Viktor Frankl's Logotherapy: Vienna's Zero-Suicide Year and Its Critics

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Viktor Frankl was born in Vienna in 1905 to a socially conscious Jewish family. As a teenager he corresponded with Sigmund Freud, who in 1924 asked to publish one of his papers, but Frankl rejected Freud's will to pleasure, joined Alfred Adler, then rejected the will to power too and was expelled from Adler's circle. He argued that people are driven by a search for meaning. After a spike in teen suicides around report card time between 1928 and 1930, he set up free youth counseling centers, and in 1931 not a single Vienna student died by suicide. As head of neurology at the Rothschild Hospital from 1940, he falsified diagnoses to shield mentally disabled patients from the Nazi euthanasia program.

From 1942 Frankl, his wife Tilly and his parents were deported to Theresienstadt, where his father died; his mother and brother were killed at Auschwitz and Tilly died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen. His manuscript, sewn into his coat, was confiscated, and he rebuilt it on scraps of paper. In 1946 he dictated Man's Search for Meaning in nine days and developed logotherapy, with Socratic dialogue, dereflection and paradoxical intention. Historian Timothy Pytell argues Frankl spent only days at Auschwitz before the Dachau subcamp Kaufering III and published in a journal of the Nazi-affiliated Göring Institute in 1937 and 1938. Lawrence Langer called the theory amoral, while Alexander Batthyány of the Viktor Frankl Institute says Pytell never consulted the archives or interviewed Frankl.

• Frankl conceived a Statue of Responsibility to balance the Statue of Liberty, and a monument of two clasped hands now stands in Utah.
• A 1991 survey named Man's Search for Meaning one of the ten most influential books in the U.S., a success Frankl found depressing.
• He was booed in New York in 1978 after refusing to assign collective guilt to Austrians.
• In 1988 he accepted an award from Austrian president Kurt Waldheim, angering many in the Jewish community.
• His family later revealed he prayed memorized Jewish prayers daily; he climbed in the Alps until 80 and died in 1997 at 92, leaving 39 books.