In 1945, prisoner 119104 was assigned to a work detail outside a Bavarian forest, near a small town called Landsberg.
As he and his 280 comrades trudged over the icy, muddy road in ragged rows of five, thinking longingly of the watery broth that passed as soup in the camps or dreading assignment to a volatile foreman, prisoner 119104 “felt that these thoughts were somehow too pointless.”
Before deportation to Auschwitz and other concentration camps, that prisoner—whose name was Viktor Frankl—had been a psychiatrist. Struggling to think “higher thoughts” while on this march, Frankl later wrote (in the third person) that he “used a trick: he tried to distance himself from this whole agonizing life…and what did he do? He imagined that he was standing before a lectern at a Viennese adult education college and giving a lecture, and it would be about what he was currently experiencing: in his mind, he gave a lecture entitled ‘Psychology of the Concentration Camp.’”
Within a year of that forced march, Viktor Frankl gave that very lecture, at that very venue in Vienna. Delivered as Frankl was attempting to pick up the pieces of his shattered life, the lecture formed the basis of a book he dictated that year, Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager (which literally translates to “a psychologist experiences the concentration camp”). The book recounts Frankl’s experiences in clear, unsentimental language and emphasizes the meaning he was able to find even in the most brutal situations. “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing,” Frankl wrote, “the last of the human freedoms: To choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager was translated into English in 1959 and eventually renamed Man’s Search for Meaning. It was an instant bestseller, and within a decade of its publication by Beacon Press, Man’s Search for Meaning had sold over a million copies. By the time of Frankl’s death in 1997, it had sold over 9 million copies. Today, according to Beacon’s director, Gayatri Patnaik, more than 18 million copies of the book have been sold in English and it has been translated into more than 60 languages, from Albanian to Uyghur to Vietnamese. Man’s Search for Meaning is used in prison support groups, at yoga retreat centers and in Tony Robbins motivational workshops. The book is touted by celebrities and has supported people facing every kind of crisis, from homelessness to the death of a child. Patnaik thinks it’s extraordinary that so many years after it was published, the book continues to be Beacon’s number-one bestseller, with some 2,500 copies bought each week. “I have to think that the need for purpose and meaning and hope is kind of a universal driver,” she says.
Viktor Frankl’s birthplace at Czerningasse 6 in Vienna, photo taken in 1978. (Photo credit: © Viktor Frankl Archiv/brandstaetter images/picturedesk.com)
Yet Frankl’s legacy is more complex than the success of Man’s Search for Meaning alone would suggest. A proud and exacting man with a passion for mountain climbing and an appreciation for puns, Frankl dedicated his life to creating and advancing logotherapy, his unique brand of existential psychoanalysis which centers on finding meaning in life. His writing also had a far-reaching influence on how people interpret the Holocaust—some scholars say for better, others say for worse. And in the social media age, many aspects of Frankl’s legacy have been decontextualized and misunderstood, even as his ideas spread farther than ever. This “Frankl-mania” has accentuated the core difficulty in Frankl’s message, which fans find empowering and critics find reprehensible—the subtle distinction between having agency even amidst the worst suffering, and being existentially responsible for that suffering, even in such a dire circumstance as the Holocaust.
Nearly 80 years after Frankl’s liberation, more than 60 years after his most famous book’s translation into English, and almost 30 years after Frankl’s death, why do he and Man’s Search for Meaning remain so popular? And how did Judaism influence the man and message that have impacted so many?
Frankl was born in 1905 to a middle-class Austrian Jewish family in Vienna, which at the time was the capital city of the mighty Austro-Hungarian empire and a center of rapidly modernizing European science and culture. Jews—who had only been granted equal rights by Emperor Franz Josef in 1867—were at the forefront of many of these changes. In spite of this, or perhaps as a result, Vienna was also rife with antisemitism.
In his memoir (published in German in 1995 and translated into English as Recollections by Insight Books in 1997), Frankl writes that he is a descendant, through his mother, of both the famed medieval commentator Rashi and the Grand Rabbi Loew of Prague, the creator of the legendary golem. He describes his father as religious and writes that until World War I, the family ate only kosher food. But Frankl’s childhood was fairly secular, reflecting the desire of many Austrian Jews at the time to assimilate. The only religious education he describes in his memoir is being forced to read “a prayer in Hebrew” on Friday evenings. “Each time we read the text without mistakes, the reward was 10 heller. But this happened only a few times in a given year.”
Siblings Walter, Viktor (center) and Stella Frankl in 1910 (Photo credit:© Viktor Frankl Archiv/brandstaetter images/picturedesk.com)
A prodigy—by his own account—Frankl had decided by age 3 to become a physician. In junior high school, his biology teacher had asserted that “life in the final analysis is nothing but a combustion process, an oxidation process.” Frankl writes that he sprang up and challenged the teacher by saying, “Dr. Fritz, if this is so, then what meaning does life have at all?” By age 15 Frankl had mastered hypnosis and was lecturing at Vienna’s adult education school on the subject of “The Meaning of Life.” He reports that in these early years, he developed two basic ideas: first, that we are responsible for creating our own meaning in and of life; second, that that ultimate meaning is, and must be, beyond our comprehension.
While still a teenager, Frankl started medical school at the University of Vienna and began a correspondence with Sigmund Freud. After toying with the idea of a career in obstetrics or dermatology, he became fully committed to psychiatry when another medical student told him that he should “own up” to his talent in the subject. The student quoted Christian existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s exhortation not to “despair at becoming your authentic self,” and young Frankl was convinced. At 20, Frankl became associated with Alfred Adler, who had broken with Freud (the first school of Viennese psychotherapy) and founded Individual Psychology (the second school of Viennese psychotherapy) in 1911.
Around this time, in the mid-1920s, Frankl writes that he would impress women (which, he demurred, he could not do “by my looks alone”) by enthusiastically praising “a certain Dr. Frankl” who was about to give a well-attended lecture. When a woman agreed to attend, “with wise foresight” he would sit with her at the end of the front row. “One can imagine the impression it would make on the girl as her date suddenly left his seat and, greeted with audience applause, step[ped] up to the lectern.”
