Who is
Viktor Frankl?
Viktor Frankl (1905-1997) was a medical doctor, a psychiatrist and a survivor of the holocaust and the concentration camps of World War II.
He had drafted his seminal work, The Doctor and the Soul before being sent to Auschwitz. He believed that both medicine and psychology addressed only limited dimensions of the human being.
His psychiatric credo maintained that even behind the tragedy of brain damage or severe mental disability, the human person, the essence of the human remained.
Frankl held that all psychotherapy must be underpinned by a philosophy of the human being and life itself. He founded the Third Viennese School of psychotherapy, Logotherapy, on these principles.
Many of Frankl’s insights have been integrated, often only partially and without attribution, into more recent therapeutic approaches, and few attempt to outline a philosophy of life and what it means to be human.
Logotherapy maintains that, within the limits his psychiatric credo, the essence of the human being which Frankl called the geistig (often translated in English as the human spirit) is always capable of choosing, of taking a stand towards being the person we wish to be in a particular circumstance.
“Life does not guarantee happiness, it offers meaning” Frankl states.
The skill of the logotherapist is to help clients discover this truth. To find out more about becoming a logotherapist or to access counselling with a logotherapeutic approach, read through this website or fill out the Contact Us form below.