The Missing Pieces of the Puzzle: A Reflection on the Odd Career of Viktor Frankl

Abstract

Viktor Frankl gained international recognition based upon his heroic survival of Auschwitz and his subsequent claim to have founded the third Viennese school of psychotherapy — logotherapy. This article revises this traditional view of Frankl by examining how logotherapy was actually developed under the auspices of the nazi-sponsored Goering Institute in the 1930s. In addition, his survival of Auschwitz is problematized by the questionable medical experimentation he performed in 1940–42 on Jews who had committed suicide in order to avoid deportation, and his limited (three-day) experience in Auschwitz. This new contextualization explains the mass appeal of Viktor Frankl as both a peculiar case of the Austrian burial of the ‘ambiguous past’ and the longing amongst Americans for an uplifting version of the Holocaust.