Viktor Frankl

Deutsch: Viktor Frankl (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Viktor Frankl,  b. 26 March 1905 – d. 2 September 1997, the second child of Gabriel and Elsa Frankl of Vienna, Austria. He told his parents when he was a small child that he would become a doctor. He was a brilliant student and when he was still a medical student between 1928 and 1930, he organized a program to provide counselling to high school students at the time they received their report cards. No students committed suicide that year. He received some acclaim for the success of the program. Between 1933 and 1937 he completed his residency in neurology and psychiatry at the Steinhof Psychiatric Hospital in Vienna where he was responsible for the Suicide Pavilion and he treated 30,000 women with suicidal tendencies. In 1938 he established a private practice.
In 1941 he was married to Tilly Grosser. 
 In 1942 He and his family were sent to Theresientsadt Ghettos where he practiced medicine for a while. Later they were all sent to prison camps.  Viktor went to Auschwitz prison camps where he treated other prisoners for a while. Tilly was killed in Bergen Belsen. His father died before they left Theresienstadt. His mother Elsa and his brother Walter died in Auschwitz. His sister Stella emigrated to Australia from Austria. He was sent to one camp associated with Dachau where he was part of a slave labor group. In 1945 he was sent to a so-called rest camp called Türkheim, affiliated with Dachau. He was liberated there by American soldiers on the 27 of April 1945. Through these events he formulated the framework of Logotherapy in which he learned to find meaning in the horrors he had faced and spent the rest of his life teaching others to do to. He married Eleonore Katharina Schwindt in 1947 and they had one daughter who became a child psychologist. He wrote several books and lectured and practiced widely until his death in 1997.