Viktor Frankl’s Search for Meaning: An Emblematic 20th-Century Life

216 Pages·2015·0.718 MB·English

by  Timothy Pytell

K Viktor Frankl’s Search for Meaning L
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Historical Memory in Africa: Dealing with the Emblematic 20th-Century Life
Past, Reaching for the Future in an Intercultural Timothy E. Pytell
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V F ’
IKTOR RANKL S
S M
EARCH FOR EANING
An Emblematic 20th-Century Life
Timothy E. Pytell
berghahn
N E W Y O R K • O X F O R D
www.berghahnbooks.com
First published in 2015 by
Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com
©2015 Timothy E. Pytell
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages
for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented,
without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pytell, Timothy, author.
Viktor Frankl’s search for meaning : an emblematic 20th-century life / Timothy
E. Pytell. — First edition.
pages cm. — (Making sense of history ; volume 23)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-78238-830-2 (hardback : alk. paper) —
ISBN 978-1-78238-831-9 (ebook)
1. Frankl, Viktor E. (Viktor Emil), 1905-1997. 2. Psychologists—Austria—
Biography. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)—Psychological aspects. I. Title.
BF109.F695P95 2015
150.19’5092—dc23
2015003131
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Printed on acid-free paper.
ISBN: 978-1-78238-830-2 hardback
ISBN: 978-1-78238-831-9 ebook
Contents
Preface vi
Introduction. Viktor Frankl and Man’s Search for Meaning 1
Chapter One. The First Attempt to Find Meaning 15
Chapter Two. The Second Attempt to Find Meaning 25
Chapter Three. Frankl’s Ordination: From Theory to Praxis 46
Chapter Four. The Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy 61
Chapter Five. The Doctor Perseveres 81
Chapter Six. Surviving and Working Through to Redemption 100
Chapter Seven. The Flight into the Spiritual 131
Chapter Eight. Forgetting, Reconfi guring, and
Vergangheitsbewältigung 146
Chapter Nine. Frankl in America: Transcending the Angel Beast 158
Postscript 182
Sources Consulted 186
Index 199
Preface
The origins of this book stem from my attempt to understand how Western
culture went from Freud’s postulation of a death instinct in 1922 to the con-
temporary Kervorkianism or medicalization of death. Infl uenced by the French
philosopher Michel Foucault, I originally aspired to write a genealogy of the
last of the human sciences—thanatology. My friend, the late Lawrence Birken,
suggested I investigate Viktor Frankl. Since Frankl had been infl uenced by
Freud, and late in his life had made critical comments on Kervorkian, I thought
his intellectual production might be the anchor for the study that I was then
formulating as the desublimation of the death instinct in Western civilization.
Although embers of that initial quest remain, I quickly realized that an intellec-
tual biography of Viktor Frankl was an ideal stand-alone topic.
This book project has left me indebted to a plethora of family, friends,
and institutions. It is impossible to acknowledge them all so I will attempt a
short list. I am grateful to Günter Bischopf for suggesting I contact Marion
Berghahn. The good people of Berghahn Books are producing top-notch and
groundbreaking historical works. I am honored to be a part of the team.
Over the years I have received a great deal of institutional support. A
Mellon Foundation grant provided initial seed money. Social science research
grants provided by Colorado College allowed me to further my understanding
of Holocaust survival issues. I presented my initial research to the Richardson
History of Psychiatry Seminar at Cornell University in New York, and I am
particularly grateful to George Makari, Aaron Esman, and Joseph Reppen for
both the opportunity and feedback. Participation in the Silbermann Seminar
and participation in the Hess Seminar at the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum led by Mark Roseman, Jurgen Matthaus, Donald Bloxham, and John
Roth were the most profoundly rewarding professional development experi-
ences of my career. The museum’s mission of Holocaust education, genocide
prevention, and advanced research is being achieved at the highest level because
of the exceptional people working there. The world owes them gratitude.
Preface vii
For the last twelve years my home institution of California State University
San Bernardino has provided both fi nancial support and a working environ-
ment that was central in bringing the book to fruition. I am especially apprecia-
tive of the warm welcome off ered by Professor Lawrence “Laurie” Baron upon
my arrival in California and subsequent support and friendship over the years. I
also owe my “immediate” family a word of gratitude. My mother Honora and
her late husband Wayne Anzick opened their home for the initial writing. Sim-
ilarly, my sister and brother-in-law, Katie and Mike Boone, loaned their alpine
retreat, and also discussed issues relating to the history of psychology. Finally my
great friend John Rice provided recreation time as we four-wheeled and biked
around Colorado when I was taking breaks from writing. For the last twelve
years my wife Lucy and our two children Alexandra and Sebastian have kept
life full of reward and emotion. Thanks for giving me the time away to fi nish
this project!
