Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl's memoir has riveted generations with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Based on his own experience and the stories of his patients, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward. At the heart of his theory, known as logotherapy, is a conviction that the primary human drive is not pleasure but the...

A prominent Viennese psychiatrist recounts his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp that led to the development of his existentialist approach to psychotherapy.

Born in 1905 in the center of the crumbling Austro-Hungarian empire, Viktor Frankl was a witness to the great political, philosophical and scientific upheavals of the twentieth century. In these recollections Frankl describes how as a young doctor of neurology in prewar Vienna his disagreements with Freud and Adler led to the development of the "third Viennese School of Psychotherapy," known as Logotherapy; recounts his harrowing trials in four concentration...