the word or term logos, which many know as a graphic symbol of a trademark, product, or company name designed for easy recognition. Although this contemporary definition can be associated with the original Greek word by linking the graphic symbol to the deeper meaning of a product or company, Frankl certainly was not speaking about graphically designed logos and our modern-day marketing practices.
Upon closer examination, the various translations of the word logos reveal that it has deep spiritual roots.3 One of the first references to logos as “spirit” came from the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus around 500 BC. The logos of Heraclitus has been interpreted in various ways: as “the logical,” as “meaning,” and as “reason.” To Heraclitus, the logos was responsible for the harmonic order of the universe, a cosmic law that declared, “One Is All and Everything Is One.” He believed that there was an order to the universe and a reason for things being the way they are. We can find deeper understanding, and thus meaning in our lives and work, if we start by doing what Heraclitus suggested: believing that all things are connected.
The concept of logos can also be found in many of the great literary works of Western philosophy and religion. The doctrine of the logos was the linchpin of the religious thinking by the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, who clearly established it as belonging to the spiritual realm. Indeed, for Philo the logos was divine—it was the source of energy from which the human soul became manifest. To Philo, the origins of logos as “spirit” and “life energy” were clearly established and well documented in the writings of the early Greek philosophers and the theologians of his era.4
It is no coincidence that the concept and process of dialogue, a core methodological component of Frankl’s Logotherapy, likewise is grounded in the logos. The word dialogue comes from two Greek words: dia (δια), meaning “passing through,” and logos, translated as “meaning” or “spirit.” The process of dialogue takes on a new and deeper meaning when it is perceived as accessing a pool of common spirit (logos) through a genuine connection between people. This suggests more than collective thinking or simply arriving at a common understanding or shared meaning of something. Authentic dialogue enables individuals to acknowledge honestly that each is part of a greater whole, that they naturally resonate with others within this whole, and that the whole is indeed greater than the sum of its various parts. As participants in such a holistic process, together they can produce greater results than they would just as individuals without this meaningful connection.
As we can see, Logotherapy was an appropriate name for Frankl’s unique and very humanistic approach to inspiring us to search for and find deeper meaning in our lives and work. It should be noted that he was not an advocate for the practices of traditional psychotherapy at that time, for he felt that many practitioners tended to focus only on a certain aspect of a person’s life without regard for his or her whole life. He felt this “reductionist” approach was limited and in some ways dehumanizing. Frankl’s work acknowledged human weakness, but it went further—to search for and acknowledge the underlying meaning behind these weaknesses. This approach highlighted the potential benefit to be had when we learn from and even transform our weaknesses. Frankl believed that every event, whether seen as positive or negative, could teach us something about ourselves and our world. “I am convinced,” he wrote in his autobiography, “that, in the final analysis, there is no situation that does not contain within it the seed of a meaning.”5
Frankl encountered many challenges as he attempted to gain support for his innovative meaning-centered therapeutic approach. By the time he received his medical degree in 1930, he had been banished from the Adler circle because he supported an alternative point of view about the fundamental nature of human motivations. His unique existential philosophy also forced him to leave the Freudian circle. As it turned out, the experience of having to leave both well-established camps only helped to pave the way for Frankl to develop his own school of thought and psychotherapeutic approach.
At an early age, Frankl had already gained an international reputation for his work in youth counseling, and from 1930 to 1938 he was on the staff of the psychiatric University Clinic in Vienna. By 1938 he had an established private practice in neurology and psychiatry. However, World War II started, and the Germans invaded Austria. During the early part of the war, Frankl and his family were afforded a measure of protection because of his position as chief of the neurological department at Rothschild Hospital, the only Jewish hospital in Vienna. During this time, he risked his life and saved the lives of many others. On some occasions he used false diagnoses to sabotage the Nazi’s efforts to euthanize mentally ill patients. It was during this period that he started writing his first book, The Doctor and the Soul.
