Viktor Frankl

Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor, and founder of logotherapy — the 'third Viennese school' of psychotherapy after Freud and Adler — whose 1946 book Man's Search for Meaning, written in nine days after his liberation from Nazi concentration camps, has sold more than sixteen million copies and is regularly named among the most influential books of the twentieth century. Born in Vienna in 1905, Frankl survived Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Kaufering, and Türkheim; his wife Tilly, mother, and brother were killed. From the camps he distilled a single conviction: that human beings can find meaning even in unavoidable suffering, and that the last of human freedoms is the freedom to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances. He went on to write more than thirty books, hold professorships at Harvard and Stanford, and lecture at over two hundred universities. Frankl died in Vienna in 1997.