[ed. I was browsing for other things today when I came across Viktor Frankl's obituary. I remember reading "Man's Search for Meaning" in college and not really getting the full context of the message he was trying to get across (or too immature to absorb it). This provides a better understanding.]
Every day in the camps, he said, prisoners had moral choices to make about whether to submit internally to those in power who threatened to rob them of their inner self and their freedom. It was the way a prisoner resolved those choices, he said, that made the difference.
In ''Man's Search for Meaning,'' Dr. Frankl related that even at Auschwitz some prisoners were able to discover meaning in their lives -- if only in helping one another through the day -- and that those discoveries were what gave them the will and strength to endure.
Dr. Herbert E. Sacks, president of the American Psychiatric Association, said Dr. Frankl's contributions shifted the direction of the field, especially in existential psychiatry, adding: ''His interest in theory galvanized a generation of young psychiarists.'' (...)
Dr. Frankl's writings, lectures and teaching, along with the work of Rollo May, Carl Rogers and others, were an important force in forming the modern concept that many factors may be implicated in mental illness and in opening the door to the wide variety of psychotherapies that now exist.
This was a major change from the strictures of Freud and Adler, who attributed what they called neurosis to single causes: sexual repression and conflicts in the subconscious in Freud's case, or unfilled desires for power and feelings of inferiority in Adler's. To Dr. Frankl, behavior was driven more by a subconscious and a conscious need to find meaning and purpose. (...)
Viktor Emil Frankl was born in Vienna on March 26, 1905. His father held a government job administering children's aid. As a teen-ager he did brilliantly in his studies, which included a course in Freudian theory that prompted him to write the master himself.
A correspondence ensued, and in one letter he included a two-page paper he had written. Freud loved it, sent it promptly to the editor of his International Journal of Psychoanalysis and wrote the boy, ''I hope you don't object.''
''Can you imagine?'' Dr. Frankl recalled in an interview before his death. ''Would a 16-year-old mind if Sigmund Freud asked to have a paper he wrote published?''
The paper appeared in the journal three years later. But shortly before its publication, Dr. Frankl said, he was walking in a Viennese park when he saw a man with an old hat, a torn coat, a silver-handled walking stick and a face he recognized from photographs.
''Have I the honor of meeting Sigmund Freud?'' he asked and began to introduce himself, whereupon the man interrupted: ''You mean the Victor Frankl at Czernin Gasse, No. 6, Door Number 25, Second District of Vienna?'' The founder of psychoanalysis had remembered the name and address from their correspondence.
At the University of Vienna Medical School, the young Frankl began attending seminars with Alfred Adler, who had broken with Freud earlier. Together with two other students, he began to feel that Adler erred in denying that people had the freedom of choice and willpower to overcome their problems.
Adler demanded to know whether he had the courage to stand and defend his position.
Dr. Frankl recalled that he rose and spoke for 20 minutes, after which Adler sat slouched in his chair ''terrifyingly still'' and then exploded. ''What sort of heroes are you?'' he shouted at the three dissenters and never invited them back to his meetings.
After receiving his medical degree in 1930, Dr. Frankl headed a neurology and psychiatry clinic in Vienna. But anti-Semitism continued to rise in Austria.
In December 1941 he and Tilly Grosser were among the last couples allowed to be wed at the National Office for Jewish Marriages, a bureau set up for a time by the Nazis. The next month his entire family, except for a sister who had left the country, was arrested in a general roundup of Jews.
The family had expected the roundup, and Dr. Frankl's wife sewed the manuscript of the book he was writing on his developing theories of psychotherapy into the lining of his coat.
After their arrival at Auschwitz, they and 1,500 others were put into a shed built for 200 and made to squat on bare ground, each given one four-ounce piece of bread to last them four days. On his first day, Dr. Frankl was separated from his family; later he and a friend marched in line, and he was directed to the right and his friend was directed to he left -- to a crematory.
He took an older prisoner into his confidence and told him about the hidden manuscript: ''Look, this is a scientific book. I must keep it at all costs.''
by Holcomb B. Noble, NY Times | Read more:
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