March Viktor Emil Frankl is born in Vienna as the second of three children. His mother, Elsa Frankl, nee Lion, hails from Prague, his father Gabriel Frankl, Director in the Ministry of Social Service, comes from Southern Moravia.
During the first World War the family experiences bitter deprivation; sometimes the children would go begging to farmers.
In his high school years Frankl attends public lectures on Applied Psychology. He starts a correspondence with Sigmund Freud. A manuscript he sends to Freud is published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis.
At the age of 15, Frankl offers his first public lecture, On the Meaning of Life. His sensibility for social inequality leads him to become a functionary of the Young Socialist Workers.
Frankl becomes increasingly attracted to the Adlerian movement of Individual Psychology, with its emphasis on community and social reform.
Frankl is studying medicine at the University of Vienna Medical School and becomes spokesman of the Austrian Socialist High School Students Association. He regularly attends the meetings of the Alfred Adler circle at Vienna's "Cafe Siller." As
Life during World War II and the Holocaust
- When Germany seized control of Austria in , the Nazis made Frankl head of the Rothschild Hospital.
- Frankl married his first wife, Tilly Grosser.
- Nine months after his marriage, Frankl, his wife and his parents were deported to the Theresienstadt camp near Prague.
- Later in , Frankl was imprisoned in Auschwitz in Poland. Here the camp doctor Josef Mengele, supervised the division of the incoming prisoners into two lines. Line on the left were sent to the gas chambers; those on the right were to be spared. Frankl was directed to join the line moving left but managed to save his life by slipping into the other line without being noticed.
- In total, Frankl was in four concentration camps: Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Dachau, and Turkheim.
- Frankl’s wife, his parents, and other members of his family died in the concentration camps.
Who was Viktor Frankl?
With a lifetime that spanned most of the 20th Century, Viktor Emil Frankl (March 26, &#;September 2, ) was witness to a transformative period in world history. He is most known for being a Holocaust survivor, but in reality, this represented a short period in his long life. By the time he entered the concentration camps at 37 years old, he had already spent much of his adult life as a psychiatrist and neurologist, specializing in the treatment of suicidal patients. He had also developed his own psychotherapy school called Logotherapy (Greek for “healing through meaning”). His lasting contribution has been to the field of psychology, with his recognition of meaning as a central factor in mental health and his advocacy that the psychologist’s role was to help their patients find meaning.
Viktor E. Frankl
Univ-Prof. DDr. Viktor Emil Frankl
Neurologist and Psychiatrist
Born: March 26, , Vienna
Died: September 2, , Vienna
Academic titles and degrees: Univ. Prof. (Full Professor, MD, ); (PhD, )
Family: Widower, second marriage () to Eleonore, b. Schwindt; one daughter, two grandchildren, three great-grandchildren
Viktor E. Frankl was professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Vienna and was lecturer in the United States (Harvard University as well as at universities in Dallas and Pittsburgh). For him, the U. S. International University in California created a chair of logotherapy—the school of psychotherapy founded by Frankl, also referred to as the "Third Vienna School" (following Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis and Alfred Adler's individual psychology). He held 29 honorary doctorates from universities around the world.
Frankl was the first non-American psychiatrist to be awarded the Oskar Pfister Prize, named after a disciple of Sigmund Freud, by the American Pyschiatric Association; the Austrian Academy of Sciences elected him honorary member.
His 32 books have been published in 32 languages
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