Viktor Frankl was an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, and philosopher, known for founding logotherapy. His best-known work, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), became an international bestseller and was later named one of the ten most influential books in America in a 1991 Library of Congress survey. A Holocaust survivor, Frankl turned personal trauma into a theory of psychotherapy centred on the human search for meaning.
Viktor Frankl was born in 1905 in Vienna, the middle child of Gabriel and Elsa Frankl. His father, a civil servant, named him after Viktor Adler, founder of Austria’s Social Democratic Party. As a teenager, Frankl attended night classes in applied psychology and began corresponding with Sigmund Freud. He studied medicine at the University of Vienna, where he focused on psychiatry and neurology.
Frankl’s first scientific paper was published in 1924. After briefly associating with Alfred Adler’s school, he developed logotherapy, a theory which identified meaning as the core human drive. By 1930, he had earned his medical degree and was treating suicidal women at Steinhof Psychiatric Hospital. In 1931, under his youth counselling initiative, there were no reported student suicides in Vienna. He joined Rothschild Hospital in 1940, where he helped Jewish patients avoid the Nazi euthanasia programme.
In 1942, Viktor Frankl, his wife, and his family were deported. His father died in Theresienstadt. His mother and brother were murdered in Auschwitz. His wife, Tilly, died in Bergen-Belsen. Frankl spent three years in four camps. After the war, he returned to Vienna, resumed practice, and completed a PhD in philosophy. His dissertation, "The Unconscious God" (1948), examined the relationship between religion and psychology.
Man’s Search for Meaning, written in nine days, combined memoir and existential theory. Frankl argued that suffering could be endured if life retained meaning. “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how,” he wrote, quoting Nietzsche. The book sold millions of copies and established logotherapy as an internationally recognised approach.
Frankl received numerous honours, including the Oskar Pfister Award (1985) and honorary degrees. He lectured globally and taught at the University of Vienna until 1970. In 2025, Alliant International University unveiled the “Statue of Responsibility” in his honour—an idea he first proposed as a counterpart to the Statue of Liberty.
Viktor Frankl died in Vienna in 1997, at the age of 92. He is buried in the Jewish section of Vienna Central Cemetery.
