A Viennese childhood
Viktor Emil Frankl was born in Vienna on March 26, 1905, the second of three children in a Jewish family. His mother, Elsa (née Lion), came from Prague; his father, Gabriel Frankl, came from southern Moravia and rose to be a director in the Austrian Ministry of Social Service. Gabriel was a socialist who named his son after Viktor Adler, founder of Austria’s Social Democratic Party. During the First World War the family knew bitter hunger; sometimes the children went begging to farmers for food.
Frankl was precocious. While still at school he attended public lectures on applied psychology and began a correspondence with Sigmund Freud, who had one of the teenager’s papers published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 1924. At fifteen he gave his first public lecture, “On the Meaning of Life”, the question that would occupy the rest of his life. He was also active in the socialist youth movement and in 1924 was spokesman of the Austrian socialist high-school students’ association.
Between Freud and Adler
Frankl studied medicine at the University of Vienna from 1923. He soon moved away from Freud toward Alfred Adler’s individual psychology, joining Adler’s circle at the Café Siller, where as its youngest member he was nicknamed “Benjamin.” His 1925 paper “Psychotherapy and Weltanschauung” already explored the frontier between psychotherapy and philosophy. But his insistence that the search for meaning, not pleasure or power, was the central human motive put him at odds with Adler, and in 1927 he was expelled from the circle. By 1926 he was already using a name for his own approach: logotherapy, from the Greek logos, meaning.
He also put his ideas into practice. From 1928 he organised free youth counselling centres in Vienna, recruiting leading psychologists such as Charlotte Bühler, and in 1930 ran a special counselling campaign around the end of the school year, when student suicides peaked. The number of student suicides fell sharply, and Frankl gained international attention.
A Jewish doctor under the Nazis
After qualifying in medicine in 1930, Frankl worked at Vienna’s Steinhof psychiatric hospital, where from 1933 to 1937 he headed the pavilion for suicidal women, seeing some three thousand patients a year. In 1937 he opened a private practice in neurology and psychiatry. Months later came the Anschluss of March 1938. As a Jew he was forced to adopt the middle name “Israel” forbidden to call himself a physician, and his practice was “aryanised.” He had been close to Austria’s Zionist movement and was due to lecture to its youth section on the psychological problems of Jewish youth when the Nazis arrived.
In 1940 he became head of neurology at the Rothschild Hospital, the only hospital in Vienna still admitting Jews. At great risk to himself he falsified diagnoses to save mentally ill patients from the Nazi “euthanasia” programme. That same year he obtained a visa to emigrate to the United States, but let it expire rather than abandon his elderly parents. In 1941 he married Tilly Grosser, a nurse at the hospital; when she became pregnant, the Nazis forced them to abort the child. He began writing the first version of his book on logotherapy, The Doctor and the Soul.
Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Dachau
In September 1942 Frankl, Tilly and his parents were deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto. His father died there of exhaustion, starvation and pneumonia in February 1943. In the ghetto Frankl organised a psychological first-response service for traumatised new arrivals and worked to prevent suicides, alongside Regina Jonas, the world’s first woman rabbi. In 1944 he, Tilly and then his mother were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. His mother was murdered in the gas chambers on arrival, and Tilly was moved to Bergen-Belsen, where she died. His brother Walter was also murdered at Auschwitz. Only his sister Stella, who had escaped to Australia, survived.
After a few days at Auschwitz, Frankl was sent on to Kaufering and then Türkheim, subcamps of Dachau in Bavaria, where he did slave labour. The manuscript of his book had been taken from him at Auschwitz. Sick with typhus at Türkheim, he kept himself awake at night, to avoid a fatal collapse, by reconstructing it on scraps of paper stolen from the camp office. He later said this effort helped keep him alive. American troops liberated the camp on April 27, 1945. Only on returning to Vienna did he learn that his wife, mother and brother were dead.
