At a glance
- Age
- 92
- Born
- March 26, 1905
- From
- Vienna
- Nationality
- Austria
Biography
The idea most often quoted from him is simple to state and hard to live: that the drive to find meaning is the central force in human motivation. Frankl built a whole school of psychotherapy around it, called logotherapy, which sits within the existential and humanistic traditions in psychology.
He came to that work as a neurologist and psychiatrist, and also as a philosopher — the two sides of his training are hard to separate in what he produced. He was Austrian, born in Vienna in 1905, and he survived the Holocaust. That experience is inseparable from why his material still circulates: the claim that a person can find meaning is being made by someone who was not writing from comfort.
Frankl died in 1997. The framework he named remains in use, and the core proposition — that the search for meaning, rather than pleasure or power, is what moves people — is the reason his name keeps turning up in clips and quotations decades later.
He came to that work as a neurologist and psychiatrist, and also as a philosopher — the two sides of his training are hard to separate in what he produced. He was Austrian, born in Vienna in 1905, and he survived the Holocaust. That experience is inseparable from why his material still circulates: the claim that a person can find meaning is being made by someone who was not writing from comfort.
Frankl died in 1997. The framework he named remains in use, and the core proposition — that the search for meaning, rather than pleasure or power, is what moves people — is the reason his name keeps turning up in clips and quotations decades later.
Quotes 4
“Everything 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.”
“Those who have a "why" to live, can bear with almost any "how".”
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.”
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
