Viktor Frankl was born in Vienna, Austria on March 26, 1905. He graduated from the University of Vienna with 2 doctorates in Medicine and Philosophy, both before the start of World War II. He was taken prisoner in the war and spent 3 years at Auschwitz, Dachau and other concentration camps. He wrote his book called, Man's Search for Meaning after he had been freed from the Nazis. After he had been liberated, he was the chief of the neurology department of the Policlinic Hospital in Vienna. After, in the 1960's, he moved to and held visiting professorships at Harvard and other universities, and did over 50 lecture tours throughout the country.
He wrote over 30 books, including Psychotherapy and Existentialism, The Unconscious God and The Unheard Cry for Meaning, and in 1997, he published an autobiography, Victor Frankl: Recollections. There have been at least 145 books and more than 1400 journal articles written about Frankl and logotherapy, and Frankl himself received 28 honorary degrees. He died on September 2, 1997. In Auschwitz then Dachau, Frankl was under constant threat of going to the gas ovens. He lost every physical belonging on his first day in the camps, and was forced to surrender a scientific manuscript he considered his life's work. Frankl's experiences helped provide the foundation for the development of a new school of psychotherapy, which was called logotherapy. It followed Freud's psychoanalysis and Adler's individual psychology. Logotherapy tries to take the person out of themselves and see their life in a broader perspective. Psychoanalysis focuses on the will to pleasure and the will to power of psychology while logotherapy sees the prime motivating force in human beings to be a will to meaning. In logotherapy, existential distress is a sign that we are becoming more human in the need for meaning. Frankl chose not to see life simply as the satisfaction of instincts, but instead he believed that the...