Viktor E. Frankl (1905-1997) · AuthorAuthor
Viktor E. Frankl
1905-1997 · Austrian psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor, and founder of logotherapy
About Viktor E. Frankl
Viktor Emil Frankl (1905–1997) was a Viennese psychiatrist and neurologist. As a young physician he organized youth counselling and student suicide-prevention work in Vienna around 1930, worked at the Steinhof psychiatric hospital, and from 1940 to 1942 headed the neurology department of the Rothschild Hospital. Deported with his wife and parents to Theresienstadt in September 1942, he passed through Auschwitz and the Dachau subcamps Kaufering III and Türkheim before liberation in April 1945; his father, mother, brother and wife Tilly died in the camps. From 1946 to 1971 he headed the neurology department of the Vienna Poliklinik, and he developed logotherapy, often called the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy.
On this site
Man's Search for MeaningViktor E. Frankl
1946 (German, as Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager); English trans. Ilse Lasch 1959; enlarged 1962 · Early 20th Century · Memoir
Man's Search for Meaning has two parts. The first, Experiences in a Concentration Camp, is not a chronicle of atrocities but a psychiatrist's account of how ordinary prisoners lived, suffered and either kept or lost their inner hold on life.