Viktor Emil Frankl (26 March 1905 – 2 September 1997)[1] was an Austrian neurologist, psychologist, philosopher, and Holocaust survivor,[2] who founded logotherapy, a school of psychotherapy that describes a search for a life's meaning as the central human motivational force.

[10] In the same year, he was president of the Sozialistische Mittelschüler Österreich, the Social Democratic Party of Austria's youth movement for high school students.

[12] Between 1928 and 1930, while still a medical student, he organized youth counselling centers[13] to address the high number of teen suicides occurring around the time of end-of-the-year report cards.

Prior to his deportation to the concentration camps, he helped numerous patients avoid the Nazi euthanasia program that targeted the mentally disabled.

[12] Throughout his career, Frankl argued that the reductionist tendencies of early psychotherapeutic approaches dehumanised the patient, and advocated for a rehumanisation of psychotherapy.

[18] While head of the Neurological Department at the general Polyclinic Hospital, Frankl wrote Man's Search for Meaning over a nine-day period.

[2] Frankl saw this success as a symptom of the "mass neurosis of modern times," since the title promised to deal with the question of life's meaningfulness.

[21] Frankl developed logotherapy and existential analysis, which are based on philosophical and psychological concepts, particularly the desire to find a meaning in life and free will.

[22][23] Frankl identified three main ways of realizing meaning in life: by making a difference in the world, by having particular experiences, or by adopting particular attitudes.

The primary techniques offered by logotherapy and existential analysis are:[24][22][23] His acknowledgement of meaning as a central motivational force and factor in mental health is his lasting contribution to the field of psychology.

[18]Frankl's concept for the statue grew in popularity, and drew the affection of Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Covey teamed up with Kevin Hall to push the idea of the statue forward in the 1990s, and eventually commissioned the sculptor Gary Lee Price who came up with the concept of two hands clasped together.

[29][30] In The Missing Pieces of the Puzzle: A Reflection on the Odd Career of Viktor Frankl, Professor of history Timothy Pytell of California State University, San Bernardino,[31] surveys the numerous discrepancies and omissions in Frankl's "Auschwitz survivor" account and later autobiography, which many of his contemporaries, such as Thomas Szasz, similarly have raised.

[32] In Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, the book devotes approximately half of its contents to describing Auschwitz and the psychology of its prisoners, suggesting a long stay at the death camp.

Frankl was neither registered at Auschwitz nor assigned a number there before being sent on to a subsidiary work camp of Dachau, known as Kaufering III, that (together with Terezín) is the true setting of much of what is described in his book.

In 1982 the scholar and Holocaust analyst Lawrence L. Langer, critical of what he called Frankl's distortions of the true experience of those at Auschwitz,[36] and of Frankl's amoral focus on "meaning", that in Langer's assessment could just as equally be applied to Nazis "finding meaning in making the world free from Jews",[37] went on to write that "if this [logotherapy] doctrine had been more succinctly worded, the Nazis might have substituted it for the cruel mockery of Arbeit Macht Frei" ["work sets free", read by those entering Auschwitz].

[39] Pytell later would remark on the particularly sharp insight of Langer's reading of Frankl's Holocaust testimony, stating that with Langer's criticism published in 1982 before Pytell's biography, the former had thus drawn the controversial parallels, or accommodations in ideology without the knowledge that Victor Frankl was an advocate/"embraced"[40] the key ideas of the Nazi psychotherapy movement ("will and responsibility"[41]) as a form of therapy in the late 1930s.

[44] This association, as a source of controversy, that logotherapy was palatable to Nazism is the reason Pytell suggests, Frankl took two different stances on how the concentration-camp experience affected the course of his psychotherapy theory.

[47][48][49] In 1988 Frankl would further "stir up sentiment against him" by being photographed next to and in accepting the Great Silver Medal with Star for Services to the Republic of Austria as a Holocaust survivor, from President Waldheim, a controversial president of Austria who concurrent with the medal ceremony, was gripped by revelations that he had lied about his WWII military record and was under investigation for complicity in Nazi War crimes.

Operating without any training as a surgeon, Frankl would voluntarily request of the Nazis to perform the experiments on those who had killed themselves, and once approved – published some of the details on his experiments, the methods of insertion of his chosen amphetamine drugs into the brains of these individuals, resulting in, at times, an alleged partial resuscitation, mainly in 1942 (prior to his own internment at Theresienstadt ghetto in September, later in that year).

[2][1] Frankl's father, Gabriel, originally from Pohořelice, Moravia, died in the Theresienstadt Ghetto concentration camp on 13 February 1943, aged 81, from starvation and pneumonia.

Although it was not known for 50 years, his wife and son-in-law reported after his death that he prayed every day and had memorized the words of daily Jewish prayers and psalms.