Viktor Frankl's Search for Meaning: An Emblematic 20th-Century Life (Making Sense of History, 23)

★"[T]his is a scholarly, commendable biography and intellectual history. Lay readers will be challenged; psychologists and historians will be grateful."--Library Journal, starred review First published in 1946, Viktor Frankl's memoir Man's Search for Meaning remains one of the most influential books of the last century, selling over ten million copies worldwide and having been embraced by successive generations of readers captivated by its author's philosophical journey in the wake of the Holocaust. This long-overdue reappraisal examines Frankl's life and intellectual evolution anew, from his early immersion in Freudian and Adlerian theory to his development of the "third Viennese school" amid the National Socialist domination of professional psychotherapy. It teases out the fascinating contradictions and ambiguities surrounding his years in Nazi Europe, including the experimental medical procedures he oversaw in occupied Austria and a stopover at the Auschwitz concentration camp far briefer than has commonly been assumed. Throughout, author Timothy Pytell gives a penetrating but fair-minded account of a man whose paradoxical embodiment of asceticism, celebrity, tradition, and self-reinvention drew together the complex strands of twentieth-century intellectual life. From the introduction: At the same time, Frankl's testimony, second only to the Diary of Anne Frankin popularity, has raised the ire of experts on the Holocaust. For example, in the 1990s the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington purportedly refused to sell Man's Search for Meaningin the gift shop.... During the late 1960s and early 1970s Frankl became very popular in America. Frankl's survival of the Holocaust, his reassurance that life is meaningful, and his personal conviction that God exists served to make him a forerunner of the self-help genre. [T]his is a scholarly, commendable biography and intellectual history. Lay readers will be challenged; psychologists and historians will be grateful. Library Journal , starred review First published in 1946, Viktor Frankls memoir Mans Search for Meaning remains one of the most influential books of the last century, selling over ten million copies worldwide and having been embraced by successive generations of readers captivated by its authors philosophical journey in the wake of the Holocaust. This long-overdue reappraisal examines Frankls life and intellectual evolution anew, from his early immersion in Freudian and Adlerian theory to his development of the third Viennese school amid the National Socialist domination of professional psychotherapy. It teases out the fascinating contradictions and ambiguities surrounding his years in Nazi Europe, including the experimental medical procedures he oversaw in occupied Austria and a stopover at the Auschwitz concentration camp far briefer than has commonly been assumed. Throughout, author Timothy Pytell gives a penetrating but fair-minded account of a man whose paradoxical embodiment of asceticism, celebrity, tradition, and self-reinvention drew together the complex strands of twentieth-century intellectual life. From the At the same time, Frankls testimony, second only to the Diary of Anne Frank in popularity, has raised the ire of experts on the Holocaust. For example, in the 1990s the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington purportedly refused to sell Mans Search for Meaning in the gift shop. During the late 1960s and early 1970s Frankl became very popular in America. Frankls survival of the Holocaust, his reassurance that life is meaningful, and his personal conviction that God exists served to make him a forerunner of the self-help genre. "Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist and philosopher who survived the Holocaust and went on to found the third school of Viennese psychotherapy. This book is an intellectual biography of Frankl, describing his early immersion in Freudianism, his connection to Alfred Adler, and the development of logotherapy in the 1930s. After the Holocaust, Frankl took on a prominent public role as a survivor in postwar Austria, and in the United States as part of the humanistic psychology movement. By critically examining the details of his intellectual life, including some previously unknown biographical details, we can begin to see the fascinating ambiguities and contradictions in Frankl's thought"-- Provided by publisher Introduction: Viktor Frankl and Man's search for meaning The first attempt to find meaning The second attempt to find meaning Frankl's ordination: from theory to praxis The third Viennese school of psychotherapy The Doctor perseveres Surviving and working through to redemption The flight into the spiritual Forgetting, reconfiguring, and Vergangheitsbewältigung Frankl in America: transcending the Angel Beast.