PERSON

Viktor Frankl

The Viennese psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz and founded logotherapy—the therapy of meaning—arguing that the primary human drive is not pleasure or power but the will to meaning, and that the freedom to choose one’s attitude toward unavoidable suffering is the last and most fundamental of the human freedoms.

In nine days in the winter of 1946, Viktor Frankl dictated the book that would sell sixteen million copies and be named one of the ten most influential books in America by the Library of Congress. Man's Search for Meaning grew from the most extreme evidence anyone has assembled for a simple claim: that human beings can endure almost any suffering if they can locate a reason for it, and that they will collapse under even mild discomfort if they cannot. Frankl had tested this thesis in conditions designed to destroy it—Auschwitz, Dachau, three other camps—losing his wife, his mother, and his brother to the machinery that tried to reduce him to a number. What he observed was not a theory but a clinical finding: the prisoners who maintained a connection to some future purpose—a manuscript to complete, a child waiting, a person to love, a scientific discovery

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