In September 1942, Frankl and his family were arrested and deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp near Prague. This was the beginning of three dark years of imprisonment during which Frankl lost his wife, Tilly, his parents, and his brother to the horrors of the Nazi prison camps. He was incarcerated at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, and finally at Türkheim, where he nearly died from typhoid fever. The Nazis had confiscated the manuscript of his first book, The Doctor and the Soul, but Frankl was able to reconstruct it on bits of paper stolen from the camp office. In his autobiography he recollected: “I am convinced that I owe my survival, among other things, to my resolve to reconstruct that lost manuscript.”6
After his release at the end of the war, Frankl wrote about his experiences in the concentration camps in his book Man’s Search for Meaning. He wrote graphically and unflinchingly about the treatment, torture, and murder of the prisoners. He also described the beauty of the human spirit, however—how it could transcend the horror and find meaning under the most unimaginable circumstances. Frankl’s experiences and observations reinforced the principles of meaning he had developed in his youth. In the death camps of Nazi Germany, he saw men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. “They may have been few in number,” he wrote, “but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”7
This statement is perhaps one of the most often quoted passages from Frankl’s work. U.S. Senator John McCain, for example, attributed his own survival as a prisoner of war in Vietnam for five and a half years in large part to the learning he acquired from Frankl’s experience and teachings. In fact, McCain began the preface to his 1999 memoir, Faith of My Fathers, with the same Frankl quotation. In Frankl’s words: “You do not have to suffer to learn. But, if you don’t learn from suffering, over which you have no control, then your life becomes truly meaningless. . . . The way in which a man accepts his fate—those things beyond his control—can add a deeper meaning to his life. He controls how he responds.”8
At the end of the war, as a survivor and as a psychiatrist, Frankl knew that his theories of Logotherapy had greater authenticity and ever-deeper meaning. He wrote about the ongoing nightmares resulting from his experiences, but he knew those experiences laid the groundwork for his belief in self-transcendence and the will to meaning:
I can see beyond the misery of the situation to the potential for discovering a meaning behind it, and thus to turn an apparently meaningless suffering into a genuine human achievement. I am convinced that, in the final analysis, there is no situation that does not contain within it the seed of a meaning.9 (V. Frankl)
Frankl returned to Vienna after the war and became director of the Vienna Neurological Policlinic, a position he held for twenty-five years. He started a long and distinguished academic career that took him to the University of Vienna, Harvard University, and many other universities throughout the world. He received twenty-nine honorary doctorates during his life and wrote thirty-two books, which have been translated into twenty-seven languages. His Man’s Search for Meaning is considered by the Library of Congress to be one of the ten most influential books in America. Because he went through the hell of despair over the apparent meaninglessness of life—and struggled with the pessimism associated with such a reductionist and ultimately nihilistic view of life—Frankl was able to fully develop and refine his therapeutic system of Logotherapy. At a conference in San Diego in 1980, Frankl said that he had wrestled with this view that undercut faith in life’s meaning, like Jacob did with the angel, until he could “say yes to life in spite of everything.” Interestingly, an earlier version of Man’s Search for Meaning had this very quotation as its title.
In 1992 the Viktor Frankl Institute was established in Vienna. Today the institute continues to serve as the center of a worldwide network of research and training institutes and societies dedicated to advancing his philosophy and therapeutic system of Logotherapy and Existential Analysis. Viktor Frankl died peacefully on September 2, 1997, at the age of ninety-two. He remained creative, productive, and passionate to the end of his life.
Meaning Reflections
Recall a situation in your personal life or work in which you felt trapped, confined, or imprisoned. Perhaps you just didn’t have the freedom or authority to deal with the situation in the way that ideally you would have liked. What, if anything, did you do about it? As you think about the situation now, what did you learn from it? In hindsight, what could you have done differently?
Meaning Questions
• Consider the hardships you have experienced in your personal and work life. How might Frankl’s experience in the concentration camps help you deal with such hardships (to settle the memories of the past and to deal with challenges in the present and the future)?
• What is your vision of the kind of work that you really want to do and the kind of life that you really would like to live?
Meaning Affirmation