Viktor Frankl

Viktor Frankl was born in Vienna in 1905 into a Jewish family. By his mid-twenties he was already a practicing psychiatrist with a developing theory about human motivation that differed fundamentally from both Freud and Adler — his two most influential predecessors. Freud had argued that the primary human drive was the will to pleasure. Adler had argued it was the will to power. Frankl believed both were wrong. The primary drive, he argued, was the will to meaning — the deep human need to find a reason, a purpose, a why that made the suffering and effort of life worthwhile.

He had been developing this theory in his clinical work for years, calling his approach logotherapy — from the Greek logos, meaning reason or meaning. In 1942, before he had published a full account of it, he was arrested and deported with his family to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. His father died there. His mother was killed at Auschwitz. His wife Tilly died at Bergen-Belsen. His brother died in Auschwitz. Frankl himself was transferred through Auschwitz to two other camps before his liberation in 1945.

He arrived in the camps as a theorist. He left as a witness. The theory he had built in the comfortable conditions of a Vienna practice had been tested against conditions almost no human being has faced — and had survived the test. Not because the camps confirmed his optimism, but because they confirmed the precise, limited claim he had been making: that meaning is available to a human being regardless of external circumstance, and that it is the presence or absence of that meaning — not physical comfort, not safety, not even health — that determines whether a person continues.

Logotherapy rests on three central pillars. First: life has meaning under all circumstances, even the most miserable. Second: the primary motivational force in human beings is the will to find meaning in life. Third: we have the freedom to find meaning in what we do and what we experience — or, if nothing else, in the stand we take when confronted with a situation of unchangeable suffering.

Frankl was careful about what he meant by meaning. He did not mean a single grand purpose, a cosmic destiny, or a philosophical system. He meant something far more specific and personal: the meaning available in this particular life, this particular set of circumstances, this particular moment. Meaning cannot be given. It can only be found — by each person, in their own specific conditions, through their own honest examination of what they are for and what they owe.

He identified three primary sources of meaning. The first is creative — through what we give to the world: work, accomplishment, creation. The second is experiential — through what we receive from the world: beauty, truth, love, another person. The third, and the one his experience made most vivid, is attitudinal — through the stand we take when we are confronted with unavoidable suffering. In that last source lies the full reach of the philosophy: meaning is available even when everything else has been taken.

Frankl wrote Man's Search for Meaning in nine days following his liberation — dictating it in a single sustained effort as if he feared losing what he had observed. It has sold more than 16 million copies in 24 languages and has been named by the Library of Congress as one of the ten most influential books in America.