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Viktor Emil Frankl (; 26 March 1905 – 2 September 1997) was an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, philosopher, and The Holocaust survivor, who founded logotherapy, a school of psychotherapy that describes a search for a life's meaning as the central human motivational force. Logotherapy is part of existential and humanistic psychology theories.
Logotherapy was promoted as the third school of Viennese Psychotherapy, after those established by Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler.
Frankl published 39 books. The autobiographical Man's Search for Meaning, a best-selling book, is based on his experiences in various Nazi concentration camps.
In 1924, Frankl's first scientific paper was published in the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse. In the same year, he was president of the Sozialistische Mittelschüler Österreich, the Social Democratic Party of Austria's youth movement for high school students. Frankl's father was a socialist who named him after Viktor Adler, the founder of the party.Pytell, T. (2000). The Missing Pieces of the Puzzle: A Reflection on the Odd Career of Viktor Frankl. Journal of Contemporary History, 35(2), 281–306. doi:10.1177/002200940003500208 During this time, Frankl began questioning the Freudian approach to psychoanalysis. He joined Alfred Adler's circle of students and published his second academic paper, "Psychotherapy and Worldview" ("Psychotherapie und Weltanschauung"), in Adler's International Journal of Individual Psychology in 1925. Frankl was expelled from Adler's circle when he insisted that meaning was the central motivational force in human beings. From 1926, he began refining his theory, which he termed logotherapy.
After earning his M.D. in 1930, Frankl gained extensive experience at Steinhof Psychiatric Hospital, where he was responsible for the treatment of suicidal women. In 1937, he began a private practice, but the Anschluss in 1938 limited his opportunity to treat patients. In 1940, he joined Rothschild Hospital, the only hospital in Vienna still admitting Jews, as head of the neurology department. Prior to his deportation to the concentration camps, he helped numerous patients avoid the Nazi euthanasia program that targeted the mentally disabled.
In 1942, just nine months after his marriage, Frankl and his family were sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. His father died there of starvation and pneumonia. In 1944, Frankl and his surviving relatives were transported to Auschwitz, where his mother and brother were murdered in the gas chambers. His wife Tilly died later of typhus in Bergen-Belsen. Frankl spent three years in four concentration camps.
Following the war, he became head of the neurology department of the General Polyclinic Vienna hospital, and established a private practice in his home. He worked with patients until his retirement in 1970.
In 1948, Frankl earned a PhD in philosophy from the University of Vienna. His dissertation, The Unconscious God, examines the relationship between psychology and religion,Boeree, George. "Personality Theories: Viktor Frankl." Shippensburg University. Accessed 18 April 2014. and advocates for the use of the Socratic dialogue (self-discovery discourse) for clients to get in touch with their spiritual unconscious.Lantz, James E. "Family logotherapy." Contemporary Family Therapy 8, no. 2 (1986): 124–135.
In 1955, Frankl was awarded a professorship of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Vienna, and, as visiting professor, lectured at Harvard University (1961), Southern Methodist University, Dallas (1966), and Duquesne University, Pittsburgh (1972).
Throughout his career, Frankl argued that the reductionist tendencies of early psychotherapeutic approaches dehumanised the patient, and advocated for a rehumanisation of psychotherapy.
The American Psychiatric Association awarded Frankl the 1985 Oskar Pfister Award for his contributions to religion and psychiatry.
“There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” I can see in these words a motto which holds true for any psychotherapy. In the Nazi concentration camps, one could have witnessed that those who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfill were most apt to survive.”
The primary techniques offered by logotherapy and existential analysis are:
His acknowledgement of meaning as a central motivational force and factor in mental health is his lasting contribution to the field of psychology. It provided the foundational principles for the emerging field of positive psychology. Viktor Frankl’s Meaning-Seeking Model and Positive Psychology Chapter from book 'Meaning in Positive and Existential Psychology' (pp. 149–184) Frankl's work has also been endorsed in the Chabad philosophy of Hasidic Judaism.
Freedom, however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.Frankl's concept for the statue grew in popularity, and drew the affection of Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey teamed up with Kevin Hall to push the idea of the statue forward in the 1990s, and eventually commissioned the sculptor Gary Lee Price who came up with the concept of two hands clasped together. The design was approved by Frankl's widow, and they began looking for a location to construct it. Their first choice was California, to have it in a Pacific Ocean harbour to complement the Statue of Liberty's position in the Atlantic harbour of New York. However, the state regulations proved difficult to navigate, and the governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, suggested a location in his state for the project, which was approved in 2023.
