Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

August 24, 2023

The Not-So-Secular Humanism of Viktor Frankl

The author of Man’s Search for Meaning attended synagogue regularly.

Like his fellow Viennese Jews Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler, Viktor Frankl was a pioneer in the field of psychiatry, distinguishing himself particularly with his work in suicide prevention. But he is best known for his Holocaust memoir—first published in German in 1946 as A Psychologist Survives the Concentration Camp, and later in English as Man’s Search for Meaning. Samuel Kronen investigates Frankl’s philosophy, and its fundamental hypothesis: only a sense of purpose that transcends the self can make life worth living and suffering tolerable:

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