Viktor Frankl with his family, from left: father Gabriel, mother Elsa, sister Stella and brother Walter, circa 1926. (Photo credit: © Viktor Frankl Archiv/brandstaetter images/picturedesk.com)
Frankl’s rise was rapid. He started a youth counseling program focused on preventing the suicides prevalent around the time of final exams, and he was soon placed in charge of a ward of suicidal women. In this part of his memoir, Frankl says that he wrote down “amusing sayings” of patients. Some of his “favorites,” he writes, were in response to his asking them whether they were sexually active. “You know, doctor, only when I get raped. I don’t get around much.” This is one of several examples in his autobiography where Frankl’s sense of humor rings oddly, at least to a modern ear.
Throughout these years, Frankl developed what he viewed as his life’s work—logotherapy, which he considered the third school of Viennese psychotherapy after those of Freud and Adler. The key premise of logotherapy is that a central drive of the human psyche is a “will to meaning,” which is framed as a counterpoint to Freud’s pleasure principle and Adler’s will to power. When the will to meaning is frustrated, it can lead to existential neuroses of various kinds.
In 1937, Frankl opened a private psychiatric practice, but in March 1938 Hitler annexed Austria. Frankl writes that the night of the Anschluss he was giving a lecture when a stormtrooper flung open the doors of the hall, “obviously” to disrupt the event. “I thought to myself, ‘I should make the impossible possible, and lecture in such a way that he will forget why he came here. Divert his attention!’ So I faced him openly and kept on speaking. He remained at the doorway, not budging from his spot, until I had finished my lecture. This was the act of rhetorical bravery of my life!”
Frankl in front of the clinic at Rosenhügel in Vienna, 1930. (Photo credit: © ÖNB-Bildarchiv/picturedesk.com)
Forced to close his practice, Frankl became the head of neurology at Rothschild, the Jewish hospital, which afforded him and his family some safety from deportation to the camps. Following the Anschluss, Jewish suicides spiked, and Rothschild received as many as ten attempted suicide cases daily. Over the protests of many of his colleagues, and although he had no experience as a brain surgeon, Frankl went to excruciating lengths for these patients, including injecting amphetamines directly into their brains. “My assistant, Dr. Rappaport, protested my efforts to save people who had attempted suicide,” Frankl wrote. “Then the day came when she herself received the order for deportation. She attempted suicide, was taken to my department, and I helped restore her to life. But eventually she was deported.” He writes elsewhere that he received no thanks for this surgical operation.
One day in 1941, Frankl received word that he had been granted an American visa. He felt anguish about whether to accept and flee to safety or to stay and protect his parents. When he arrived home with the news, he says in Man’s Search for Meaning, he saw a piece of marble on the table that his father had rescued from the rubble of Vienna’s largest synagogue, which the Nazis had burned down. It was a fragment of the Ten Commandments from the bimah; a single gilded Hebrew letter was engraved on the piece. “My father explained that this letter stood for one of the Commandments. Eagerly I asked, ‘Which one is it?’ He answered, ‘Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land.’ At that moment I decided to stay with my father and my mother upon the land, and to let the American visa lapse.”
He met his first wife, a nurse named Tilly, and they married under a chuppah. They were one of the last couples recorded by the Jewish registrar’s office before it was shuttered by the Nazis, who wanted to discourage Jewish reproduction. (The Nazis also forced Tilly and Frankl to abort their first and only pregnancy.) He and his mentor Otto Pötzl, head of the Department of Neurology and Psychiatry of the University Clinic of Vienna and a Nazi party member, worked together to sabotage the euthanasia of Jews deemed mentally ill. Frankl later cited Pötzl as an example of why, after the war, he refused to see all Austrians as collectively responsible for Hitler’s crimes.
Frankl climbing in July, 1939. (Photo credit: © Viktor Frankl Archiv/brandstaetter images/picturedesk.com)
Worried that his days were numbered, Frankl wrote the manuscript of a book eventually translated into English as The Doctor and the Soul so that the insights of logotherapy might survive him. He carried the completed manuscript with him when his family was eventually deported to Theresienstadt, where Tilly was assigned work in a munitions factory and Frankl was appointed to lead the model ghetto’s Department for Psychological Hygiene, a division of the camp’s Nazi-contrived self-administration. In this capacity, Frankl appointed fellow inmate Regina Jonas—the world’s first ordained female rabbi—to greet new arrivals and help attend to their shock. Two years later, in 1944, Frankl and his wife were deported to Auschwitz.
This book does not claim to be an account of facts and events but of personal experiences,” begins Man’s Search for Meaning. “Experiences which millions of prisoners have suffered time and again.” In the following pages, Frankl describes how the “hard fight for existence” began even before the transport, as people fought to keep their names off the rolls of those camps known to have gas chambers. He describes the unhappy condition of the 1,500 persons who had been traveling by train for several days and nights, how “suddenly a cry broke from the ranks of the anxious passengers, ‘There is a sign, Auschwitz!’” and how “with the progressive dawn, the outlines of an immense camp became visible: long stretches of several rows of barbed wire fences; watch towers; search lights; and long columns of ragged human figures, gray in the grayness of dawn, trekking along the straight desolate roads, to what destination we did not know.”
Frankl describes deboarding onto the wide platform, the shouting SS guards, and many other details that have become seared into popular consciousness through films and literature in the decades since Man’s Search for Meaning was first published.
In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl writes that when it was his turn at the selection, “the SS man looked me over, appeared to hesitate, then put both his hands on my shoulders. I tried very hard to look smart, and he turned my shoulders very slowly until I faced right [toward the camp proper, rather than immediate gassing], and I moved over to that side.”
But in his autobiography, Frankl tells a different story: “Dr. Joseph Mengele, one of the Holocaust’s most notorious mass murderers, was selecting prisoners: to the right for labor in the camps, and to the left for the gas chambers. In my case, Mengele pointed my shoulder toward the left. Since I recognized no one in the left line, behind Mengele’s back I switched over to the right line where I saw a few of my young colleagues. Only God knows where I got that idea or found the courage.”
