After his liberation in 1945 from the Türkheim camp, where he had nearly died of typhus, Frankl discovered that he was utterly alone. On the first day of his return to Vienna in August 1945, Frankl learned that his pregnant wife, Tilly, had died of sickness or starvation in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Sadly, his parents and brother had all died in the camps. Overcoming his losses and inevitable depression, he remained in Vienna to resume his career as a psychiatrist—an unusual choice when so many others, especially Jewish psychoanalysts and psychiatrists, had emigrated to other countries. Several factors may have contributed to this decision: Frankl felt an intense connection to Vienna, especially to psychiatric patients who needed his help in the postwar period. He also believed strongly in reconciliation rather than revenge; he once remarked, “I do not forget any good deed done to me, and I do not carry a grudge for a bad one.” Notably, he renounced the idea of collective guilt. Frankl was able to accept that his Viennese colleagues and neighbors may have known about or even participated in his persecution, and he did not condemn them for failing to join the resistance or die heroic deaths. Instead, he was deeply committed to the idea that even a vile Nazi criminal or a seemingly hopeless madman has the potential to transcend evil or insanity by making responsible choices.
He threw himself passionately into his work. In 1946 he reconstructed and revised the book that was destroyed when he was first deported (The Doctor and the Soul), and that same year—in only nine days—he wrote Man’s Search for Meaning. He hoped to cure through his writings the personal alienation and cultural malaise that plagued many individuals who felt an “inner emptiness” or a “void within themselves.” Perhaps this flurry of professional activity helped Frankl to restore meaning to his own life.
Two years later he married Eleanore Schwindt, who, like his first wife, was a nurse. Unlike Tilly, who was Jewish, Elly was Catholic. Although this may have been mere coincidence, it was characteristic of Viktor Frankl to accept individuals regardless of their religious beliefs or secular convictions. His deep commitment to the uniqueness and dignity of each individual was illustrated by his admiration for Freud and Adler even though he disagreed with their philosophical and psychological theories. He also valued his personal relationships with philosophers as radically different as Martin Heidegger, a reformed Nazi sympathizer, Karl Jaspers, an advocate of collective guilt, and Gabriel Marcel, a Catholic philosopher and writer. As a psychiatrist, Frankl avoided direct reference to his personal religious beliefs. He was fond of saying that the aim of psychiatry was the healing of the soul, leaving to religion the salvation of the soul.
He remained head of the neurology department at the Vienna Policlinic Hospital for twenty-five years and wrote more than thirty books for both professionals and general readers. He lectured widely in Europe, the Americas, Australia, Asia, and Africa; held professorships at Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Pittsburgh; and was Distinguished Professor of Logotherapy at the U.S. International University in San Diego. He met with politicians, world leaders such as Pope Paul VI, philosophers, students, teachers, and numerous individuals who had read and been inspired by his books. Even in his nineties, Frankl continued to engage in dialogue with visitors from all over the world and to respond personally to some of the hundreds of letters he received every week. Twenty-nine universities awarded him honorary degrees, and the American Psychiatric Association honored him with the Oskar Pfister Award.
Frankl is credited with establishing logotherapy as a psychiatric technique that uses existential analysis to help patients resolve their emotional conflicts. He stimulated many therapists to look beyond patients’ past or present problems to help them choose productive futures by making personal choices and taking responsibility for them. Several generations of therapists were inspired by his humanistic insights, which gained influence as a result of Frankl’s prolific writing, provocative lectures, and engaging personality. He encouraged others to use existential analysis creatively rather than to establish an offcial doctrine. He argued that therapists should focus on the specific needs of individual patients rather than extrapolate from abstract theories.
Despite a demanding schedule, Frankl also found time to take flying lessons and pursue his lifelong passion for mountain climbing. He joked that in contrast to Freud’s and Adler’s “depth psychology,” which emphasizes delving into an individual’s past and his or her unconscious instincts and desires, he practiced “height psychology,” which focuses on a person’s future and his or her conscious decisions and actions. His approach to psychotherapy stressed the importance of helping people to reach new heights of personal meaning through self-transcendence: the application of positive effort, technique, acceptance of limitations, and wise decisions. His goal was to provoke people into realizing that they could and should exercise their capacity for choice to achieve their own goals. Writing about tragic optimism, he cautioned us that “the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.”
Frankl was once asked to express in one sentence the meaning of his own life. He wrote the response on paper and asked his students to guess what he had written. After some moments of quiet reflection, a student surprised Frankl by saying, “The meaning of your life is to help others find the meaning of theirs.”
“That was it, exactly,” Frankl said. “Those are the very words I had written.”
WILLIAM J. WINSLADE
William J. Winslade is a philosopher, lawyer, and psychoanalyst who teaches psychiatry, medical ethics, and medical jurisprudence at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston and the University of Houston Law Center.
BEACON PRESS
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Beacon Press books are published under the auspices of
the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.
© 1959, 1962, 1984, 1992, 2006 by Viktor E. Frankl
Foreword © 2006 by Harold S. Kushner
Afterword © 2006 by William J. Winslade
All rights reserved
First published in German in 1946 under the title
Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationslager.
Original English title was From Death-Camp to Existentialism.
Composition by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Frankl, Viktor Emil.
[Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationslager. English]
Man’s search for meaning: an introduction to logotherapy /
Viktor E. Frankl; part one translated by Ilse Lasch
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-8070-1428-8
1. Frankl, Viktor Emil. 2. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—
Personal narratives. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—
Psychological aspects. 4. Psychologists—Austria—Biography.
5. Logotherapy. I. Title.
D810.J4F72713 1992
150.19’5—DC20 92-21055
v3.0
Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
(Series: # )
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