Meet Viktor Frankl: The Last of the Human Freedoms

Before

Frankl was already an established psychiatrist in Vienna — he had corresponded with Freud as a teenager and run a youth counselling programme — when the Nazis annexed Austria. He was offered a US visa in 1941 and turned it down, unwilling to leave his elderly parents. He was deported in 1942, and over the next three years was held in four camps including Theresienstadt and Auschwitz.

His wife Tilly, his mother and his brother were all murdered. He learned this only after liberation.

Logotherapy

He had been developing his own school of psychotherapy before the war, and the manuscript was confiscated on arrival at Auschwitz. He reconstructed it partly from memory on scraps of paper.

Its claim is simple and severe: the primary human drive is not pleasure, and not power, but the search for meaning — and meaning is available even in suffering, through what you choose to do with it. He was explicit that suffering is not necessary for meaning, and that removing avoidable suffering is right. But where it cannot be removed, the attitude taken toward it is still a choice.

The book

Man's Search for Meaning was written in nine days in 1946. He published the first edition anonymously, expecting it to fail. It has sold in the many millions and is routinely named among the most influential books of the century.

He kept practising, lecturing and climbing mountains into his eighties, and did not treat his survival as making him wiser than anyone else.

Why they belong at your table

Seat him when the situation genuinely will not change. He is the least sentimental voice at this table on suffering, and the only one who earned the right to say what he says about it.