Viktor Frankl's Search for Meaning ─ An Emblematic 20th-Century Life

"Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist and philosopher who survived the Holocaust and went on to found the third school of Viennese psychotherapy. This book is an intellectual biography of Frankl, describing his early immersion in Freudianism, his connection to Alfred Adler, and the development of logotherapy in the 1930s. After the Holocaust, Frankl took on a prominent public role as a survivor in postwar Austria, and in the United States as part of the humanistic psychology movement. By critically examiningthe details of his intellectual life, including some previously unknown biographical details, we can begin to see the fascinating ambiguities and contradictions in Frankl's thought"--

Timothy Pytell is Chair of the History department at California State University, San Bernardino. He published an abridged version of this biography, titled Viktor Frankl: Das Ende eines Mythos, in German in 2005.