Viktor Emil Frankl (1905–1997) was an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, philosopher and Holocaust survivor. He founded logotherapy, a school of psychotherapy that describes the search for meaning in life as the central human driving force. Logotherapy is considered part of existential and humanistic psychology and was presented as the third Viennese school of psychotherapy, following those of Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler.
Frankl was born in Vienna to a Jewish family. His interest in psychology and the role of meaning developed while he was still in secondary school, when he attended evening classes in applied psychology. As a teenager, he corresponded with Freud, who asked permission to publish one of his papers.
He studied medicine at the University of Vienna and in 1925 published the paper “Psychotherapy and Worldview” in the journal of Adler's circle. Adler expelled him from his circle because he insisted that meaning was the central human driving force. In 1926, he began developing his theory, which he called logotherapy.
As a medical student, from 1928 to 1930, he organised free youth counselling centres in Vienna to address the high number of teenage suicides around the time annual school reports were issued. In 1931, no student in Vienna died by suicide.
After receiving his medical degree, he worked at Steinhof Psychiatric Hospital and later headed the neurology department at Rothschild Hospital, the only hospital in Vienna that still admitted Jews. Before his deportation, he helped many patients avoid the Nazi euthanasia programme for people with mental disabilities.
In 1942, nine months after his wedding, Frankl and his family were sent to the Theresienstadt camp, where his father died of starvation and pneumonia. In 1944, he was transferred to Auschwitz, where his mother and brother were murdered in the gas chambers. His wife, Tilly, later died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen. In total, he spent three years in four Nazi concentration camps.
During this experience, Frankl observed that those who knew they had a task waiting for them to complete were more likely to survive. He quoted Nietzsche: “He who has a ‘why’ to live can bear almost any ‘how.’”
After the war, he wrote “Man's Search for Meaning” in nine days while heading the neurology department at Vienna's General Polyclinic Hospital. The book was published in German in 1946, and the English translation in 1959 became an international bestseller. A 1991 survey for the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club named it one of the ten most influential books in the US. Frankl himself saw its success as a symptom of the “mass neurosis of modern times,” since the title promised to answer the question of life's meaning.
Logotherapy recognises three main ways of finding meaning: making a difference in the world, having particular experiences and adopting particular attitudes. Its main techniques include paradoxical intention, dereflection and Socratic dialogue.
Frankl's work was not without criticism. Historian Timothy Pytell identified contradictions in Frankl's account of Auschwitz, arguing that Frankl was neither registered there nor given a prisoner number, but was held near the train for a few days before being transferred to the Kaufering III labour camp, a subcamp of Dachau.
Holocaust scholar Lawrence L. Langer criticised Frankl's “amoral” focus on meaning, pointing out that the same logic could also apply to Nazis who “found meaning in ridding the world of Jews.”
Pytell also highlighted that Frankl had contributed to the Göring Institute in Vienna in 1937 and early 1938, linking logotherapy to the worldview of some leading Nazi psychotherapists; his foundational paper was published in the Göring Institute's journal. Alexander Batthyány, director of the Viktor Frankl Institute and Archives, responded that Pytell had never visited the archive or interviewed Frankl, and that his criticism had been used by Holocaust denier Theodore O'Keefe.
Frankl argued that freedom was not the last word, but had to be complemented by responsibility. On this basis, he proposed complementing the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast with a “Statue of Responsibility” on the West Coast. Stephen Covey and Kevin Hall promoted the idea, and sculptor Gary Lee Price designed two joined hands. Construction in Utah was approved in 2023, and on 6 June 2025, Alliant International University unveiled a 15-foot statue titled “Statue of Responsibility.”
In his personal life, Frankl lost his father, mother, brother and first wife in the Holocaust. In 1947, he married Eleonore Schwindt, a Catholic, and they respected each other's religion; according to later accounts, he prayed daily and had memorised Jewish prayers and psalms. Their daughter, Gabriele, became a child psychologist.
Frankl remained a skilled mountaineer until the age of 80, and three difficult trails in the Austrian Alps bear his name. He died of heart failure in Vienna on 2 September 1997 and was buried in the Jewish section of Vienna's Central Cemetery.
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