September 2: Viktor Frankl

Viktor Frankl, who chronicled the preservation of his mental health as a concentration camp inmate in Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), died on this date in Vienna in 1997. Dr. Frankl headed the “suicide pavilion” of the General Hospital in Vienna from 1933 to 1937, where he treated thousands of suicidal women, and hung on under the Nazis as a neurologist and brain surgeon at the Rothschild Hospital in Vienna until 1942, when he, his wife Tilly, and his parents were deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Working with Rabbi Leo Baeck and Regina Jonas, he saved hundreds of his fellow prisoners from despondency and suicide and gave lectures on mental health. In 1944 he endured life as a slave laborer in Auschwitz and Dachau while losing his wife to the executioners at Bergen-Belsen. Clinging to her memory, he later wrote, he “grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.” Frankl survived to become an important humanistic psychotherapist who wrote some thirty-two more books.

“Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” —Viktor Frankl

Watch an interview with Viktor Frankl about the search for meaning: