Person

Viktor Frankl

Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist, survivor of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and two Dachau subcamps, and founder of logotherapy, a school of psychotherapy built on the claim that the search for meaning is the primary human motive. His account of the camps, first published in Vienna in 1946 and known in English as Man's Search for Meaning, is one of the most widely read books of the twentieth century.

Frankl was Jewish and was not a Christian apologist. The codex draws on his clinical observations, not his theology: that people can bear almost any suffering when they have a reason to live, that meaninglessness is itself a pathology, and that meaning is discovered rather than invented. Because those findings come from a non-Christian clinician who tested them in the worst conditions of the century, they carry weight with listeners who would discount the same point from a pastor.

Life

• Born 26 March 1905 in Vienna, the second of three children. As a high-school student he corresponded with Sigmund Freud, and a manuscript he sent Freud was published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis.
• Drawn to Alfred Adler's Individual Psychology in the 1920s, then broke with Adler and was excluded from his circle. Studied medicine at the University of Vienna and first used the term "logotherapy" in public lectures in 1926.
• From 1933 to 1937 he was chief doctor of the pavilion for suicidal women at the Steinhof Psychiatric Hospital in Vienna. In 1940 he became head of the neurological department of the Rothschild Hospital, the clinic for Jewish patients, where he is said to have made false diagnoses to protect mentally ill patients from the Nazi euthanasia programme.
• In September 1942 he was deported with his wife Tilly and his parents to the Theresienstadt ghetto, where his father died. In 1944 he was moved to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where his mother was murdered on arrival, and then to the Dachau subcamps of Kaufering and Türkheim. American troops liberated Türkheim on 27 April 1945. His wife, his mother and his brother did not survive.
• From 1946 he directed the Vienna Neurological Policlinic for twenty-five years. He took a doctorate in philosophy in 1948, became professor at the University of Vienna in 1955, and taught as a guest professor at Harvard in 1961.
• In 1947 he married Eleonore (Elly) Schwindt, a practising Catholic; the two kept both Jewish and Christian observances in their home. He died on 2 September 1997.

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Major works

• Man's Search for Meaning, first published in German in 1946 (Deuticke), the account of the camps followed by an outline of logotherapy. The English translation appeared in 1959, and the US edition is published by Beacon Press. In a 1991 survey for the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club it was named one of the ten most influential books in the United States.
• The Doctor and the Soul (Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), the English translation of Ärztliche Seelsorge, the systematic statement of logotherapy and existential analysis.
• Der unbewusste Gott (1948), his philosophy dissertation, published in English as The Unconscious God (Simon and Schuster) and later expanded as Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning (Perseus, 1997). It argues that the human person has a "spiritual unconscious" alongside the instinctual one.
• Psychotherapy and Existentialism (Simon and Schuster, 1967).
• The Will to Meaning (World Publishing, 1969).
• Recollections: An Autobiography (English edition, Perseus, 1997).
• Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything (Beacon Press, 2020), a posthumous English edition.

Thought

1. The will to meaning. Against Freud's will to pleasure and Adler's will to power, Frankl held that the primary human motive is the search for meaning. Its frustration, the "existential vacuum," shows up as boredom, despair, addiction and suicide.
2. Three avenues to meaning. Meaning is found by creating a work or doing a deed, by experiencing something or encountering someone, and by the attitude one takes toward unavoidable suffering.
3. Life asks the question. Frankl reversed the usual question about the meaning of life. The person should not ask what life means, but recognize that "it is he who is asked," and answer through responsible action.
4. The last freedom. Everything can be taken from a person except the freedom to choose an attitude toward the circumstances. The codex quotes this line at Argument from Meaningful Suffering.
5. "A why to live." He quoted Friedrich Nietzsche's line that one who has a why to live can bear almost any how, and reported from the camps that prisoners who lost their future-directed hope collapsed quickly.

How the codex uses him

• The anchor witness for meaningful suffering. Argument from Meaningful Suffering opens with his camp observations, quotes his "why and how" and "last freedom" lines, and answers the objection that his report is anecdotal and shaped by survivorship bias. It also uses his Judaism tactically: the strongest classical witness to the pattern was not a Christian.
• Meaning and hope. Argument from Purpose Meaning and Hope leads with Frankl for sceptical audiences, and The Heat Death Argument cites his report that deaths in his camp rose sharply after Christmas 1944, when prisoners who had hoped to be home lost courage, as clinical evidence that hope is not optional for human functioning.
• Longing. Argument from Desire lists his will to meaning among the secular-existential reports of a universal longing.
• Laughter in extremity. Argument from the Anomalous Humor Convergence cites his account of humour in the camps as central evidence for its case.
• Evangelism. Meaning-Centered Evangelism builds its approach on logotherapy and the existential vacuum, Psychology of Lowered Defenses treats the meaning-need as one of its mechanisms, and Evangelism and Preaching to Non-Believers route seekers who want "more to life" through that page.
• Against Freud. Sigmund Freud presents logotherapy as the alternative to psychoanalysis, with the meaning-need as foundational rather than derivative.

See also

• Argument from Meaningful Suffering, the argument built most directly on his work
• Argument from Purpose Meaning and Hope, the companion case on meaning and hope
• Meaning-Centered Evangelism, the evangelism approach drawn from logotherapy
• Sigmund Freud, the Viennese psychiatrist whose account of motive Frankl rejected
• Friedrich Nietzsche, the source of the "why and how" line Frankl made famous
• Problem of Evil, the wider debate his work on suffering speaks to