Viktor Frankl

1905 - 1997
 Biography
 Born Vienna
 Father, Gabriel
 Strong, Disciplined
 From stenographer to Director of Ministry of Social

Service
 Mother
 Tender hearted and pious
 Middle of three children
  Precocious and very curious
 High school
 Young Socialist Workers Organization
 Did a psychoanalytic study on Schopenhauer
 Published in International Journal of Psychoanalysis
 Corresponded with Freud
 Met Freud in 1925
 Liked Adler better
 Working on medical degree

 1926 used “Logotherapy” for the first time

 1930 MD
 1933 in charge of ward of suicidal women
 1937 opened private practice
 1938 Hitler takes Austria

 Visa to US in 1939

 1940 head of neurology at Rothschild Hospital

 Married 1942

 Viktor, Wife, father, mother, and brother all

sent to Theresienstadt
 Mother and brother in Auschwitz
 Father starved in Theresienstadt
 Wife died in Bergen-Belsen in 1945
 Sister, Stella survived in Australia
 Manuscript “The Doctor and the Soul” taken
from him
 Desire to see wife, complete work reason to live
 Wrote on scraps of paper
 April 1945 Camp Liberated
 Returned to Vienna, discovered deaths
 Broken, alone
 Director of the Vienna Neurological Policlinic for 25 years
 Book published
 Resulted teaching appointment at University of Vienna
Medical School
 In 9 days dictated “Man’s Search for Meaning.”
 International best seller
 Love at first sight with Eleonore Schwindt -- “Elly” 1947
  Credits her with helping him recommit to world
 Daughter Gabriele
 1948 Ph.D. in Psychology, dissertation “The
Unconscious God”
 1950 founded and was president of the Vienna

Medical Society for Psychotherapy

 Promoted to full Professor

 Guest lecturer
 Visiting professor Duquesne University
 Oskar Pfister Prize by the American Society of
Psychiatry
 Nominated Nobel Peace Prize

 Taught until 1990, 85 years old

 Mountain Climber
 Pilot’s license at 67

 1992 Viktor Frankl Institute, founded by friends

in his honor
 1997 published his book “Man’s Search for

Ultimate Meaning”
 32 books translated into 27 languages

 Died September 27, 1997 of heart failure

 Survived by his wife Eleonore, his daughter Dr.

Gabriele Frankl-Vesely, his grandchildren

Katharina and Alexander, and his great-
granddaughter Anna Viktoria
 Theory
 “He who has a why to live for can bear
with almost any how.” – Nietzsche
 The Death Camps
 logotherapy – a new form of therapy
 Logos – Greek, meaning study, word, spirit, God, or
meaning
 Freud – pleasure is the prime motive

 Adler – power was the prime motive

 Logotherapy – meaning is the prime motive

  noös - Greek for mind or spirit
 Freud – psychodynamics, struggle with inner forces
 noödynamics – struggle for meaning, purpose,
goal
 Rejected reductionism
 Mental life reduced to biochemical
reactions
 People as a side effect of brain function
 Original – balance physiological and
spiritual
 "...the de-neuroticization of humanity

requires a re-humanization of
psychotherapy."  (1975, p. 104)
Three factors characterize humans
 Spirituality
 Irreducible
 Freedom (in the face of)
 Instincts
 We have instincts, they do not have us
 Inherited disposition
 Research shows high degree of freedom in predispostion
 Environment
 Our attitudes determine how our environment effects us
 Conscience – core of being and
source of personal integrity
 Intuitive and personal
 “…(B)eing human is being responsible --
existentially responsible, responsible for one's own
existence.” (1975, p. 26) 
 “wisdom of the heart”
 Increasing pressure to conform
 Increasingly, we are responsible for who we are
 Responsibility to find our own meaning
 Meaning must be found, never given
 It is discovered, not invented
 Unique to each individual
 "...(M)an must be equipped with the capacity to listen to
and obey the ten thousand demands and
commandments hidden in the ten thousand situations
with which life is confronting him."  (1975, p. 120)
  Therapist must assist in the quest for
meaning
 The existential vacuum
 Frustration of quest
 noögenic neurosis
 Lives empty, meaningless, purposeless, aimless
 Behaviors which hurt self or others
 Existential vacuum (metaphor he loved), feeling of
emptiness
 Boredom is a symptom
 Getting drunk, passive entertainment are “Sunday
neurosis”
 Fill lives with “stuff”
 Neurotic vicious cycles
 anticipatory anxiety – so afraid of symptoms
we get them
 Fear of anxiety leads to anxiety

 hyperintention – trying to hard causes failure

 Trying to sleep keeps us awake
 hyperreflection - -- the self-fulfilling
prophecy
 Death camps
 Losing everything, losing vision of future,
losing hope
 The abyss experience – feeling of futility
 Hiding in the masses or totalitarianism releaves
feeling or emptiness and responsibility for it
 mass neurotic triad
 Depression, aggression, and addiction
 Referred to research about this relationship

 psychopathology
 Anxieties grounded in existential anxiety
 Refocuses anxiety over leak of meaning and
responsibility on specifics of life
 Obsessive – Compulsive key is finding meaning
 Do not fight fears

 Acknowledges role of physical

 Depression is associated with feelings of
inadequacy facing tasks
 Schizophrenia physiological, experience self as
object
 Finding meaning
 Three broad approaches
 experiential values – meaning by
experiencing something or someone that we
value
 Love
 , "is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man
can aspire."  (1963, pp. 58-59)
 creative values – meaning by becoming
involved with projects of project of one’s life
 attitudinal values – meaning through virtues
 Bravery, compassion, sense of humor
 Most famous example - suffering
  A doctor whose wife had died mourned her
terribly
 :  "...everything can be taken from a man but
one thing:  the last of the human freedoms -- to
choose one's attitude in any given set of
circumstances, to choose one's own way." 
(1963, p. 104)
 Transcendence
 The other three surface
 Supra-meaning - ultimate meaning
 Religious
 God of the inner heart, the individual

 Not a narrow view

 Therapy
 paradoxical intention
 dereflection
 Shift away from self
 Too much self-reflection

 Self-transcendence
 Not focused on self, on wholly other