| Viktor Emil Frankl was born in Vienna on March 26, 1905. His father worked his way up from a parliamentary stenographer to director at the Social Affairs
Ministry. As a high school student involved in Socialist youth organizations, Frankl became interested in psychology. In 1930, he earned a doctorate in medicine and then was in charge of a ward for the treatment of female suicide candidates. When the Nazis took power in 1938, Frankl was put in charge of the neurological department of the Rothschild Hospital, the only Jewish hospital in the early Nazi years. But in 1942, he and his parents were deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp near Prague. Frankl survived the Holocaust, even though he was in four Nazi death camps including Auschwitz from 1942-45, but his parents and other members of his family died in the concentration camps. During and partly because of his suffering in concentration
camps, Frankl developed a revolutionary approach to psychotherapy known as logotherapy. Frankl returned to Vienna in 1945, where he became head physician of the neurological department of the Vienna Polyclinic Hospital, a position he held for 25 years. He was a professor of both neurology and
psychiatry. Frankl's 32 books on existential analysis and logotherapy have been translated into 26 languages. He held 29 honorary doctorates from
universities around the globe. Starting in 1961, Frankl held five professorships in the United States at Harvard and Stanford Universities as well as at universities in Dallas, Pittsburgh and San Diego. He was awarded the Oskar Pfister prize of the American Society of Psychiatry, as well as honors from several European countries. Frankl taught regularly at Vienna University until he was 85 and was an avid mountain climber. He also earned a pilot's license at 67. Viktor E. Frankl died of heart failure September 3, 1997, survived by his wife, Eleonore, and a daughter, Dr. Gabriele Frankl-Vesely. Readings Viktor Frankl has written a number of books that introduce his theory. One, From Death Camp to Existentialism, focusses on his experiences in a concentration camp. The Doctor and the Soul is a fairly technical book and the most complete. Man’s Search for Meaning is designed more for the general
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