Viktor Frankl (1905 to 1997) was a Viennese psychiatrist and neurologist who founded logotherapy, a therapy built on the idea that our deepest need is for meaning. He survived the Nazi concentration camps, in which his parents, his brother and his first wife died, and his book Man’s Search for Meaning has been read by millions. Therapeutic Shamanism shares his conviction that meaning is found, not invented, and adds that it is found above all through Soul and our relationship with the living world.
Who was Viktor Frankl? #
A Viennese doctor who spent his whole life on the question of meaning. He was born in Vienna on 26 March 1905, and qualified in medicine in 1930, adding a doctorate in philosophy in 1949.1 As a young man he corresponded with Sigmund Freud and joined the circle around Alfred Adler, but was later expelled from it, as his own ideas took a different direction.2
By 1940 he was head of neurology at the Rothschild Hospital in Vienna, which served Jewish patients. He had the chance to emigrate to America, but chose to stay with his ageing parents. In his own words: “At that moment I decided to stay with my father and my mother upon the land, and to let the American visa lapse.”3
What happened to him in the war? #
In September 1942 Frankl, his wife Tilly and his parents were deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto, where his father died. In 1944 he and Tilly were sent to Auschwitz. His mother was murdered there, as was his brother, and Tilly died after being moved to Bergen-Belsen. Frankl himself was sent on to Kaufering and Türkheim, camps attached to Dachau, and was freed by American troops on 27 April 1945.4
He was honest about what survival had often cost. Writing that, on the whole, the prisoners most likely to stay alive were those who had lost all scruples in the fight to exist, he added: “We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles, whatever one may choose to call them, we know: the best of us did not return.”5 Back in Vienna, he dictated Man’s Search for Meaning in nine days in 1946. He described it as not “an account of facts and events but of personal experiences”, and said that most of what it describes took place not in the large and famous camps but in the smaller ones.6
What did he do after the war? #
He went back to work as a doctor and teacher. For twenty-five years he headed the Vienna Neurological Policlinic, and he became professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Vienna. In 1947 he married Eleonore Schwindt. His approach became known as “the third Viennese school of psychotherapy”, after Freud’s and Adler’s, a name first given to it by the psychiatrist Wilhelm Soucek.7 He died in Vienna on 2 September 1997.
What were his main ideas? #
The best known are covered in What can Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy offer shamanic work?: the will to meaning, the three ways we find meaning, and the “last of the human freedoms”, our freedom to choose our attitude. He had others too.
He thought a healthy life needs a certain tension, not ease. “What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.”8 He thought happiness cannot be chased directly: “happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue.”9 And late in life he wrote of what he called tragic optimism, “an optimism in the face of tragedy”, which does not deny pain, guilt or death, but asks what can be made of them.10 He also offered a rule for living: “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!”11
Why does Frankl matter to Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Because he understood how much we need meaning, and how much modern life has emptied it out. Therapeutic Shamanism sees the same hunger: “When we ask, “What is the meaning of life?”, we are asking for a story to guide us and to live by.”12 Like Frankl, Therapeutic Shamanism holds that meaning is something we discover, not something we simply make up.
Where it goes further is in where that meaning is found. For Frankl, meaning lies in our work, our loves and our attitude to suffering. Therapeutic Shamanism adds Soul, the wild and true self each of us is born with, and our place among the other-than-human Peoples. See What can shamanism offer logotherapy and the search for meaning?
Is his account of the camps disputed? #
Some of it has been questioned. The historian Timothy Pytell has said that the book gives a misleading impression of Frankl’s time in Auschwitz, which lasted only days.13 Alexander Batthyány of the Viktor Frankl Institute replies that Frankl said this openly, and the book itself says that most of its events took place in the smaller camps.14