The Frankls with friends. From left: Erna Gsur, Paul Polak, Oti (Ottilie) Polak, Tilly Frankl, Viktor Frankl and Herbert Gsur, circa 1941-1942. (Photo credit: © Viktor Frankl Archiv/brandstaetter images/picturedesk.com)
Once he arrived in the processing area, Man’s Search for Meaning continues, Frankl pleaded with an older prisoner—likely a kapo (a prisoner who also served as guard)—to let him keep the manuscript of The Doctor and the Soul during processing. “Approaching him furtively, I pointed to the roll of paper in the inner pocket of my coat.” He told the kapo that this manuscript represented his whole purpose, and must be kept at any cost. “A grin spread over his face, first piteous, then more amused, then mocking, insulting, until he bellowed one word at me in answer to my question, a word that was ever present in the vocabulary of the camp inmates: ‘Shit!’ At that moment I saw the plain truth and did what marked the culminating point of the first phase of my psychological reaction: I struck out my whole former life.” In his autobiography, Frankl writes further that in the lining of the shabby coat he was given to replace his nice one, Frankl found a copy of the Shema. He kept this page with him until liberation, when it mysteriously disappeared.
All of Man’s Search for Meaning is written in the same gripping yet dispassionate style. Frankl matter-of-factly describes the deep sadism of the kapos and SS, as well as the everyday suffering caused by hunger, cold and fatigue. He details the coveted servings of watery soup “from the bottom,” where the few vegetables would settle; how cigarettes were used as currency by inmates; how he decided not to wake a man screaming in his sleep because he knew that no nightmare could be worse than their shared reality.
But strikingly, Frankl also acknowledges the gradations of suffering possible within the camp and moments of psychological escape, pleasure and even ecstasy—a vision of his wife’s loving countenance, a spectacular sunset seen over the forest, a feeling of a “victorious ‘Yes’” in answer to his anguished internal question of whether any of the misery around him had any “ultimate purpose.”
Most of all, Frankl emphasizes the connection between survival and hope. “What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.” (Italics in the original.)
Frankl was soon transferred from Auschwitz to Kaufering III, a subcamp of Dachau, and then to Türkheim, another subcamp of Dachau, where he worked as a camp doctor. He was liberated on April 27, 1945, by a Texas regiment of American troops. Upon returning to Vienna, he discovered immediately that except for his sister, his entire family, including Tilly, had been killed. He became deeply depressed. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl describes liberation as one of the most dangerous phases in the psychological trajectory of the concentration camp inmate.
Portrait of Frankl, circa 1945. (Photo credit: © Viktor Frankl Archiv/brandstaetter images/picturedesk.com)
While still in the camps, Frankl had begun to reconstruct The Doctor and the Soul on strips of SS forms as a way to hold delirium at bay when sick with typhus. He finally published the book in 1946. His friends also encouraged him to write a more personal book, which he dictated in nine days and which came out the same year. It was the original version of Man’s Search for Meaning. Due to his “intense dislike of exhibitionism,” Frankl intended to publish the second book anonymously until a friend convinced him to “stand behind” his words.
Frankl’s intense productivity in the years after liberation has led to some confusion, even among his devotees. Many wrongly assume that Frankl “discovered” logotherapy and his existential approach to life while in the camps, and that Man’s Search for Meaning—originally published in English as From Death Camp to Existentialism—tells this tale. In fact, Frankl viewed Man’s Search for Meaning as more of a proof of concept detailing how his worldview could serve even in the most dire circumstances.
The key premise of logotherapy is that a central drive of the human psyche is a “will to meaning”—a counterpoint to Freud’s pleasure principle and Adler’s will to power.
Even less well known, Frankl also penned a fictional drama that first year after the war. “It was as if something deep inside of me had dictated the play,” he said years later. “I could hardly write fast enough, even though I used shorthand. The play was written within a few hours.” It was called Synchronization in Buchenwald and opens with the philosophers Kant, Spinoza and Socrates deliberating in heaven about how to help humans rediscover purpose. They go to Buchenwald, where a Jewish family is imprisoned and dying. One of the brothers in the family—Franz, a playwright who (like Frankl) was forced to surrender his precious script when he entered the camp—hopes to die in place of his brother. Yet he cannot. “I’ll carry on this filthy existence,” Franz says at the denouement. “I am condemned to live,” and—again, like Frankl—to rewrite the play that had been destroyed.
The semi-underground barracks of the Kaufering III concentration camp, April 27, 1945. (Photo credit: © Viktor Frankl Archiv/brandstaetter images/picturedesk.com)
In the final scene, Spinoza turns to his fellow heavenly philosophers. Referring to both Franz’s play and also to Synchronization in Buchenwald itself, he asks whether the work will be understood. “You’ll see,” he says. “The humans will say it’s all make-believe.”
The Doctor and the Soul was translated into English in 1955, when Frankl was head of neurology at the Vienna Polyclinic Institute. By this time, Frankl had remarried—a young Catholic nurse named Elly—and had a daughter named Gabriele. His ideas had not found much purchase in Europe, but immediately after its translation, the book—and Frankl—were discovered and embraced by some American Christians. These men were eager to build a rapprochement between psychotherapy and religion by circumventing Freud’s theories and antipathy toward religion, which dominated psychotherapy at the time. In contrast, logotherapy left space for religion, and Frankl posited that religion was a legitimate path through which to find meaning. Furthermore, Frankl’s emphasis on the redemptive power of suffering, the ability and necessity of finding meaning in life, and the resilience of the human spirit all dovetailed well with Christian theology.
Frankl soon found a secure fan base among these ministers and pastoral counselors. Aaron Ungersma, a Presbyterian minister and professor of pastoral psychology at San Francisco Theological Seminary, spent his sabbatical year in 1958-59 with Frankl in Vienna. Robert Leslie, a Methodist minister and associate of Ungersma, studied with Frankl from 1960-1961. Ungersma’s The Search for Meaning (1961), which introduced logotherapy as a basis for pastoral counseling, and Leslie’s Jesus and Logotherapy (1965), which examines Jesus’s ministry through a logotherapeutic lens, were the first books published in English about the work of the Austrian psychiatrist.
