Frankl

On March 26, 1905 in Vienna, Austria Viktor Emil Frankl was born. Later in life he received his MD and PhD degrees from the University of Vienna where he studied psychiatry and neurology, mainly concerned with the areas of suicide and depression. While he was medical student in the late 20s, he successfully counseled high school students to nearly remove suicide. In 1942, Frankl and his parents, wife, and brother were arrested and sent to the Thereisienstadt concentration camp; Frankl’s father died there within six months. Over the course of three years, Frankl was moved between four concentration camps, including Auschwitz where his brother died and his mother was killed. Frankl’s wife died at Bergen-Belsen. Frankl used his experiences in the camps to develop his theory of logo therapy, which is sometimes referred to as the “Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy,” because Frankl cam after Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler. Frankl believed that even in the middle of desensitizing and brutal conditions, life still had meaning and that suffering had a purpose. Frankl believed that during intense physical circumstances, a person could escape through his or her spiritual self as a way to survive what can seem to be intolerable conditions. He believed the spiritual self could not be affected by external forces. Frankl spent most of his later career studying existential methods of therapy. 

            Frankl argues that discovering importance in regular minutes can empower injury survivors to maintain a strategic distance from the severity and lack of care that are so frequently the results of torture, imprisonment, and prolonged trauma. He encourages those who have suffered traumatic incidents to think of people they would not want to disappoint, such as dead or distant family members, and to reflect on how they would like to be perceived by these loved ones. Frankl believes meaning can be found through creativity and work, human interaction and experience, and how we chose to respond to unavoidable suffering. Frankl's logo therapy is based on the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard's “will to meaning.” Frankl draws upon Kierkegaard's philosophy in arguing that the primary drive in life is the search for meaning—not the drive to sex or pleasure, as Freud theorized, or power, as Nietzsche and Adler argued. Logo therapy is a form of existential therapy that emphasized that people have the power to find meaning in anything they do.