I owe a special acknowledgement to Alexander Batthyány. In the famous
Viennese cafés “Sperl” and “Schwarzenberg,” amid coff ee and clouds of smoke,
Alex took me through a page by page critical reading of my manuscript. I did
my very best to incorporate his opinions and criticisms, and the manuscript is
the better for it. Although his training as a philosopher and Logotherapist, in
contrast with my training as a European intellectual historian, led us to some
perhaps “irreconcilable” disagreements, I appreciate his good humanity and his
willingness to agree to disagree.
My circle of close comrades in Vienna, Wolfgang Maderthaner, Siegfried
Mattl, Karl Fallend, and Gerhard Benetka, made this book possible. Thank you!
My research was also enhanced by Wolfgang Neugebauer, Elisabeth Klamper,
Gerhard Botz, Oliver Rathkolb, Karin Holzer, Joachim Widder, Wilfried Po-
totsnig, Ernst Kreishler, Richard Mitten, Walter Manoschek, Rüdiger Stix, Judy
Podilipnik, Peter Malina, Karl Pfeifer, Ernest Seinfeld, Lydia Marinelli, Helwig
Leibinger, Anna Hájková, Camilla Nielsen, Peter Mauer, and Herbert Kuhner.
In New York, my colleagues at New York University, Ed Zupcic, Nicole Dom-
browski-Risser, and John Savage helped me survive the ups and downs of grad-
uate school. At Cooper Union, Peter Buckley and David Weir kept my spirits
and humor up while I was working as an adjunct. Along with being a great
friend, Mark Durkin provided generous editorial assistance with my writing.
Other close friends and patrons in New York include Roger Mullarkey, Tom
Howes, Scott Driggers, Andrew Collins, Barry Pailet, and Rob Morea, along
with Barbra Dixon, Tom and Jeanne Hill, Alice Geller, Lorig Yekhairparin, and
David Rentschler. So many others have had a profound impact on my life.
Thanks for enhancing the ride.
The stars literally aligned for me at NYU in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
NYU already had an excellent faculty that included Molly Nolan when three
outstanding European intellectual historians, the late Tony Judt, Anson Rabin-
bach, and Jerrold Seigel, arrived on the scene. Each in their own unique way
viii Preface
made a profound impact on me, and made my life so much more worth liv-
ing. Early on I came in contact with the work of Geoff rey Cocks. We became
friends and the reader will easily see the debt I owe him. The late Lawrence
“Larry” Birken spent countless hours discussing not only Frankl but intellec-
tual life in general and was a great “intellectual” friend to me. I miss him. I am
deeply appreciative of the direction of Jerry Seigel. He forced me to become
a better writer, thinker, and scholar. Finally I owe my greatest debt to Andy
Rabinbach. I learned to teach under his tutelage at Cooper Union, he estab-
lished all my initial contacts in Vienna that made the research for this book
possible, he read the initial draft, and most importantly he has been the ideal
mentor, steady, inspiring, and the epitome of a “gut mensch.” He has my and
many other students’ deepest admiration and appreciation.
It has been my great fortune in life to have encountered exceptional teach-
ers. From the nuns in my grammar school that fi rst sparked my interest in the
past, to the exceptional group of extraordinary professors at Colorado College
that gave me the foundation and confi dence to pursue a Ph.D., to the brilliant
minds I encountered at NYU, I owe my deepest gratitude. The oft-quoted line
from Yeats that “Education is not the fi lling of a pail, but the lighting of a fi re”
is undoubtedly true. But to teach is in essence nurturing and coaxing that “fi re”
into form through writing, speaking, and critical thinking. Subsequently, to the
teachers and especially “Susan” Ashley at Colorado College, who taught me to
never stop asking “so what,” this book is dedicated.
Finally for those who fi nd Viktor Frankl’s Search for Meaning disturbing for
any reason I off er “all apologies.”