Man’s Search for Meaning
Back in Vienna, with the help of friends, Frankl found an apartment, a job and a typewriter. In 1946 he became director of the Vienna Neurological Policlinic, a post he held for twenty-five years. That year he published the reconstructed Doctor and the Soul, and in just nine days dictated a short book, Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationslager, “A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp.” Published in English in 1959, first as From Death Camp to Existentialism and later as Man’s Search for Meaning, it became one of the most widely read books of the century, selling millions of copies in dozens of languages. 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 America.
The book describes the psychology of camp prisoners and argues that even in the most extreme suffering a person retains the freedom to choose an attitude toward it. Frankl drew on Nietzsche’s line that he who has a why to live for can bear almost any how, and observed that prisoners who knew a task was waiting for them, a person, a work, were most apt to survive. He himself regarded the book’s enormous success as a symptom of what he called the mass neurosis of modern times: a hunger for meaning.
Logotherapy
Logotherapy, called the “Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy” after Freud’s psychoanalysis and Adler’s individual psychology, holds that the primary human drive is the will to meaning. Frankl taught that meaning can be found in three ways: by creating a work or doing a deed, by experiencing something or encountering someone, and by the attitude one takes toward unavoidable suffering. Its techniques include paradoxical intention, in which patients overcome fears by humorously exaggerating them, and dereflection, which turns a patient’s attention away from obsessive self-observation.
Frankl earned a doctorate in philosophy in 1948 with a dissertation published as The Unconscious God, became a full professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Vienna in 1955, and lectured around the world, including at Harvard in 1961. He wrote thirty-nine books. His emphasis on meaning helped lay foundations for existential and humanistic psychotherapy and, later, positive psychology.
Controversy
Frankl’s legacy is not without dispute. The historian Timothy Pytell has argued that Man’s Search for Meaning gives a misleading impression of a long stay at Auschwitz, when Frankl spent only a few days there before transfer to Dachau’s subcamps, and that in 1937–38 Frankl published work in the journal of the Nazi-aligned Göring Institute in Germany. The literary scholar Lawrence Langer criticised what he saw as Frankl’s self-congratulatory tone and the implication that survival depended on attitude. Frankl’s defenders, including Alexander Batthyány of the Viktor Frankl Institute, reply that the book itself places most of its account in the Dachau subcamps and that Pytell did not consult Frankl’s archive.
His stance toward postwar Austria was also contentious. He rejected the idea of collective guilt, preached forgiveness, and in 1988 accepted an Austrian state decoration from President Kurt Waldheim, then under fire over his concealed wartime record. Many Jews saw this as a betrayal; at a 1978 lecture in New York he had already been heckled and called a Nazi.
Faith, family and the mountains
In 1947 Frankl married Eleonore “Elly” Schwindt, a practising Catholic; their daughter, Gabriele, was born that December and became a child psychologist. The couple respected each other’s faiths, going to both church and synagogue and celebrating both Christmas and Hanukkah. Frankl was reticent about his own religious life, but after his death his wife and son-in-law revealed that he had prayed every day and knew the daily Jewish prayers and many psalms by heart. In 1988 he celebrated a second bar mitzvah in Jerusalem.
He was a passionate mountaineer, climbing until he was about eighty; several routes in the Austrian Alps bear his name. In his late sixties he took flying lessons, earning a solo pilot’s certificate in 1973.
Last years and legacy
Frankl died of heart failure in Vienna on September 2, 1997, at ninety-two, and was buried in the Jewish section of Vienna’s Central Cemetery. His last book, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, appeared the same year.
His influence reaches far beyond psychiatry, into medicine, education, pastoral care and the countless readers who have turned to Man’s Search for Meaning in times of grief. His proposal that America’s Statue of Liberty be balanced by a Statue of Responsibility inspired a sculpture project, and a Statue of Responsibility honouring him was unveiled in 2025. A Jewish doctor who lost almost his entire family to the Nazis, he answered the catastrophe not with despair but with the claim that life keeps its meaning under any conditions, a message that, whatever its critics say, has given hope to millions.
Sources & further reading
Viktor Frankl, Wikipedia · Viktor Frankl, Biography, Viktor Frankl Institut Wien · Viktor Frankl, Wikiquote · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.