Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905 – Sept. 2, 1997) was born in Vienna to Austrian civil servant Gabriel Frankl and his wife Elsa Lion. As a teenager, he corresponded with Sigmund Freud and a year after graduating high school, his 1924 paper was published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. That same year he served as president of the youth movement of the Social Democratic Party of Austria and began the study of medicine at the University of Vienna. In 1925, he published a second paper, “Psychotherapy and Worldview” In 1926, he began development of his logotherapy theory that people are mainly motivated by a search for meaning.
While still in medical school, Frankl organized youth counseling centers to address an alarming number of teen suicides. In 1930, he joined the staff of Steinhof Psychiatric Hospital, where the treatment of suicidal women was his specialty. In 1937, he went into private practice but the following year the Nazis annexed Austria, limiting his practice. In 1940, he became head of the neurology department at Rothschild Hospital, the last remaining hospital where Jewish doctors could practice in Austria. There he married Tilly Grosser, a station nurse, who subsequently was forced to abort their child. The couple was sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp, where his father, a well known Socialist, died of starvation and pneumonia. In 1944, Frankl and other members of his family were transported to Auschwitz, where his mother and brother were murdered in the gas chambers. Tilly later died of typus in Bergen-Belsen.
Shortly after the Holocaust, during which Frankl survived four concentration camps, he wrote Man’s Search for Meaning. It became an international best seller after it was published in English. The Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club on the basis of a 1991 survey said it was one of the ten most influential books in the United States.
Frankl’s second marriage was to Eleonore Katharina Schwindt, a practicing Catholic. They attended services at synagogue and church, celebrated Christmas and Chanukah, and had one daughter, Gabriele, who grew up to become a child psychologist.
Frankl died of heart failure and was buried in the Jewish section of Vienna Central Cemetery.
Tomorrow, March 27: Budd Schulberg
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SDJW condensation of a Wikipedia article.