It was also American Protestants who enabled Frankl to cross over into the mainstream. For years, Randolph Sasnett, a Methodist minister, had been looking for “America’s Next Genius,” who could help integrate religion and prayer into American higher education. From 1957 to 1959, Sasnett organized three major tours for Frankl on American college campuses small and large, sectarian and secular, relatively unknown and prestigious. It was also Sasnett who introduced Frankl to the famous Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport, who soon connected Frankl to Beacon Press, which published From Death Camp to Existentialism in 1959. This book, by the then relatively obscure Frankl, was lent psychological weight by Allport’s glowing preface. In 1962, the book was reissued as Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy.
The wedding of Viktor Frankl and Eleonore (Elly) Schwindt, July 18, 1947. (Photo credit: © Viktor Frankl Archiv/brandstaetter images/picturedesk.com)
Although Leslie described Frankl as “relatively unknown” in his 1961 review of Ungersma’s book, that changed rapidly. In a 1967 profile, PACE, the student magazine of Los Angeles City College, described Frankl as “Europe’s leading psychiatrist, whose new theory of logotherapy has rocketed him to fame as the most dynamic modern thinker in the field.” The magazine remarked that his “tours across six continents are marked by those he has helped to face life hazards—suicide, drugs, bereavement, hatred, jealousy, the loneliness of age, or youthful despair.” The article described Frankl as glowingly charismatic: “Bounding onto the platform, he explodes into racy Viennese-accented English with a gusto which almost physically assaults his listeners. Flashes of wit light up the pungent phrases. He bubbles and twinkles. You feel here is a man in love with life, with his job, with his audience.”
“Victor Frankl’s exploitation of the Holocaust to promote his controversial thesis that the suffering endured by Jews in Nazi Europe could or should somehow be seen in a positive, even redemptive, light is problematic in the extreme.”
His ideas did not escape criticism. In 1961, Rollo May—the leader of American existentialist psychology at the time—described Frankl’s approach as “authoritarian,” a description borne out somewhat by a 1963 audio recording of a case demonstration organized by Robert Leslie. The demonstration was given in front of a group of medical doctors, ministers, social workers and psychologists at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. The patient—introduced as Mrs. Holdout—had many diagnoses, including severe “psychogenic obesity,” diabetes, congestive heart failure, “passive-dependent personality trait disturbance” and more. She had gotten married in 1948, but the marriage was unhappy. She had wanted children but had experienced four miscarriages, none of which was ever satisfactorily explained by her doctors. She had divorced her husband in 1960 and was lonely. Although she wanted to find work, she experienced crippling panic attacks whenever she approached a building where she might find it.
Caricature by Frankl of the “Three Viennese Schools of Psychotherapy”: Sigmund Freud (1), Alfred Adler (2) and Viktor Frankl (3), 1993. (Photo credit: © Viktor Frankl Archiv/brandstaetter images/picturedesk.com)
To modern ears accustomed to a client-centered approach, the hour-long interview between Frankl and Mrs. Holdout is shocking. Mrs. Holdout speaks for, cumulatively, about a minute. The rest of the time, Frankl holds forth. He asks her questions but interrupts the answers. When her voice communicates mild skepticism, he tells her she must not understand his English and patronizingly says her counselor will explain it all to her later. His overall tone is strident and domineering.
Yet, his message is empowering. “Calories don’t count, in your case. Not yet,” he tells her in his thick accent. “What matters, immediately, is to reconcile yourself to all those things for which your doctors are making you accountable and responsible…Do you know what you are responsible for? You are responsible for the attitude which you adopt toward your predicament, but not for the predicament. Do you understand me?”
In a follow-up a year later, Robert Leslie reported that the patient had a generally more positive outlook on life, had gotten a new doctor, and that she credited Frankl for some of these changes.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Viktor and Elly spent much of their time in the United States—mostly in San Diego, where he was appointed to the faculty of the California School of Professional Psychology, which has since become Alliant International University. Already an avid mountain climber, Frankl learned how to fly small planes as a hobby, and he was a regular interviewee on television programs and a guest lecturer on college campuses. In the 1970s, at the height of his fame, the couple met with such luminaries as Pope Paul VI and Otto von Habsburg, the heir to the Habsburg dynasty. In Berkeley, meanwhile, Robert Leslie persuaded Frankl to open the Frankl Library and Memorabilia at the Graduate Theological Union, with Leslie himself as curator.
Frankl at the University of Vienna in 1954. (Photo credit: © Viktor Frankl Archiv/brandstaetter images/picturedesk.com)
The archive’s opening in 1977 was marked by a “Festival of Meaning” at the First Unitarian Church in Berkeley. Frankl’s play Synchronization in Buchenwald was staged for the first time (at least in English), and Joseph Fabry—another Jewish Viennese Holocaust survivor and one of Frankl’s main acolytes—presented Frankl with the Albert Schweitzer Reverence of Life award. In his presentation, Fabry said, “You have shown that reverence of life is the deepest meaning a human being can achieve. You have almost single-handedly rehumanized psychotherapy. You have dared to introduce the human spirit into therapy and to make the resources of the human spirit the medicine chest of mental health.”
This might have been overstating the case. Despite the accolades, there were those, even among his followers, who felt that it was difficult to distinguish the practice of logotherapy from its founder. In a letter to Leslie in 1975, Frank T. Humberger—a founder of the family counseling center Logos West—wrote that “none of us but Viktor” practices “pure logotherapy.” And outside his circle of fervent admirers, enthusiasm for Frankl was beginning to burn off.
According to several of Frankl’s biographers, this had a lot to do with his personality. Many noted a disconnect between his public persona—as a charismatic and brilliant speaker with the moral gravitas of a Holocaust survivor—and his private manners. In response to a letter from Leslie, who was gathering materials for the Frankl archives, one college host described Frankl as “absolutely the most unpleasant person that I have ever dealt with” and wondered about the “little coherence between his personal characteristics and the words of his speech…I can say without any hesitation that we were glad when he left Indiana.”
