Viktor Emil Frankl was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist. A Holocaust survivor, he was the founder of logotherapy –– a meaning-centered school of psychotherapy, considered the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy–– following the theories developed by Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler. Logotherapy is part of existential and humanistic psychology theories. He is the author of over 39 books, he is most noted for his best-selling book Man’s Search for Meaning based on his experiences in various Nazi concentration camps.
Between 1928 and 1930, while still a medical student, he organized special youth counselling centers to address the high numbers of teen suicides occurring around the time of end of the year report cards. The program was sponsored by the city of Vienna and free of charge to the students. Frankl recruited other psychologists to join him including such notables as Charlotte Bühler, Erwin Wexberg and Rudolf Dreikurs. In 1931 not a single Viennese student committed suicide. The success of this program caught the attention of the likes of Wilhelm Reich who invited him to Berlin.
After obtaining his M.D. in 1930, Frankl gained extensive experience at Steinhof Psychiatric Hospital where he was in charge of the “pavilion for suicidal women”. Over a four-year period, he treated no less than 3,000 patients each year. In 1937, he began his private practice, but with the Nazi annexation of Austria, his ability to treat patients became limited. In 1940, he joined the Vienna Rothschild Hospital as head of the neurology department. It was the only hospital in Vienna still admitting Jews. Prior to his deportation to the concentration camps, he helped numerous patients avoid the Nazi euthanasia program that targeted the mentally disabled. (via Wikipedia)
Lets take a look at a few of his great quotes:
On Love:
Nothing could touch the strength of my love, and the thoughts of my beloved. Had I known then that my wife was dead, I think that I still would have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of that image, and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying. ‘Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death.’
A thought transfixed me for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truththat love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.
The truth-that love is the highest goal to which man can aspire.
On Life:
Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.
Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.
A man’s concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.
Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.
So live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!
It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.
On Success:
Again and again I therefore admonish my students in Europe and America Don’t aim at success the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run in the long-run, I say success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.
Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.
On Fear:
On Inspiration:
When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.