Timothy Pytell
So-Cal February 2015
Introduction
Viktor Frankl and Man’s Search for Meaning
Viktor Frankl was born on 26 March 1905 in the Jewish district of Leopold-
stadt in Vienna. After living a remarkable life that was shaped by the major
intellectual and cultural trends of the twentieth century, he died at the age of
ninety-two of heart failure on 2 September 1997 in Vienna. Frankl is best known
for writing the highly acclaimed Holocaust testimony Man’s Search for Meaning,
and he is also recognized as the founder of his own school of psychotherapy—
logotherapy. As the proclaimed successor to Freud’s psychoanalysis and Adler’s
individual psychology, logotherapy is promoted as the “third Viennese school
of psychotherapy.”1 Defi ned succinctly, logotherapy is a form of existential
psychotherapy that is conceived as “therapy through meaning.”2 Frankl’s third
school of Logotherapy therefore complements the Freudian will to pleasure,
and the Adlerian will to power, by considering the primary motivational force
in humans to be the will to meaning. In Freudian and Adlerian therapies the
focus is on personal introspection, uncovering character structures, and remem-
bering signifi cant (often traumatic) events in the past. In contrast, logotherapy
focuses on concrete life conditions and guides the patient to fi nd what is con-
sidered the unique and specifi c meaning to their existence.
Since his death, three biographies of Frankl have been published. In Vi-
enna, Frankl’s disciple Alfred Längle published Viktor Frankl Ein Porträt in 1998.
Längle, the head of the International Society for Logotherapy and Existential
Analysis, was Frankl’s right-hand man from 1982 until 1991. In 1991 Frankl
severed ties with Längle over the latter’s psychotherapeutic revisions that incor-
porated elements of depth psychology, personal introspection, and signifi cant
Notes for this section begin on page 12.
2 Viktor Frankl’s Search for Meaning
experiences. According to Frankl, these revisions were “anti-logo-therapeutic.”3
Despite the rejection, Längle’s biography is full of praise and admiration. This
is not surprising since Längle conceived of Frankl as a “fatherly friend” during
their association and claimed that he was one of only two friends Frankl had in
his life, and the “one who knew him best.”4 This intimate friendship allowed
Längle to rely on personal stories and anecdotes, along with an extended ver-
sion of Frankl’s autobiography that Frankl had entrusted to him, to paint a
glowing portrait.
The second biographer, the American psychologist Haddon Klingberg, Jr.,
was a professor of psychology at North Park University in Chicago. Klingberg
originally studied with Frankl in Vienna in 1962. Although they had little to no
contact over the years, Frankl chose Klingberg in the early 1990s to become his
offi cial biographer. Based on hundreds of hours of interviews Klingberg pro-
vides an “unabashedly sympathetic rendering of their story as Viktor and Elly
[Frankl’s second wife] told it to me.”5 Similar to Längle’s, Klingberg’s book is
conceived in a hagiographic mode that is profoundly fl attering. I published the
third biography, Viktor Frankl: Das Ende eines Mythos? in 2005. The objective of
my biography was to provide a critical refl ection that focused on Frankl’s intel-
lectual struggle for meaning. This substantially revised English version includes
two chapters not originally published in German, and also incorporates the
insights of Längle and Klingberg. In addition I respond to criticisms that head
of the Frankl archive and university Professor Alexander Batthyány expressed
in his response to my critical view of Frankl, entitled Mythos Frankl? Geschichte
der Logotherapie und Existenzanalyse 1925-1945, Entgegnung auf Timothy Pytell.
All biographers agree that Frankl’s biography is fascinating. In his long
and productive life Frankl wrote over thirty books and dozens of articles. As a
neurologist and self-proclaimed founder of existential analysis, Frankl addressed
in his writings subjects ranging from therapeutic and social concerns to scien-
tifi c research.6 His renowned Holocaust memoir, Man’s Search for Meaning, is a
worldwide best seller, and was once ranked by “Library of Congress in Wash-
ington … as one of the ten most infl uential books in America.”7 Man’s Search
for Meaning has also sold millions of copies in the English version alone, and
has been chosen fi ve times by American colleges as “the book of the year.”8
Indeed, the impact of the book has been global because it has been translated
into twenty languages, including Chinese and Japanese, and sold over ten mil-
lion copies worldwide. Touting his success to Robert Leslie, the curator of the
Viktor Frankl Library and Memorabilia in Berkeley, Frankl proclaimed, “Man’s
Search for Meaning was Number One on a new list called Longseller. This list
refers to those bestsellers which throughout decades, do not stop bestselling.”9
The success of Man’s Search for Meaning has also served to promote logo-
therapy because Frankl included a theoretical synopsis of his brand of analysis as
a postscript. The synopsis, entitled “Logotherapy in a Nutshell,” was included at
the suggestion of the renowned Harvard psychologist, Gordon Allport. Allport