From Death-Camp to Existentialism: A Psychiatrist’s Path to a New Therapy

A highly influential writer on the Holocaust, Viktor Emil Frankl was born in Vienna. Already a noted psychiatrist prior to the war, he believed that psychological disorders could be treated by helping patients find meaning in their lives, postulating that human beings are driven not by pleasure but by a will to find meaning. He and his young wife were deported along with his parents to Terezín and then to Auschwitz. Only Frankl survived, in a succession of camps where his theories regarding the power of finding meaning even in the worst suffering were, in his view, demonstrated decisively.