In his response, Leslie acknowledged Frankl’s “prima donna” tendencies. “My guess is that he is so used to being treated as a very special person that he loses his perspective when things don’t go just as he would like. Incidentally, he has a reputation of being a hard guest to satisfy!” Prominent existential psychiatrist Irvin Yalom, in his own autobiography, Becoming Myself, described Frankl as egotistic and reported that on a visit to Stanford, Frankl’s scolding had brought Yalom’s au pair to tears because she brought him tea in the wrong kind of cup.
Portrait of Frankl, circa 1965. (Photo credit: © Viktor Frankl Archiv/brandstaetter images/picturedesk.com)
Yalom was also an important critic of logotherapy itself. In his 1980 book Existential Psychotherapy, he wrote that although Frankl had successfully reintroduced “meaning” into the clinical encounter, his techniques were “improvised” and relied too heavily on the individual therapist. In a section of Becoming Myself that echoes the encounter with Mrs. Holdout, Yalom described a clinical demonstration given by Frankl to Stanford residents as “catastrophic.” “His logotherapy demonstration consisted, for the most part, of his determining, in a ten-to-fifteen-minute inquiry, what the patient’s life meaning should be, and prescribing it to the patient in authoritarian fashion. At one point during a demonstration interview, one of the more obstreperous, long-haired, sandal-wearing psychiatric residents stood up in protest and stalked out of the room, muttering, ‘This is inhuman!’ It was a terrible moment for all, and no amount of apology would soothe Viktor, who repeatedly demanded that the resident be dismissed from the program.”
Although eclipsed by his Protestant friends, some prominent Jews also were excited by Frankl’s inclusion of faith in logotherapy. Menachem Schneerson, the seventh Lubavitcher rebbe, requested materials on logotherapy as early as 1959. In a June 19, 1969 letter to an Israeli psychiatrist in Haifa, Schneerson wrote that he had taken an interest in Frankl’s writing and its relevance to “the awesome power of faith,” especially “when applied and expressed in practical action, community work, observance of mitzvot, etc.” Schneerson went on to wonder why “[Frankl’s] approach has apparently not been appropriately disseminated and appreciated.”
“It was uncommon to see the rebbe reaching out to a secular professional in search of material that would aid potential patients who came to his door,” says Rabbi Eli Block, director of Legacy West Chabad in Plano, TX, who is researching a book on Schneerson. Usually, says Block, it was the other way around.
There are other letters written and personally signed by Schneerson regarding Frankl in which he makes it clear that he wants to be able to send people in need of treatment to therapists who don’t speak against “faith in G-d, against fear of Heaven, and against the respect afforded to one’s parents.” In Block’s assessment, “The rebbe was clearly looking for someone to integrate logotherapy into the Jewish world.” This was not the first time a Lubavitcher rebbe had taken an interest in a Viennese school of psychology, says Maya Balakirsky, a psychoanalyst and professor at Bar-Ilan University who has written books on Chabad and Freud. “The fifth rebbe underwent psychoanalysis in Vienna in 1903 with Wilhelm Stekel, a student of Freud’s,” she says. The sixth rebbe spent time in Vienna’s Purkersdorf Sanatorium.
Mentions of Frankl vanished from Schneerson’s correspondence by the mid-1970s. By then, however, a different noted rabbi had made logotherapy a touchstone of his life’s work—Reuven Bulka, the Orthodox spiritual leader of Congregation Machzikei Hadas in Ottawa, who later served as co-president of the Canadian Jewish Congress. Bulka received his PhD in psychology in 1971 from the University of Ottawa and wrote his thesis on logotherapy and religion. When he was starting his studies, a professor had suggested that Bulka read Man’s Search for Meaning, and he was immediately taken by it. “It was incredible,” Bulka said in a 2020 video. “It’s almost as if this fellow had been inside the mindset of Jewish religious leaders over the generations and figured out a way to amalgamate it into a psychological system.”
Frankl giving a lecture in New York in 1959. (Photo credit: © Viktor Frankl Archiv/brandstaetter images/picturedesk.com)
Bulka was so inspired that he called Beacon Press, which forwarded a letter to Frankl in Vienna. A few months later, Bulka was sitting in his kitchen when the phone rang. It was Frankl, who told him he would soon be in Rochester, NY, five hours away, where he could spare five minutes for the rabbi. On the appointed day, Bulka recalled that he drove to Rochester and that “five minutes turned into four hours,” adding that Frankl “valued his time but spent it so liberally when it was for something he felt was meaningful.”
“The two men became very close and spoke often,” says Rikki Bulka Ash, Rabbi Bulka’s granddaughter and biographer. Bulka went on to write numerous books about Judaism and logotherapy. The friendship between the two men was so strong that Frankl requested that when the day came, he wanted Bulka to officiate at his funeral, says Ash. “When Dr. Frankl died, my grandfather was unable to get there in time for the funeral. He did, however, preside over a later memorial service in Vienna.”
Ash says her grandfather, who died in 2021, often remarked that logotherapy was essentially “Judaism 101,” and noted that “logotherapy touches on a lot of deep wisdom that has been in the Torah.” In her book she writes, “While Viktor Frankl did not explicitly make the connection between Judaism and logotherapy, my grandfather embraced many of the tenets of logotherapy as an inseparable part of Judaism.”
Frankl had an even earlier but less well-known advocate in the Jewish world. Marguerite Chajes was a Vienna-trained concert soprano who had fled Vienna in 1939 and settled in Detroit with her husband, Julius, a renowned concert pianist and the conductor of the local Jewish Center Orchestra. The couple performed in Europe after the war, including in Vienna, where Chajes met Frankl in 1956 and became his patient for a while. Eli Block, who has studied the correspondence between Chajes and Frankl and interviewed Chajes’s granddaughter, says that Chajes became Frankl’s emissary to the Jewish community in the United States, giving talks on logotherapy and arranging lectures for him, including three in Detroit in April 1957, one of which was to the Hillel students at Wayne State University. Frankl told her that he was thrilled, but he was disappointed that other hoped-for lectures, such as one at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, never materialized. “They are apparently uninterested,” he wrote. “Based on my experiences, I believe that the Jewish people are more uninterested—in sad contrast to the churches.” After a visit to Israel, he said that he felt more lonely lecturing at Hebrew University than during his tour of the desert the day prior, adds Block.