On 6 June 2025, Alliant International University unveiled a 15-foot statue that honors Frankl titled: "Statue of Responsibility".
Pytell later would remark on the particularly sharp insight of Langer's reading of Frankl's Holocaust testimony, stating that with Langer's criticism published in 1982 before Pytell's biography, the former had thus drawn the controversial parallels, or accommodations in ideology without the knowledge that Victor Frankl was an advocate/"embraced" the key ideas of the Matthias Goring movement ("will and responsibility"Viktor Frankl's Search for Meaning: An Emblematic 20th-Century Life By Timothy Pytell pg 70–72, 111) as a form of therapy in the late 1930s. When at that time Frankl would submit a paper and contributed to the Göring institute in Vienna 1937 and again in early 1938 connecting the logotherapy focus on "world-view" to the "work of some of the leading Nazi psychotherapists", both at a time before Anschluss. Frankl's founding logotherapy paper, was submitted to and published in the the journal of the Goering Institute, a psychotherapy movement, with the "proclaimed agenda of building psychotherapy that affirmed a Nazi-oriented worldview".
The origins of logotherapy, as described by Frankl, were therefore a major issue of continuity that Pytell argues were potentially problematic for Frankl because he had laid out the main elements of logotherapy while working for/contributing to the Nazi-affiliated Göring Institute. Principally Frankl's 1937 paper, that was published by the institute. This association, as a source of controversy, that logotherapy was palatable to Nazism is the reason Pytell suggests, Frankl took two different stances on how the concentration-camp experience affected the course of his psychotherapy theory. Namely, that within the original English edition of Frankl's most well known book, Man's Search for Meaning, the suggestion is made and still largely held that logotherapy was itself derived from his camp experience, with the claim as it appears in the original edition, that this form of psychotherapy was "not concocted in the philosopher's armchair nor at the analyst's couch; it took shape in the hard school of air-raid shelters and bomb craters; in concentration camps and prisoner of war camps." Frankl's statements however to this effect would be deleted from later editions, though in the 1963 edition, a similar statement again appeared on the back of the book jacket of Man's Search for Meaning.
Frankl over the years would with these widely read statements and others, switch between the idea that logotherapy took shape in the camps to the claim that the camps merely were a testing ground of his already preconceived theories. An uncovering of the matter would occur in 1977 with Frankl revealing on this controversy, though compounding another, stating "People think I came out of Auschwitz with a brand-new psychotherapy. This is not the case."
In 1988 Frankl would further "stir up sentiment against him" by being photographed next to and in accepting the Great Silver Medal with Star for Services to the Republic of Austria as a Holocaust survivor, from Kurt Waldheim, a controversial president of Austria who concurrent with the medal ceremony, was gripped by revelations that he had lied about his WWII military record and was under investigation for complicity in Nazi War crimes. It was later concluded that he was not involved in war crimes but had knowledge of them. Frankl's acceptance of the medal was viewed by many in the international Jewish community as a betrayal.Freud's
Frankl's father, Gabriel, originally from Pohořelice, Moravia, died in the Theresienstadt Ghetto concentration camp on 13 February 1943, aged 81, from starvation and pneumonia. His mother and brother, Walter, were both killed in Auschwitz. His sister, Stella, escaped to Australia.
In 1947, Frankl married Eleonore "Elly" Katharina Schwindt. She was a practicing Catholic. The couple respected each other's religious backgrounds, both attending church and synagogue, and celebrating Christmas and Hanukkah. Although it was not known for 50 years, his wife and son-in-law reported after his death that he prayed every day and had memorized the words of daily Jewish prayers and psalms.
Viktor and Elly Frankl had one daughter, Gabriele, who went on to become a child psychologist. Frankl's grandson, Alexander Vesely, is a licensed psychotherapist, producer and documentary film director, who co-founded the Viktor Frankl Institute of America. Alexander Vesely produced, filmed, and edited the documentary "Viktor & I".
Frankl was also an "avid mountain climber," until he was 80 years old. There are three "difficult" trails in the Austrian Alps named after him.
Frankl died of heart failure in Vienna on 2 September 1997. He is buried in the Jewish section of the Vienna Central Cemetery.
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