Abstract

Viktor E. Frankl, (1905–1997), was Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Vienna Medical School. For 25 years he was head of the Vienna Neurological Policlinic. His Logotherapy/Existential Analysis came to be known as the „Third Vienna School of Psychotherapy”. Frankl received the degrees of Doctor of Medicine and Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Vienna. During World War II he spent three years at Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Kaufering III and Türkheim. He held professorships at Harvard, Stanford, Dallas, and Pittsburgh, and was Distinguished Professor of Logotherapy at the U.S. International University in San Diego, California. Frankl has given lectures at 209 universities on all 5 continents. His first article was published in 1924 in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis at the invitation of S. Freud. Frankl’s 32 books were translated into 31 languages. His book Man’s Search for Meaning has sold millions of copies and has been listed among „the ten most influential books in America”. Through four decades Dr. Frankl made innumerable lecture tours throughout the world. He received honorary degrees from 29 universities in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. He held numerous awards, among them the Oskar Pfister Award of the American Psychiatric Association and an Honorary Membership of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and Medicus Magnus Medal and International Golden Star „Merit for Humanism” (Polish Academy of Medicine, 1997). His thoughts had an impact on the development of human psychology in Poland. Most known followers of his theory are K. Popielski of Lublin and M. Wolicki of Wrocław. Frankl is the originator of the school of psychotherapy known as logotherapy, or existential analysis. Harvard’s eminent psychologist, the late Gordon W. Allport, called logotherapy “the most significant psychological movement of our day”. Logotherapy offers a potent weapon against the general malaise that gives rise to depression, despair, and addiction: the existential vacuum. Drawing upon his many years of professional practice and the concentration-camp experiences that helped shape his views, Viktor Frankl outlines such invaluable therapeutic techniques as inversion of intention, dereflection, and the use of paradox and parable, in addition to traditional analysis and drug therapy. Logotherapy and Existential Analysis has been internationally recognized for decades as an empirically supported humanistic school of psychotherapy. Evidence for the growing significance of logotherapy includes institutes, societies and professorships in many countries of the world, as well as conferences and publications. The interconnected theory of Logotherapy and Existential Analysis has been internationally recognized for decades as an empirically supported humanistic school of psychotherapy.