Viktor Frankl was a Vienna psychiatrist with an established practice and a developing theory about meaning when he was deported with his wife and parents in 1942. He spent three years moving between Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Kaufering and Türkheim, the last two satellite camps of Dachau. His mother and brother were murdered at Auschwitz. His wife Tilly died at Bergen-Belsen at twenty four. His father died of starvation at Theresienstadt. Frankl himself was liberated from Türkheim by American forces on 27 April 1945, weighing forty kilos.
The book he wrote in nine days that summer was published in German in 1946 as Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager, A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp. The English version, Man’s Search for Meaning, was published in 1959 and has now sold over sixteen million copies in more than fifty languages. The book is in two parts. The first is the camp memoir. The second is a short introduction to logotherapy, the school of psychotherapy Frankl had been developing before the war and which he formalised after it. The argument of logotherapy is that the primary human drive is not pleasure or power but the search for meaning, and that this drive can be sustained even under the most extreme deprivation if the person can find a purpose for which they are suffering. Frankl drew the argument out of what he had seen in the camps. The prisoners who survived, he argued, were not necessarily the strongest. They were the ones who had something to live for outside the wire.
The book has had a peculiar afterlife. It has become a self-help classic, often read for its uplift rather than its substance. Some readers, in particular, have taken from it a message that suffering is meaningful in itself, which is not what Frankl said. What he said was that meaning is sometimes available even when nothing else is, and that this is the last freedom that cannot be taken from a person. The argument is more guarded than the popular reading.
Frankl returned to Vienna after the war, ran the neurological department of the Vienna Polyclinic Hospital for twenty five years, and held visiting professorships in the United States. He published more than thirty books and lectured into his nineties. He died in Vienna on 2 September 1997 at the age of ninety two. His grave is in the Vienna Central Cemetery.
Logotherapy is a minority school within psychiatry. It has been criticised for what some clinicians call its philosophical rather than empirical basis. Man’s Search for Meaning, however, is now read by people who have no interest in the school and who use the book as a guide to surviving illness, bereavement and other extreme conditions. That is not what Frankl wrote it for. He wrote it as a record of what he had seen and a defence of the dignity of the prisoners he had seen die.
See also
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards