Viktor E.

Frankl’s extraordinary, moving memoir of three years in Nazi death and labor
camps is a literary classic and an inspiration to millions. This 2006 edition features a
57-page added section offering Frankl’s explication of “logotherapy,” the psychoanalytic
method he developed after the war. Frankl wrote this memoir in nine days in 1946, after
returning to his former home in Vienna, Austria, to learn that the Nazis had murdered
his pregnant wife, his parents, his brother and his community of friends. His
unsentimental account sets out to help readers avoid what he regarded as a misleading,
conceptual trap: thinking of the camps with “sentiment and pity.” As of 2006, Frankl’s
book had sold more than 12 million copies in 22 languages. A 1991 Library of Congress
survey placed it among the “10 most influential books in America.” In non-English
editions, its title is Say Yes In Spite Of Everything; that exuberance captures Frankl’s
belief that what happens to you – including suffering – is secondary to your response to
it. His book teaches that everyone must find his or her unique meaning and purpose in
life, and fulfill it. After the intense horror of his camp saga, Viktor E. Frankl’s report on
his psychoanalytic approach is less gripping, but quite
meaningful. getAbstractrecommends his brilliant, stirring, unforgettable memoir to
students of history, all therapists and, really, to everyone.

In this summary, you will learn

 What events marked the life and work of psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl,
 How Frankl survived four Nazi death camps,
 What Frankl learned in the camps, and
 What methods you can use to apply Frankl’s “logotherapy” to your life.

Take-Aways
 Viktor E. Frankl, a Viennese doctor and psychiatrist, survived four Nazi death and labor
camps during World War II and developed a deep sense of the meaning of life.
 In the camps, human life had no worth. Many prisoners lost all scruples as they fought
to endure.
 Without knowing how or why, people can grow accustomed to and cope with anything.
 Even the worst living conditions reveal the “potential” for meaning.
 After years of imprisonment, Frankl stopped making choices; he “let fate take
its course.”
 Postwar, he created a “third school” of Viennese psychology, “logotherapy,” to help
people find the purpose and meaning in their lives.
 Seeking meaning in life is humankind’s primary drive.
 Your attitude toward life determines the meaning of your life.
 You must take responsibility for finding the answers to the problems your life presents
and doing the tasks life sets for you.
 “The salvation of man is through love and in love.”
Summary
Viktor E. Frankl

As a teen, Viktor E. Frankl studied philosophy and psychiatry. He initiated a

correspondence with Sigmund Freud, who submitted an article of Frankl’s to a leading
journal, which published it when Frankl was only 16. By age 34, in 1939, he was head of
neurology at Rothschild Hospital, Vienna’s only Jewish hospital. When the Nazis closed
it, Frankl feared for his and his family’s lives. In 1942, the US consulate offered him a
visa. This rare invitation, a stroke of luck, was a tribute to his reputation. Few Jews got
out of Austria that late; fewer still got to America.

Frankl wanted to flee; he knew he could finish his pending book in America. But he saw
a fragment of marble his father had saved after the Nazis destroyed Vienna’s largest
synagogue. It came from an engraving of the Ten Commandments and bore only a
Hebrew letter. When Frankl asked about it, his father said the letter stood for “Honor
thy father and mother.” Unable to abandon his family, Frankl let his US visa lapse. The
Nazis deported him and his family in September 1942. From then until March 1945, the
Nazis shuttled Frankl among four death and labor camps: “Theresienstadt, Auschwitz-
Birkenau, Kaufering and Türkheim,” part of Dachau.

“It is a question of the attitude one takes toward life’s challenges and opportunities,
both large and small.”

Scruples

Frankl worked in small, less-well-known camps where “the real extermination took
place” and uncounted people perished in horror and obscurity. The Nazis pushed their
captives off cattle cars at the entry to Auschwitz, confiscating their documents and few
remaining belongings. They tattooed numbers on the arms of those they did not send
straight to the gas chamber. This – with being stripped naked, completely shaved and
given the clothes of dead prisoners – destroyed prisoners’ identities. With the loss of
identity came the loss of principles. Few inmates could care about morality or ethics. To
live amid great suffering, each person grew a “very necessary protective shell.” Some of
those who shed their compunctions survived. Camp life killed many others, and wiped
out those who clung to a higher purpose. “The best of us did not return.”

“Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as
Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning.”

Cigarettes

Frankl worked as a doctor in a typhus ward during his last few weeks of captivity only.
He spent most of three years doing crushing manual labor, laying train tracks in cold,
wet weather, wearing rags and rotting shoes. Jews were slave workers for German
industrial concerns. At times, they earned “bonus” coupons for cigarettes, the camp’s
currency. Only the Capos – Jewish prisoners chosen as guards – actually smoked their
cigarettes. Everyone else traded them for food or tidbits, like a scrap of wire to use as a
shoelace. If a prisoner smoked his own cigarettes, everyone knew he’d lost the will to live
and would die shortly. The SS soldiers who ran the camps gave liquor to prisoners
working in the gas chambers and crematoria. These workers knew they soon would end
up in the ovens like most prisoners. The Nazis kept them drunk to keep them working.

“I do not at all see in the bestseller status of my book an achievement and

accomplishment on my part but rather an expression of the misery of our time.”

Reality

Frankl quickly recognized the reality of the camps. He divorced himself from his
previous life and vowed to live within this new reality. All he had was “his existence.” He
learned he did not need any of the things he once thought he couldn’t live without. He
had to sleep on rough boards in unheated huts, sharing two ragged blankets with eight
other men, and yet he still slept. He ate almost nothing, but lived. He accepted
Dostoevsky’s truth: “A man can get used to anything.” Prisoners seeking suicide would
hurl themselves onto the electrified barbed-wire fence. Frankl vowed never to “run into
the wire.” He would die soon anyway; he wanted each day he could get.

“I am a survivor of four…concentration camps…and as such I also bear witness to the

unexpected extent to which man is capable of defying and braving even the worst
conditions conceivable.”

Apathy

Prisoners hardened to their circumstances did not look away from humiliating
punishments that fellow inmates endured. They raced to strip new corpses of clothes,
shoes or hidden food. Many lost all empathy as they starved, though Frankl clung to
some caring for his friends as a path to his own survival. The men grew almost used to
constant beatings, finding that “the most painful part of the beatings is the insult they
imply.” To the Capos and the SS, no prisoner had humanity. They were nothing. All that
mattered was survival. Fed only “watery soup” and a tiny bread ration daily, the
prisoners watched their bodies “devour themselves.” They forgot anything that wouldn’t
help keep them alive. Few had the energy to help others. As the guards and Capos ruled
life and death, the prisoners became mere toys of fate, further reducing their sense of
humanity.

“If there is a meaning in life at all, there must be a meaning in suffering.”

Spirituality

Prisoners retreated into interior lives. Many Jews became more religious. The more
sensitive and artistic tended to survive as their hardier, less-aware compatriots died.
The most sensitive were physically weak, but their richer, deeper interior lives fueled
survival. By embracing their inner lives, the men became more, not less, appreciative of
natural beauty, sunsets, or brief respites, like an hour by a hot stove. Frankl learned that
the tiniest moments could evoke profound joy. Longing for his wife, speaking to her in
his mind, the full power of love transfixed him. Amid squalor and death, he saw in his
soul that “the salvation of man is through love and in love.”

“In logotherapy the patient is actually confronted with and reoriented toward the
meaning of his life.”

Fate

Over time, prisoners became more passive. Any active decision might further death, so
they avoided making choices. As liberation neared, Frankl turned down an SS offer to
join other prisoners on a truck to Switzerland. He let “fate take its course.” He didn’t try
to alter his destiny. Like many, he felt fate controlled him and that trying to shift it
meant disaster. The Nazis crammed the men from the truck into a hut, set it on fire and
watched the Jews in it burn alive.

“Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: You have to let it happen by
not caring about it.”

Choice

Camp life showed Frankl that men have options for how they act. He maintained and
saw others maintain “spiritual freedom” and individuality no matter what the Nazis
forced them to endure. He found that attitude provides meaning. How you cope with
your fate adds or subtracts meaning from your existence. Amid privation, you can keep
your “inner liberty.” Men who could hold onto even a small sense of a future found that
it helped them survive. Those who ceased to believe in tomorrow did not. In February
1945, a friend of Frankl’s dreamed that the camp would be liberated on March 30. On
March 29, amid reports that Allied advances had slowed and would not reach the camp
when he had dreamed, the man fell into a deep fever. He died the next day. Typhus
appeared to be the cause, but Frankl knew his friend’s loss of belief in his future killed
him. Life becomes meaningless when people have nothing to strive for, lose their sense
of direction and stop searching for meaning. That is why you must seek answers to the
questions your unique life raises. The singularity of your existence gives it meaning. Yet
a meaningful life includes death and suffering. Frankl found that life at the bottom of
existence revealed good and evil clearly.

“What man needs is not a tensionless state, but rather the striving and struggling for a
worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.”

