Why Viktor Frankl is the father of the self-help genre

This prelude isn’t meant to scoff at Frankl’s work, which is recognised and lauded as the third branch of psychotherapy to have emerged from Vienna, after Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler. Frankl called his practice logotherapy, a form of cure that focused on finding logos, the Greek word for meaning. While Frankl’s contemporaries Freud and Adler focused on pleasure and power, respectively, the youngest doctor built his ideas on the pillar of the purpose. But like Freud’s and Adler’s, Frankl’s ideas, too, have been misunderstood, and mythologised.

One of the popular misconceptions about Frankl’s famous book is the belief that it was written at Auschwitz, when he was a prisoner at the concentration camp. While this narrative may deepen the appeal of the book, the reality isn’t quite the same. Frankl began to develop his ideas of logotherapy in the 1930s, before the persecution of Jews intensified, leading to his eventual arrest, along with the rest of his family—his elderly parents, brother and wife. Only Frankl emerged alive at the end of World War II.

In the 1930s as a practising young psychologist, Frankl began to apply logotherapy to counsel students, especially during the dreaded “end of the year report card" season, when the incidence of suicide would rise. His efforts paid off, as the numbers began to decline the year after he started his sessions. Once he was out of Auschwitz, he developed his ideas further based on his interviews with fellow prisoners, who had been forced to live each day in anticipation of death, either by starvation and disease or in the gas chambers.

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However well-meaning his intentions, Frankl could not entirely stop suicides in the camps in spite of logotherapy. More problematic were the later revelations of him conducting lobotomy on them in the misguided hope of reviving them, even though he had no training as a surgeon and the conditions in the camp were far from conducive to such medical procedures. It’s not surprising that a section of Holocaust historians has accused Frankl of ingratiating himself with the Nazis by undertaking such actions and, thereby, increasing his own chances of survival.

Yet, within the extreme ecosystem of the camp, where familiar rules of decorum were suspended and upended, it’s difficult to label Frankl’s behaviour as being one of pure complicity. The experiences he synthesised from his time at the camp have led to new approaches to understanding trauma, especially in the idea of post-traumatic growth as opposed to the more debilitating post-traumatic stress disorder. When a tragedy alters the circumstances of a person’s life, it can lead to gratitude for what there is instead of focusing on what has been lost. This is not a coping mechanism but quite the opposite—it’s a strategy to rebuild one’s life.

As Frankl puts it in the opening essay of his new book, “I once heard that an arch that has become unsafe can be reinforced and stabilised, paradoxically, by increasing the load on it. It’s a similar situation for human beings: when experiencing external difficulties, our inner strength and resilience apparently grows." In this day and age, however, such counter-intuitive formulations may sound like sweeping generalisations, and indeed insensitive, considering the gulf between a lifeless concrete arch and a flesh-and-blood being.

In another prescient passage, Frankl discusses the “nervous sickness" of our times, which is a version of what we know as burnout. He writes, “the accelerated pace of our lives today represents an attempt at self-healing, albeit a failed attempt at self-healing." It is as though he could foresee a future where humanity would be desperately doomscrolling and posting on social media to fill the void at the core of life. “Certainly, the frantic pace of our lives can be understood perfectly well if we comprehend it as an attempt to anaesthetize ourselves," he adds. “Every person is fleeing from an inner bleakness and emptiness and, during this flight, plunges into turmoil."

The antidote to this “boreout" (Frankl’s term) is finding a purpose to live. The idea is to resist giving in to the easy cop-out of the pleasure principle or to the false allure of power. What we need instead is to find a larger meaning to our existence, be it by creating a rich inner life that leads to an expansive view of the world, or by taking our attention away from the self to helping others.

Frankl’s theory, sensible as it is, always ran the risk of being co-opted by any group of people to justify their vested interests. For the Nazis, as many argued, the meaning of life was embedded in the idea of extinguishing the lives of Jews. Major corporates, in a more benign context, continue to urge employees to align their purpose with the company’s goals, no matter how underpaid and overworked they may be. Frankl, to give him credit, didn’t advocate work as being the meaning of our lives, or embracing challenges as the necessary stepping stone to finding meaning.

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Re-reading Frankl in 2024 is, therefore, a strangely disconcerting experience. Even as he does validate our human need to seek meaning in what we do and how we live, he also runs the risk of glorifying suffering, especially in current times, which, in many ways, is a spitting image of his time—riddled with authoritarian politics, the persecution of minorities and the denial of the basic conditions of a decent life to a majority across the world.

It’s helpful that the new book comes with a warning from the publisher: “This book is a child of (its) time and may contain language or depictions in common usage at the time that some readers may find offensive today."

Somak Ghoshal is a writer based in Delhi.