Viktor Frankl and the Development of Logotherapy

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Viktor Emil Frankl was born on March, 26th 1905, at Czeringassa 7, in Leopoldstadt, in Vienna Austria, where Sigmund Freud and Alfred Alder also grew up (Klingberg, 2014). He was the middle child out of three children. His older brother, Walter was two and a half years older, and his younger sister, Stella, was four years younger. His mother was Elsa Frankl, was a polish woman from Prague with a gentle manner. His father, Gabriel Frankl, had been a hard working man who was the Director of Social Affairs (Redsand, 2006). By the time Frankl was four years old he knew he wanted to be a doctor and he pursued that interest while into high school. He took classes focused on psychology and philosophy. He began corresponding with Freud when he was 16, sending him letters about his own ideas and each time Freud would respond with a postcard with his thoughts (Redsand, 2006). He sent Freud a paper in 1924 about psychoanalysis on the mimic movements of affirmation and negation which Freud then published it in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis three years later (Frankl, 2006). Frankl graduated in 1925 and went on to study neurology and psychiatry at University of Vienna, the same school his father had attended years earlier, although he had to discontinue his education due to financial difficulties after five years of school (Frankl, 2006). During this year Frankl took more interested in Alders theory and had a psychoanalytic article titled, “Psychotherapy and Weltanschauung", published in Adlers International Journal of Individual Psychology (Pytell, 2003). Frankl graduated in 1930 and specialized in depression and suicide. While he was in school he set up a suicide prevention center for teenagers. He then used his term logotherapy...

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...ng can be taken from a man but one thing: The last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way…" (Pg.25, Frankl, 2006).

Works Cited

Bruner, T. (2012). Pascal Bruckner—Guilt in Western Consciousness With Perspectives from Karl Jaspers and Viktor Frankl. Existenz, 7.
Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man's search for meaning. Boston: Beacon Press.
Haddon Klingberg Jr. (2014). Frankl, Viktor, Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion, pp 684-688

Krasko, G. (2004) This Unbearable Boredom of Being. New York: IUniverse, Print.
Logarta, E. (2009). The philosophy of existentialism. Xlibris Corporation.
Redsand, A. (2006). Viktor Frankl: A Life Worth Living. New York: Clarion Books.
Timothy E. Pytell, (2003). ‘Redeeming the Unredeemable: Auschwitz and Man's Search for Meaning’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17.1 89-113.

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