Austrian psychiatrist, founder of logotherapy (the "third Viennese school" after Freud's and Adler's), and author of Man's Search for Meaning (1946) — one of the most widely read psychological books of the 20th century and the central bridge between clinical psychiatry and the existentialist tradition in popular reception.
Frankl was a young psychiatrist in Vienna in the 1930s, briefly associated with Freud's circle and then with Adler's before developing his own position; he was deported in 1942 with his family to Theresienstadt, and then through Auschwitz and Dachau, losing his wife, parents, and brother. The short book he dictated in nine days after liberation combines a compressed memoir of the camps with the sketch of the therapeutic school — logotherapy — he had been developing before the war and which, in the camps, he had tested as a working psychology of survival. Its central thesis is Nietzsche's line that Frankl quotes: "He who has a why to live can bear almost any how." The primary human motive, on his account, is not Freud's pleasure nor Adler's striving for superiority but the will to meaning; and meaning is always concrete — the meaning of this life, this situation, this task — rather than a general answer one supplies once.
Logotherapy, set out in The Doctor and the Soul (1946), proceeds clinically from this starting point. Where other therapies treat existential distress as a symptom of something else, Frankl treats it as the specific disorder of a life without discovered meaning — the existential vacuum and the noogenic neurosis it can produce — and places the therapist's work at the level of meaning directly. The technical contributions include paradoxical intention (inviting the patient to will the feared symptom) and dereflection (turning attention away from the self and toward a task or person), both of which prefigure moves in later cognitive and behavior therapies. The philosophical kinship is with Kierkegaard and Heidegger on the side of existential anxiety, and with Scheler on the side of objective values; Rollo May placed Frankl alongside himself as a founder of American existential psychology.
Frankl's cultural influence has been unusually broad for a psychiatrist: Man's Search for Meaning has sold in the tens of millions and functions as a companion text to Camus's The Plague and Primo Levi's If This Is a Man in the postwar literature of moral endurance. Academic psychiatry has absorbed some of his technical contributions and largely set the philosophy aside; the book keeps being read.
Frankl is here because Man's Search for Meaning is the most widely read twentieth-century popular statement of the existentialist claim that meaning, not pleasure or power, is the core human need — written from Auschwitz, read by readers who would not otherwise approach existentialism.