Viktor and Elly Frankl with their daughter Gabriele and their grandchildren Katharina and Alex in 1981. (Photo credit: © Viktor Frankl Archiv/brandstaetter images/picturedesk.com)
But how did Frankl himself experience faith? Although he didn’t speak about it, Jewish practice did play a role in his life. His biographer and student Haddon Klingberg says Elly Frankl told him that her husband prayed every morning for more than 50 years and took tefillin with him wherever they traveled. In his 1994 memoir, Frankl explained why he rarely spoke publicly about his faith. His approach, he said, had depended on whether he was speaking as a “psychiatrist, philosopher, physician, or simply as a human being.” Since “we need to consider the audience to whom we speak, I would not dream of confessing my personal faith when speaking about logotherapeutic methods and techniques to psychiatrists. This would not serve the spreading of logotherapeutic ideas, which, after all, is my responsibility.”
Frankl attributed his less-than-enthusiastic reception in the American Jewish community to his emphasis on personal responsibility and his refusal to assign collective guilt for the Holocaust, which clashed with emerging ideas about its meaning. In addition to defending Otto Pötzl, his former mentor, Frankl had praised the SS officer who had been in charge at the Türkheim camp. In his autobiography, he described how his fellow former prisoners hid the man from the American liberators until they promised no harm would come to him. Soon, by popular demand, the SS officer had been put (back) in charge of feeding and sheltering the newly freed Jews. As a survivor, Frankl felt that he had a right to distinguish decent Nazis from evil ones. In addition, he believed that guilt is particular to each individual.
Frankl’s personal desire to reconcile with ex-Nazis dovetailed with the postwar desire by many Austrians to view themselves as victims of the Nazis, rather than perpetrators. This worked well in Vienna but thrust the psychiatrist into an uncomfortable position in the American context, and he was often viewed as an apologist for Nazis. Tensions between Frankl and some members of the American Jewish establishment boiled over in 1978, the same year President Jimmy Carter established the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, which launched a new era of scholarship and debate over its meaning. That year—only one year after the Festival of Meaning in Berkeley—Frankl was booed and called a “Nazi pig” while lecturing at the Institute of Adult Jewish Studies at Congregation B’nai Jeshurun in New York City. Biographer Klingberg wrote that before the audience’s outburst Frankl had rejected the idea of collective guilt for the Holocaust and also quoted Bruno Kreisky, the then-chancellor of Austria. Despite having been born into a Jewish family himself, in 1975 Kreisky had appointed four former Nazis to Austria’s cabinet.
Lawrence Langer, who died last year at the age of 94, came to prominence among Holocaust scholars around this time and began criticizing Man’s Search for Meaning in his 1982 book, Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit. He viewed Frankl as the father of so-called “redemptive memory” in Holocaust studies, which he defined as “the pursuit of reassurance that however bad the Holocaust was, we can extract something meaningful from it.” Although Langer said he understood this might be a human need, he wrote that “it distorts the nature of the experience. The idea does not emerge from the testimony of Holocaust survivors. It emerges from trauma theorists who believe that one can work through a trauma no matter how bad it was.”
Menachem Rosensaft, an adjunct law professor at Cornell Law School and the son of two survivors, describes a deeper problem with Frankl’s ideas from a Holocaust perspective. “Victor Frankl’s exploitation of the Holocaust to promote his controversial thesis that the suffering endured by Jews in the ghettos and camps of Nazi Europe could or should somehow be seen in a positive, even redemptive, light is problematic in the extreme,” he says. “His approach stands in stark contrast with [that of] Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, who maintained that ‘Auschwitz signifies not only the failure of two thousand years of Christian civilization, but also the defeat of the intellect that wants to find a Meaning—with a capital M—in history. What Auschwitz embodied had none.’”
Viktor and Elly Frankl at an audience with Pope Paul VI in Rome, 1970. (Photo credit: © Viktor Frankl Archiv/brandstaetter images/picturedesk.com)
It was the linkage of logotherapy with the Holocaust that was at the core of Frankl’s Jewish problem. The Doctor and the Soul and logotherapy principles by themselves might not have led to this resistance. But Man’s Search for Meaning was both a Holocaust memoir and a professional manifesto, and this was a step too far for some survivors. (Not all, of course: Edith Eva Eger, an Auschwitz survivor who became a psychologist, was deeply inspired by Man’s Search For Meaning and had a long friendship with Frankl.)
Interestingly, Frankl’s efforts to find meaning and redemption in the Holocaust were generally less of an obstacle in parts of the Orthodox world, says Balakirsky. “In ultra-Orthodox historiography, the Holocaust is not exceptional in the history of Judaism,” she says. “In the Orthodox world, even if they are not ultra-Orthodox, the historiography insists that the Holocaust is not different from the destruction of the First Temple, the destruction of the Second Temple, the Khmelnytsky massacres, [or] the future war of Gog and Magog that’s supposed to happen before the Messiah comes.”
In the later part of the 20th century, Frankl was warmly embraced by authors in the self-help movement. Stephen Covey, the Mormon author of the wildly successful 1989 book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, helped cement Viktor Frankl’s place at the heart of the cultural zeitgeist by citing Frankl 16 times in that book. “I will never forget how deeply moved and inspired I was in the sixties when I studied Man’s Search for Meaning and also The Doctor and the Soul,” Covey later wrote in a foreword to a colleague’s 2004 volume. “These two books, along with Frankl’s other writings and lectures, reaffirmed my ‘soul’s code’ regarding our power of choice, our unique endowment of self-awareness, and our essence, our will for meaning.”
Pointing to the meaning that Frankl was able to make out of his life, Covey writes: “Look at the word responsibility— ‘response-ability’—the ability to choose your response. Highly proactive people recognize that responsibility. They do not blame circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their behavior. Their behavior is a product of their own conscious choice, based on values, rather than a product of their conditions, based on feeling.”
