Viktor E. Frankl

Viktor Frankl was born in Vienna in 1905, corresponded with Sigmund Freud as a teenager, and studied under Alfred Adler before breaking from both to develop his own approach to psychiatry. He earned his medical degree from the University of Vienna in 1930, specializing in neurology and psychiatry, and before the war ran a program counseling suicidal patients — work that shaped his early conviction that a sense of purpose was central to psychological survival.

In 1942 Frankl and his family were deported by the Nazis. Over the next three years he was held in four camps, including Auschwitz and Dachau, and lost his wife, his parents, and his brother to the Holocaust; only he and a sister survived. A manuscript he had been developing before his arrest was confiscated and destroyed, and after liberation he reconstructed it from memory in a matter of days — the material that became Man's Search for Meaning.

After the war, Frankl led Vienna's Neurological Policlinic for roughly a quarter-century and taught at the University of Vienna, formalizing logotherapy — often called the 'third Viennese school of psychotherapy' after Freud's psychoanalysis and Adler's individual psychology — as a clinical approach built around the human need for meaning. He went on to write nearly forty books, lectured and held visiting professorships across the United States for decades, and continued teaching, writing, and mountaineering into his eighties before his death in Vienna in 1997 at age 92.