Logotherapy

Frankl’s family lived close to Alfred Adler, known as the Father of Individual Psychology and Freud’s former student. At the tender age of 3, Frankl settled on medicine as his career choice, but became interested in philosophy in his teens. His decision to study psychiatry then allowed him to marry medicine and philosophy and study both. Having been born in Vienna, he was exposed to psychoanalysis at a young age, and established correspondence with Freud while still in high school. At 19, Frankl published a paper in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis following a personal invitation by none other than Freud (Frankl, 1978). However, he became disillusioned with Freud’s efforts to lower human behaviors to hidden or frustrated sexual impulses and was drawn to Alfred Adler’s Individual Psychology (Hoffman, 1995). As a result, and shortly afterwards, his second paper was published in the International Journal of Individual Psychology in 1925 (Frankl, 2000b). Regardless, his relationship with Adler broke down in 1927, after he declared, publicly, that Individual Psychology should, among other factors, surmount its “psychologism”. He was consequently banished from the Society of Individual Psychology. After his expulsion, his focus shifted from theory to practice, indulging in a number of activities, including youth counselling. By 1929 most of his theories had matured, and within a few years he conceived his own movement, legotherapy. Legotherapy was heavily influenced by his observation that the widespread depression in the 30s was associated with the high unemployment rates (Hoffman, 1995). In 1933, he labelled this depression “umeployment neurosis”, arguing that it is the result of a perception that unemployment equals uselessness, and “therefore… life being meaningless” (Frank, 1978, p. 25-26).
During World War II, Frankl was a prisoner in four camps: Kaufering III, Auschwitz, Turkheim, and Theresienstadt (Frankl, 2000b). His mother, father, brother and first spouse wife perished in those camps (Allport, in Frankl, 1984). Frankl’s experiences in camps heavily influenced his perspective on human nature (Das, 1998; Southwick, Gilamartin, McDonough & Morrissey, 2006). Although he entered Auschwitz with most of his ideas already formulated, the harsh and inhumane conditions of the camps offered him the chance to test most of his theories, and eventually, led to the “ultimate validation for and acceptance of logotherapy” (Hoffman, 1995, p. 19). It was in the camps where the importance of meaning in mankind’s life really hit Frankl, as he discovered that just having “something to live for strengthened prisoners’ will to live in conditions that made death look like a viable solution” (Shantall, 1989, p. 424). For Frankl, the idea of “something to live for” was the re-formulation of a manuscript which was confiscated when he entered Auschwitz, a manuscript which was later published as The Doctor and the Soul (1986). The Nazi concentration camps became Frankl’s workshop, and his main tenet – the likely meaningfulness of life under all conditions – was “tested and reaffirmed in the shadow of the gas chambers” (Havenga Coetzer, 1997, p. 13). He wrote about his experiences in the camps in From Death Camp to Existentialism, which was later to become Man’s Search for Meaning (Washburn, 1998), his most popular work.