Viktor E. Frankl was born March 26, 1905 in present day Austria. Frankl grew up in Vienna and became interested in psychiatry in his teens. Frankl earned a medical degree from the University of Vienna in 1930 and worked in a ward for suicidal women. Germany seized control of Austria eight years later and the Nazi’s appointed Frankl the head of the Rothschild hospital, the only Jewish hospital allowed to remain open in Vienna. The Nazis began to remove the Jews of Vienna to the concentration camps and Frankl was deported to the Theresienstadt camp in Prague in January, 1942. He had just married Mathilde Grosser one month earlier. He was later sent to Auschwitz camp in Poland. He spent three years at Auschwitz, Dachau, and other concentration camps. By the end of the war, Frankl lost his pregnant wife, his parents, and a brother. In 1947, after confirming his first wife’s death in the camps, Frankl married Eleonore Schwindt. They had a daughter together.

Frankl was a professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Vienna Medical School until his death in 1997. He has written thirty-two books that have been translated into 26 different languages. Viktor drew on his own experiences as a survivor of the holocaust to originate the discipline of Logotherapy. Logotherapy is a form of Psychotherapy that stresses the need to find meaning in life even in the most tragic circumstances. When “Man’s Search for Meaning” was published in 1959, Carl Rogers called it “one of the most outstanding contributions to psychological thought in the last fifty years.” He was quite a distinguished professor of Logotherapy at the United States International University in San Diego, California. Frankl was appointed many honorary doctorates over his career. He enjoyed mountain climbing and had obtained his pilot’s license at the age of sixty-seven.