In 1991, Man’s Search for Meaning was listed as one of the ten most influential books in America after a survey was conducted for the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club. (Actually, twelve titles were given, with Man’s Search for Meaning and three other books tied for ninth place.) The top three titles were the Bible, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck, a self-help book written by a popular yet controversial psychologist that also emphasizes personal responsibility.
In a 1995 interview with writer Matthew Scully, Frankl—then 90—said he had heard of The Road Less Traveled. “In fact he had heard enough to wonder why the book and others like it pay no homage to the logotherapy of which they seem bland imitations,” wrote Scully. “But, [Frankl] said with a dismissive wave, ‘it is no matter. Better that they should borrow from logotherapy than use their own nonsense.’”
Later in the interview, piqued at Scully’s observation that Freud’s psychology seems to resonate more strongly with Americans than Frankl’s, the Austrian psychiatrist said that he still received an average of 23 letters every day from fans. “Still. And most of them are from Americans. And do you know what they say? Most just write to say, ‘Thank you, Dr. Frankl, for changing my life.’”
Viktor and Elly Frankl with Simon Wiesenthal in 1994. (Photo credit: © Viktor Frankl Archiv/brandstaetter images/picturedesk.com)
Covey had the opportunity to thank Frankl in person. In September 1997 he traveled to Vienna to sit at Frankl’s deathbed. “I was very anxious to talk with him so that I could express my profound gratitude for his life’s work—for his impact on millions of people, including my own life and life’s work,” he wrote. “I will never forget the feeling of hearing his voice and visiting with him. He was so kind and gracious as he listened to my expressions of appreciation, esteem, and love. I felt as if I were speaking to a great and noble spirit.” Covey also made Frankl a deathbed promise to realize the latter’s dream—first articulated in Man’s Search for Meaning—of constructing a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast of the United States to complement the East Coast’s Statue of Liberty. (The idea has now outlived both Frankl and Covey, and is now being planned by sculptor Gary Lee Price and his family.)
Especially in the years since Frankl’s death, Man’s Search for Meaning has overshadowed logotherapy to the point that many people who consider themselves big fans of Frankl have no idea what it is—despite Man’s Search for Meaning’s subtitle: “An introduction to logotherapy.” Jess Frey, 43, has used Frankl’s quotes for years in her role as lead staff member and “embodiment teacher” at Kripalu Yoga Center in Massachusetts. Frey first encountered Frankl’s work about ten years ago when, for about a year, she experienced vivid dreams of the Holocaust. “Like, I was there,” says Frey, who is not Jewish. “I was in it, you know, I was in the concentration camps. It was kind of bonkers.” Frey started watching movies about the Holocaust, and someone in her class told her about Man’s Search for Meaning. “And I find all the amazing quotes that he has. And the quotes are applying to some of the teachings that I’m offering.”
While Frey hopes Man’s Search for Meaning will provoke a deep conversation about the Holocaust in her classes, she is not particularly interested in logotherapy. The message she takes from Man’s Search for Meaning is more universal. “There’s something about the book…I find when people actually read it and report back to me, it’s like they wake up to the preciousness of life.”
Across the country, at San Quentin State Prison, Marvin “Shaka” Walker is on the waitlist to attend the Man’s Search for Meaning support group for the second time. Walker has been incarcerated at San Quentin Prison for more than 40 years. He spent much of that time on death row, although his sentence has since been reduced to life with the possibility of parole. He reports that the Man’s Search for Meaning group is one of the most popular in the prison because it offers a needed sense of perspective to the inmates. “Some people were talking [in the group] about the conditions that we endure on a daily basis,” says Walker. “And I was telling them, well, look, the food is bad, but it’s edible. We don’t have to barter, we don’t have to hide and hustle for food…
When I read this, I could only come to the conclusion that I have no reason to complain, compared to what [Frankl] went through.” Walker says the book helped recast even his decades on death row. “On death row, people were concerned and worried about being executed. But we knew just about when that would take place. People in the camp worried about that every day.”
The sustained interest has been great for Beacon Press. Director Gayatri Patnaik says that if Man’s Search for Meaning weren’t categorized as a classic, it would be on bestseller lists most weeks.
Beacon has been diversifying its Frankl sales by publishing new collections of Frankl’s lectures, releasing new editions of Man’s Search for Meaning (young adult, gift, large print and an ebook edition), planning a Frankl companion/journal and commissioning a graphic novel.
Viktor and Elly Frankl at the Western Wall, Jerusalem, in November, 1988. (Photo credit: © Viktor Frankl Archiv/brandstaetter images/picturedesk.com)
Frankl has also been “meme-ified,” and has taken on new life on social media, where quotes from and reviews of Man’s Search for Meaning proliferate on every platform. One of the most common quotes used is “Between the stimulus and the response lies a space, and in that gap is a choice, and in that choice is our freedom.” The quote, however, is misattributed to Frankl; its first known usage was by Steven Covey, who said it encapsulated Frankl’s views.
There are those who detest the fact that even Frankl’s authentic quotes are spread and repeated to new audiences who know nothing about him or the Holocaust. As author Mattie Kahn wrote in a 2022 Vox article, “The recent social media proliferation of Frankl-mania is distinct from what preceded it: It operates and spreads without encouraging real awareness of, or interest in, what Frankl endured, let alone in the Holocaust as a historical event,” she writes. “Lines from the book show up on Pinterest and Instagram like free-floating credos. Quotes are reposted. Websites aggregate them. It is no simple feat to make memories of incarceration sound like hollow mottos of hustle culture, but here we are: the recollections of a Holocaust survivor whose experiences have been sold for literal parts on the internet.”
Lost in the “Frankl-mania” of today is Frankl’s actual school of psychological thought. For many reasons, logotherapy was never directly or fully embraced by the American psychology establishment. There was Frankl’s personality, which rubbed many people the wrong way, and the fact that Frankl never managed to transform logotherapy into a therapeutic model that could easily be practiced by others—or to allow anyone else to do so. Some blame it on his disagreement with Freud, since Freudians dominated academia for many decades.