“Depersonalization”

When the Allies liberated the camps and freed Frankl, he and his fellow inmates felt no
joy. They had lost “the ability to feel pleased.” They had to relearn it. Their experiences
depersonalized them. Their new life seemed to be a dream. They could not connect to it.
Frankl learned his body could recover as he ate every bit of food that came his way and
grew stronger, but his mind and emotions would not heal quickly. He leaned on his faith
and slowly found his humanity. Many inmates felt that after what they had suffered,
they could behave any way they liked and that their suffering justified evil conduct.
Many could not cope with people who hadn’t been in the camps. As the men regained a
measure of humanity, they lost their understanding of how they’d survived. The camps
came to seem like a bad dream, disconnected from their new lives. The best feeling for
those who were able to feel again at all was the exquisite absence of fear.

“I had learned to let fate take its course.”

“Logotherapy”

After the war, Frankl created a new therapeutic approach he called logotherapy, which
leads a patient to understand – even if the understanding might hurt – the purpose and
meaning of his or her life. He told a colleague that in psychoanalysis a patient lies on a
couch and says things that are “disagreeable” to say. Using logotherapy, a patient sits in
a chair and “hears things…disagreeable to hear.” Where Freud wrote of a “will to
pleasure” and Alfred Adler of “a will to power,” logotherapy concerns “the will to
meaning.” Finding life’s meaning is a human’s primary drive. Each person’s meaning is
exclusive, particular to his or her life. For a gratifying life, each person must discover
and fulfill his or her own meaning. If you cannot find or fulfill your life’s meaning, you
will suffer “existential frustration.” Logotherapy helps patients find their lives’ meaning.
Unlike psychoanalysis, it doesn’t limit its inquiry to forces in the unconscious.
Logotherapy includes the impact of “existential realities” – how patients live, work and
love, their health, and the like. Logotherapy tries to help patients identify what their
souls need most and fulfill it to give their lives meaning.

“The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some
kind of trick learned while mastering the art of living.”

“Tension”

A healthy psyche exists in a state of tension between what you’ve accomplished and
what you have yet to do. Mental health stems not from an absence of tension – or an
excess of leisure – but from trying to reach a goal with profound meaning. This is a goal
you choose, not one that life thrusts upon you – like, for example, the goal of staying
alive in a death camp. The two poles of existence are, first, a meaning you must explore
and, second, the person who must explore it – you. When an arch needs repair, those
fixing it put a larger load on top of the arch. The load pushes the pieces of the arch
together and strengthens it. Your quest for meaning is like the increased load atop an
arch.

“Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its
problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.”
“The Existential Vacuum”

A sense of emptiness, the existential vacuum is a malaise from the late 20th century and
beyond, manifesting as boredom. It springs from a disconnection between you and your
goals. It occurs when you cannot find or connect to your necessary purpose. People
without a goal fall prey to “conformism,” doing what everybody else does, or
“totalitarianism,” doing what other people say. The vacuum might become apparent
during times of enforced leisure, like a quiet Sunday.

“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.”

Meaning

Life’s meaning changes with each person, each day and each hour. Don’t seek a grand,
overall meaning to your life. What matters is your life’s unique meaning in the present
moment. This is not an abstraction: It’s a concrete task or series of tasks you must
identify and perform. To find this meaning, determine what your life asks of you. Only
you can answer the demands of your existence. No matter how life shifts, its meaning
endures. You can take three paths to finding the meaning in your life: producing work
that is yours alone, connecting with another person – that path is love – or transcending
hardship or tragedy. If you cannot change your fate, “rise above it.”

“So, let us be alert – alert in a twofold manner. Since Auschwitz we know what man is
capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.”

Love

Only love enables you to understand the essence of another person. Love reveals your
beloved’s foundational characteristics. Love lets you see your loved one’s true potential.
Your love inspires and enables your beloved to achieve his or her true potential as his or
her love does the same for you. Love may be manifest in sex and, ideally, sex expresses
love. But love exists in a place beyond sex or rationality.

Suffering

Suffering, like love, can reveal your life’s meaning. Suffering can stop feeling like
suffering when you understand its deeper meaning. But, contrary to what most people
think, you do not have to suffer to find meaning in your life. Your heart can “change at
any instant.” What seems oppressive today can be revelatory tomorrow. Despite your
suffering, strive to embrace “tragic optimism.” Welcome life no matter what course it
takes; believe in a future even amid a bereft present. When you find what you must do,
and do it, you will gain strength to deal with suffering.

About the Author

World-renowned writer and psychotherapist Viktor E. Frankl wrote more than 30
books on theoretical and clinical psychology.