Viktor Frankl’s Search for Meaning: An Emblematic 20th-Century Life by Timothy Pytell (review)

The life and works of Viktor Frankl (1905–1997) comprise an important piece of the tapestry of Vienna’s golden age of psychotherapy. The historian Timothy Pytell provides a careful and even-handed examination of both the man and his scholarly contributions.

An assimilated Austrian Jew who studied medicine at the University of Vienna, Frankl was attracted early on to the work of Freud. Yet, soon disenchanted, he rejected what he deemed “the reductionism of psychoanalysis” and Freud’s paramount reliance on biology and anthropology. Already reflecting on his experience in 1925 (he was 20 at the time), Frankl wrote that he had “looked into the abyss of the nihilism of reductionism” (p. 24). Abandoning Freud, Frankl briefly adopted the “individual psychology” of Alfred Adler. A member of Freud’s original circle, Adler had in 1911 dismissed Freud’s belief in the domination of the subconscious in each individual’s life as overly predetermined. In time, however, Frankl grew disenchanted with Adler’s uncritical esteem of the individual. According to Pytell, while Frankl was an existentialist for whom the individual was of overriding importance, he believed that meaning (a word of fundamental essence) was achieved only when the individual was absorbed into the community: “The individual had to choose to live for the community rather than for oneself” (p. 32). This prescriptive, almost authoritarian, stress on an individual’s bias or direction would be critical to the area of psychotherapy that Frankl labeled “logotherapy.”

Pytell carefully traces Frankl’s intellectual evolution through the complex interplay of the political and social developments that propelled Austria from social democracy to “Austrofascism”—a term that differentiates the ascendancy of Vienna’s right-wing politics from what preceded it in Italy and what later developed across the border in Germany. When the March 1938 Anschluss (union of Austria with Germany) placed the Nazis in control of Austria, Frankl managed to “persevere” (“The Doctor Perseveres” is among Pytell’s chapter titles). Indeed, rather than selecting internal exile—Pytell quotes George Berkley’s remark that “the Austrian Jews with all the signs of the coming catastrophe around them behaved like ostriches” (p. 63)—Frankl from 1936 nurtured an association with the Vienna branch of the “Göring Institute.” Pytell uses this designation “as shorthand for German dominance” over the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy (the “Göring” in question being Matthias Hermann Göring, cousin of the man who would become Nazi Reichsmarschall in 1940). During this period, Frankl engaged in questionable experiments in brain surgery, a matter Pytell examines in some detail. Aimed at the removal of tumors, Frankl’s surgeries invariably resulted in the death of the patient—a result that might have been avoided had Frankl devoted more time researching the procedure he employed. Pytell neatly juxtaposes the surgical experiments against Frankl’s refusal to assist Jews wishing to commit suicide in the face of Nazi persecution (labeled the “Masada solution”). “Frankl’s decisions and medical research starkly contrasted with those of other Jewish doctors who faced similar choices,” Pytell writes (p. 94). With justification, Pytell argues that under the circumstances suicide was an act aimed at retaining one’s dignity, not an act of resignation. Frankl’s refusal to accept this reveals much about his character.

After living four-and-a-half years in post-Anschluss Vienna, Frankl was deported on September 25, 1942 to the so-called “privileged ghetto” at Theresienstadt (Terezín). He managed for more than two years to practice medicine under austere and fraught conditions. (He was quartered, nonetheless, with several other doctors in circumstances that provided for occasional conjugal visits with his wife, Tilly.) But on October 19, 1944, Frankl was transported, together with Tilly, to Auschwitz. It seems that, for no more than three days, he was confined as a “depot prisoner” to the unfinished Mexico section of Birkenau. Never actually processed into Auschwitz, he...