But logotherapy has survived, most notably through the efforts of the Viktor Frankl Institute (VFI) in Vienna, which was established in 1992 to document Frankl’s work and disseminate “authentic information” about logotherapy. VFI is run by Frankl’s disciples and family members—five of the ten board members are Frankl’s wife Elly, his daughter, his son-in-law and his two grandchildren.
Among other things, VFI accredits more than 162 Viktor Frankl institutes and other “members of the International Association of Logotherapy and Existential Analysis” around the world. These include training schools but also counseling centers, archives and other organizations related to Frankl or logotherapy. A surprisingly large proportion of these organizations are in Latin America.
Despite the quantity of credentialing online institutes, finding a logotherapist is not simple. Psychology Today, the magazine and database where people seeking therapy can filter providers by specialization, does not include logotherapy in its list of 68 modalities, or approaches.
But there are other measurements of success: Many therapists who practice logotherapy practice other modalities as well. And although logotherapy itself is still incredibly niche, many of its essential premises are similar to modern therapeutic approaches—including the will to meaning, the importance of values and the relevance of existential peril to our psychological well-being. Positive Psychology, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and Meaning Centered Psychotherapies each echo Frankl’s thinking in different ways—and Frankl’s name is often mentioned with respect in therapy training programs.
Frankl with a rabbi in Jerusalem in 1988. (Photo credit: Images © Viktor Frankl Archiv/brandstaetter images/picturedesk.com)
Today “the mantle” of promoting logotherapy is mainly worn by Alex Vesely, Frankl’s grandson. As a teenager, Vesely was not interested in logotherapy at all. “My grandfather was like any other grandfather,” he says. “Logotherapy was kind of the thing that he would always talk about, but it was boring to me.” That changed in 1993, when Vesely, now 50, was 19 and Frankl—no longer able to travel—sent Vesely and his sister Katharina to deliver a speech at a conference in his stead. Vesely says he read Man’s Search for Meaning for the first time on the plane, but what excited him was how attendees at the conference kept approaching him and sharing stories about how Frankl’s work had changed their lives. “I was like, ‘Wow!’” remembers Vesely. “To see that people just being exposed to his ideas would be able to use them and change their lives, that’s what got me interested.”
It was at these conferences, signing his grandfather’s books, that Vesely first adopted “Frankl” as part of his last name. He says it was “just for orientation purposes and to make it easier for people,” but “it’s kind of stuck.” At logotherapy presentations and for certain publications—like the preface to Embracing Hope, Beacon’s latest Frankl title—he is credited as Alex Vesely-Frankl.
Vesely became a licensed psychologist and did his practicum at the same Vienna hospital where Frankl himself worked in the 1930s. He also runs the Viktor Frankl Media Archives in Vienna. A filmmaker, Vesely produced a 2010 documentary called Viktor and I and is currently co-producing a film adaptation of Man’s Search for Meaning with motivational speaker Tony Robbins (who often cites Frankl in his seminars) and producer Kate Cohen, which could be released as early as this year. In 2020 Vesely also cofounded the Viktor Frankl Institute of America (VFIA), which offers both introductory and in-depth courses in logotherapy online.
Zainab Zeb Khan, a clinical psychologist in North Carolina who works with children, recently completed a multiyear postgraduate training program in logotherapy, a decision motivated in part by her grief after the suicide of her mother. “So much in our society has just depleted meaning and purpose,” says Khan, who is also the president and founder of the Muslim American Leadership Alliance, of logotherapy’s appeal. “There’s a vacuum of inner emptiness and doubt and despair and a false phenomenon of success and purpose that’s driven by social media and lack of connection, both lack of interpersonal connections and lack of intrapersonal connections, like within your own self.”
And a new generation of Jewish therapists is being drawn to logotherapy. One is Rabbi Daniel Schonbuch, a Crown Heights-based marriage and family therapist and the author of Viktor Frankl and the Psychology of the Soul, published in 2024. Schonbuch has developed his own training program that he says makes Frankl’s logotherapy ideas and principles more accessible to therapists and other professionals. Most, though not all, of the people who take it are Jewish. He says one of the beauties of logotherapy is that, while it can encompass other approaches, it can also “deal with things beyond the self, things like meaningful activity, values, spirituality and one’s relationship with God.” He points to The Unconscious God, a book that Frankl published in 1948 based on the dissertation he wrote for his PhD in philosophy, as proof of Frankl’s belief in the power of faith: It argues that humans have an unconscious will to spirituality and God and that a mature involvement with a religious group can increase a sense of purpose in life.
Last year, Beacon Press’s Panaik went to the Frankfurt Book Fair, where her Chinese counterpart told her that Man’s Search for Meaning is one of their top ten sellers, too. “Frankl over the years has enabled us to do a great deal,” she says. “There is nobody more important on our list from a revenue standpoint, and there’s nobody even close.”
While in Europe, Panaik had the opportunity to meet the Frankl family in Vienna—the first time anyone from the company had met anyone from the family. They told her that Frankl loved to laugh, particularly about puns, and that he never wanted to be defined by having survived the Holocaust. Yet in his office, where he slept by himself, “above his bed there was a picture of his first wife who perished in the camps,” she says. “And on the other wall in the same room there was a painting that a fellow inmate had made of the concentration camp.”
In 1972, when Frankl was near the apogee of his American fame, a television interviewer asked the Viennese psychiatrist how he felt about the incredible success of Man’s Search for Meaning, which had already sold over a million copies in the United States since being translated into English a decade earlier. “Frankly speaking, I don’t see it so much as a merit or achievement on account of the author of this book—that’s me,” Frankl responded in his thick Austrian accent. “But rather, a symptom on the part of the mass neurosis of today…the ‘existential vacuum.’”
Five decades later, it’s easy to argue that our collective existential vacuum has only worsened. But despite Viktor Frankl’s own prescription for this mass nihilism—his logotherapy—that modality is not what he is really remembered for. Most people will never know him as anything other than the inspiring author of Man’s Search for Meaning—the book that, according to Frankl’s family, he himself considered of only trifling importance.
—with additional reporting by Nadine Epstein
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