Viktor Frankl (1905–1997) was a psychologist and psychiatrist who gained worldwide fame as the founder of logotherapy. This form of existential analysis is regarded as the “third Viennese school of psychotherapy,” alongside Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis and Alfred Adler’s individual psychology.
Frankl was born into a Jewish family in Vienna. After finishing school, he studied medicine, developing a strong interest in cases of depression and suicide. At the age of 15 he was already personally in touch with Sigmund Freud, and it was at this time that the two started corresponding. In 1924, at Freud’s express recommendation, one of Frankl’s first publications appeared in the German language journal of psychoanalysis Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse. As a student, Frankl was also in close contact with Alfred Adler. Frankl’s work centered increasingly on the search for meaning, especially in connection with his commitment to suicide prevention. In 1926, he also started using the term logotherapy in lectures as a concept based on the premise that individuals’ prime motivation in life is to find meaning. From 1933 to 1937, Frankl worked as a doctor at the psychiatric hospital in Vienna, where he looked after some 3,000 suicidal women a year.
After the Nazi occupation of Austria, Frankl was given only limited permission to work. Risking his life, he used false diagnoses to sabotage the Nazi-ordered euthanasia of the “mentally ill.” In 1939, he allowed a valid exit visa for the United States to expire so as not to abandon his elderly parents. In 1941 he married Tilly Grosser, and a year later the Nazis forced the couple to abort their child. In 1942 the pair was arrested and sent with Frankl’s parents to the Theresienstadt ghetto, where his father died of exhaustion six months later. Frankl, his wife, and shortly after his mother, too, were all deported to the extermination camp at Auschwitz, where his mother died in the gas chambers. Frankl was separated from Tilly when she was moved to the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. In 1944, Frankl himself was moved from Auschwitz to another concentration camp, Türkheim, a subcamp of Dachau, where he remained until the camp was liberated by U.S. troops on April 27, 1945.
Frankl’s observations of his fellow inmates under the extreme conditions in the concentration camps confirmed his hypotheses about the search for meaning in human life.
When he returned to Vienna after being liberated, within a few days he learned about the death of his mother, wife, brother, and sister-in-law. Overcoming his despair, in 1946 he started working at the Vienna Policlinic of Neurology. That same year, in just nine days he dictated the book about his concentration camp experience as seen through the eyes of a psychologist, titled Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager (the English title is Man’s Search for Meaning). More than 9 million copies of that book had been sold by the time Frankl died in 1997, and the Library of Congress in Washington lists it as “one of the ten most influential books in America.”
How can Frankl’s findings be extrapolated to management? In surveys, nearly 90 percent of all managers list motivation as one of their key tasks in people management. Yet the essential teachings of Viktor Frankl are almost completely unexploited in business. Frankl’s core message is that people are motivated by meaning. In other words, the search for meaning is a person’s main motivational force. If people can see meaning in something, they will also be willing to perform to the best of their ability and even make sacrifices and forgo certain things. Conversely, people who no longer sees any meaning in their life will be neither willing nor able to perform and may even be prepared to relinquish their life. The decisive issue here is that nobody except the individual can give meaning to his or her own life by seeking and finding what, for them, constitutes such meaning. The remarkable fact here is that everybody is capable of finding meaning in their life, and Frankl cited three main ways of doing so1:
1. Serving a cause, whereby the individual contributes to a perceived whole: In management this is the most important way. Peter F. Drucker repeatedly stressed the importance of individuals’ contribution to their respective organization to achieve performance and results. The aim of serving a cause is also what spurs individuals to create a life’s work, to single-mindedly pursue an objective, as so many great people did through history. However, in this connection Frankl also cites the importance of experiencing something.
2. Loving somebody or feeling devoted to a person: Here, people find meaning by being there for their family, partner, friends, or people who are dependent on assistance. This primarily applies in people’s private and personal sphere.
3. Turning suffering into an achievement: Whenever human beings are faced with a destiny that cannot be altered—an incurable disease or a hopeless situation—they can do that most human of all things, namely endure a difficult fate with dignity, transforming suffering into an achievement. Frankl saw in this “the secret of the unconditional meaningfulness of life: that man, especially in existential borderline situations, is called upon to bear witness, as it were, to what he and he alone is capable of.”2
As mentioned already, in spite of extensive scientific evidence demonstrating the applicability of Frankl’s views in different social domains and especially also in borderline situations concerning human achievement potential, the core ideas behind his work have barely been heeded in business circles. Yet it has been demonstrated in connection with many organizations and many managers that Frankl’s basic ideas can make a considerable contribution to corporate culture, to the understanding of management, and to managers’ personal development.
Time and time again, almost “superhuman” achievements in all domains confirm what Frankl said, quoting Nietzsche: “He who has a ‘why’ to live can bear almost any ‘how’.”3
Motivate yourself by drawing on the meaning of your work.
Examining Viktor Frankl’s ideas is a highly worthwhile exercise. Why not take a longer, closer look at his gripping book Man’s Search for Meaning or at his work The Will to Meaning: Foundations and Applications of Logotherapy in which he provides a deeper insight into the subject?