Viktor Frankl and the Shoah: Advancing the Debate

This books takes a new and critical look at the development of logotherapy and existential analysis, a prominent existential school of psychotherapy. It explores the intellectual and political biography of its founder, the Austrian psychiatrist and holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, best known for his bestselling “Man’s Search for Meaning”. The book focuses on his life and works and political thinking from the late 1920’s to the years spent in Nazi-occupied Vienna, and finally the time he spent in the concentration camps Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Dachau. It presents new archival findings on Frankl’s involvement with the Austrian Zionist Movement, his attempts to sabotage the “euthanasia” program of the National Socialists, and his scathing critiques of the NS-Psychotherapy school around Göring and his students, published during the years before Frankl’s deportation to Theresienstadt. This book addresses recent attempts by the author Timothy Pytell to portray Frankl as a “fellowtraveler” of the Nazi regime and corrects the fundamental errors and misrepresentations in Pytell’s work. It thus offers important perspectives on the intellectual history of ideas in psychology and existential psychotherapy, and also serves as key material on the development of psychotherapy before and during the Holocaust.