Many don’t know how to label Viktor Frankl: hero, martyr or thinker?The truth is, he’s got a lot of them. He was a hero because he bravely faced many of the worst adversities a human being could experience, he was also a martyr, for although he was able to escape suffering, he decided to stay and suffer with his family the horrors of an atrocious war. He was also a great thinker, who left a great legacy to humanity: logotherapy.
Viktor Frankl was one of those human beings who managed to live amid the greatest human misery and who remained intact, was an Austrian physician and psychiatrist, born into a bourgeois family in 1905, had two brothers, an older one and a younger sister.
- “When we talk about the inability to change a situation.
- We face the enormous challenge of changing ourselves.
- “- Viktor Frankl-.
Viktor grew up in a quiet place and had a quiet childhood, says that at the age of 5 he woke up in bed and without opening his eyes he had a deep sense of happiness and protection, when he opened his eyes, his father was by his side, smiling.
During their teenage years, the family lived the rigors of World War I, goods were scarce, and then realized what scarcity and hunger were. At the time, Viktor Frankl was a passionate reader, who corresponded with Sigmund Freud. Passionate about the riddles of the human spirit.
Viktor Frankl was just a high school student when he gave his first lecture at the People’s University of Vienna and talked about the “sense of life. “From an early age, he cared about the questions he tried to answer throughout his life: why live, why live?
Although he had a keer interest in psychoanalysis, he walked away from Freud in 1925, thought his ideas were very deterministic, so he began to follow closely: individual psychology? Alfred Adler. He then became interested in the theories of Rudolf Allers and Oswald. Schwarz, founders of psychosomatic medicine.
From a very young age he had a great passion for philosophy, especially for the existentialist current, however, he decided to study medicine and specialize in neurology and psychiatry. From 1933 to 1937, she worked as a psychotherapist at the University’s psychiatric clinic. In 1939, he was appointed head of the neurology department of Rothschild Hospital in Vienna. He successfully continued his profession until his fate and that of his family were not affected by radical change.
Viktor Frankl was Jewish and lived in Austria, so from a very young age he began to feel the changes of a growing Nazism, everyone knew that the situation was becoming very difficult, at the beginning of World War II, his older brother Walter was arrested by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp.
Then, his sister Stella fled to Mexico, Viktor applied for a visa to enter the United States and obtained it, however, he was upset about the plight of his elderly parents and all his patients.
Then he made an uplifting decision, which described himself as follows: “In the radio buffet, there was a piece of marble. I asked my father what it was? A Hebrew letter was engraved in gold. My father told me that he seemed only in one of the commandments, in the fourth commandment that said, “Honour your father and your mother and you will be in the promised land. “After that, I decided to stay in Austria and let my U. S. visa expire.
In 1941, Viktor Frankl married Tilly Grosser. A few months later, the Nazis forced her to abort the son they were expecting. In 1942, Viktor, his wife and parents were forced to go to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. father starved to death, overwhelmed by serious breathing problems. In 1944, Viktor was transferred to Auschwitz with his wife. At that moment, they separated and never heard from her again.
This difficult period of confinement and forced labour has sparked great reflections on Viktor Frankl, who was eventually released by the Americans in 1945 and his wife, who had been taken to the Bergen-Belsen camp, was also released. who was trampled by the crowd during the liberation and that they all ran. Viktor’s mother had died in the gas chamber the year before.
When he left the concentration camp he sought out his family and had to face the harsh reality: he was completely alone, he would never see his loved ones again, he had no one else. So the first thing he tried to reconstruct was his book, which had been seized when he was taken to concentration camps. He directed and published his first book, “Psicanalysis and Existentialism. “
Just before Christmas 1945 Frankl felt an uncontrollable impulse: he needed to talk about what he had lived and learned in concentration camps, for that he hired three secretaries and began to say everything that occurred to him while taking notes. It was nine days during which the words were interrupted only by the tears he could not contain.
Thus was born Viktor Frankl’s greatest work: “Man in Search of Meaning”. This book has been translated into almost all languages and is considered a masterpiece, both as a testament to life and psychology. The most exciting thing is that Frankl didn’t want it to be a cruelty report, but his goal was to send a moving message to the world:?I just wanted to convey to the reader, through a concrete example, that life has a potential meaning in all conditions, even in the most miserable ?.
Viktor Frankl was able to rebuild his life. He remarried in 1947, had a daughter, two grandchildren and a great-granddaughter. Their marriage lasted 50 very happy years. He has received more than 40 honorary doctorates from various institutions around the world, published more than 30 books and has been a professor at the world’s most prestigious universities, including Harvard University, Stanford University and Vienna. He died in 1997, shortly after making his first flight as an amateur pilot.
It’s called Frankl’s school? And today it has a large number of psychologists who apply its procedures, postulates that human beings have three dimensions: somatic or physical, mental and spiritual, from this point of view, psychological problems arise when we do not have enough spiritual strength. or find a precise meaning in our lives. For speech therapists, the desire for meaning is what allows us to move forward.
But how can we find that meaning? According to Frankl and his followers, there are three ways to achieve this: creation, transcendental emotional experience and attitude to suffering, the former corresponds to the values of creation, and refers to the ability to make art, write, etc. , the second has to do with experiences that relate to interpersonal interaction and the experience of sensations. The third refers to the values of attitude and ability to overcome suffering.
The message that Viktor Frankl wanted to convey is that mental disorders do not come from suffering, but from the meaning we give him, the most interesting thing about this approach is that it is not a theoretical elaboration, but Frankl himself applied it to himself and thus managed to survive the Holocaust. His life was undoubtedly proof that human beings are able to overcome all circumstances.