Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

—Viktor Frankl

Are human beings primarily motivated by sex and power? The first two great psychoanalytic schools, one founded by Sigmund Freud and the other by Alfred Adler, saw it that way. But another great psychotherapist disagreed. His name is Viktor Frankl, and though he knew and studied with Freud and Adler, his view of human nature led him in a different direction.

According to Frankl, man’s search for meaning is fundamental. As he put it in his book about the Nazi concentration camps he was interned in, “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how.’” So while he didn’t deny the existence of severe biological causes of mental illness, Frankl focused on helping his patients discover the meaning of their lives.

Both academic study and personal experience informed Frankl’s perspective. As a student in Vienna in the early 1900s, he had easy access to some of the most brilliant minds in modern history.

In Viennese coffeehouses, scholars and students met in discussion circles to debate the pressing questions of the day over coffee and beer. These circles were headed by men such as Sigmund Freud, Ludwig von Mises, Karl Popper, Friedrich Hayek, Rudolf Carnap, and Kurt Gödel. Though some are more famous than others, each was recognized as an intellectual giant in his own day.

In addition,  Frankl became a medical student and organized youth counselling centers throughout Vienna to combat rising numbers of suicides. Within a few years, the teen suicide rate dropped to zero. In the 1930s, Frankl worked with suicidal women at a psychiatric hospital, opening a private practice in 1937.

However, the rise of the Nazis put an end to his professional life. Due to his intellectual reputation, Frankl, a practicing Jew, had a chance to escape Austria. However, he would not leave his family behind. In 1942, they were all sent to the Terezín concentration camp (sometimes known as Theresianstadt) in occupied Czechoslovakia.

After his father died of starvation and pneumonia, the Frankls were moved to Auschwitz, where the Nazis murdered his mother and brothers in the gas chambers there. Frankl’s wife eventually succumbed to typhus in the Bergen-Belsen camp. All told, Frankl was imprisoned in four concentration camps over the course of three years.

Yet Frankl was unbowed by the horrors of the Holocaust. After the camps were liberated, he returned to Vienna, taking up a practice and completing a Ph.D. in philosophy. He spent the rest of his life helping patients and pushing back on the reductionist tendency of psychoanalysis. As he put it, the job of the therapist was above all to humanize.

Frankl once gave an example of what his practice looked like in a speech he gave at the University of Heidelberg. A man came to him in a state of anguish. The man’s wife had died two years prior, and he suffered every day without her.

Frankl asked the man, “What would your wife had done if you had died first?”

The man said, “She would not have been able to survive without me, she loved me so.”

Frankl replied, “So, the fact that you are suffering now means that your wife did not have to suffer.”

The man stood up, shook Frankl’s hand, and left. His suffering now had meaning, and thus, was bearable.

The school of psychotherapy that Frankl founded is known as logotherapy. Logotherapists engage their patients in a Socratic dialog to help them discover the meaning of their lives. Yet while logotherapy has made a significant impact on psychology, Frankl is perhaps best known in America as a writer.

In fact, Frankl’s book on his time in the concentration camps, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), is frequently named as one of the most influential books in the United States. Reading it is a great way to start learning about Frank’s powerful perspective on human nature.

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Image credit: “Viktor Frankl” by Prof. Dr. Franz Vesely on Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE, image edited; Pexels (background image).

Correction: This post has been updated to correct a typo in “interned.”