Viktor frankl biography completary

1941

He starts writing the first version of his book The Doctor and the Soul (Aerztliche Seelsorge) in which he lays down the foundations of his system of psychotherapy, Logotherapy and Existential Analysis. Like so many other families of that time, the Frankls had to contend with bitter poverty.

He did not have family left, save for a sister who had escaped to Australia. Then, at four years old he had the realization every human has to go through – that one day, he would die. .

1997

Viktor Frankl dies of heart failure on the 2nd of September. As he explains,

“I repeatedly tried to distance myself from the misery that surrounded me by externalising it.

In 1955, the University of Vienna made him a full professor, and by 1961 he was serving as a visiting professor at Harvard and his ideas were being cemented in the minds of those studying psychotherapy in the United States. When he came across a fragment of a stone in his parents house, he knew he had found the answer he was looking for. His friend Bruno Pittermann, who has become a member of the new government, organizes an apartment and a job for him - as well as a typewriter.

Frankl wrote Freud a letter and included a copy of one of his own papers in it.

At the "Salzburger Hochschulwochen" Frankl expounds his "Ten Theses On The Human Person", a cornerstone in the anthropological foundation of Logotherapy. He later set out his thinking this way, in his famous work “Man’s Search for Meaning,”

“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.

Then, in 1937 he opened his own private practice.

But a year later, Frankl’s world was uprooted.

World War II

In 1938, Germany invaded Austria. As he saw it, the suffering gave him a valuable perspective on what real trouble is, making him more appreciative of the life he could live freely from 1946 onward.

“What I would have given then if I could have had no greater problem than I face today,” he said in 1995.

Legacy

When he was in the concentration camps, Viktor Frankl lived out the idea that he later imparted to the world in Man’s Search For Meaning:

“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.”

While he was in the concentration camps, Viktor Frankl opted to think of his wife, to think of his profession, to theorize about how he could use his experience with suffering to impact others’ lives.

1940

Frankl becomes director of the Neurological Department of the Rothschild Hospital, a clinic for Jewish patients. In 1970, he was honored by his peers when they created the “Viktor Frankl Insitute.”

Among his academic work, Frankl still worked with patients. They were initially sent to Theresienstadt, a camp in Czechoslovakia.

Despite this, Adler's daughter Alexandra (photo), Rudolf Dreikurs and other important Adlerians remain lifelong friends to him.

Frankl is deeply involved in the Viennese adult education centers.