ABSTRACT
The originality and poignancy of Frankl’s work and the impetus for it stem from his personal reflections on the depth of human misery as experienced first hand during the war. Viktor Frankl discovered existential principles while he was interned in a number of concentration camps during the Second World War (Frankl 1946, 1955). In his own words, in the camps he realised that there were only two sorts of human beings: decent ones and non-decent ones and that this division existed across the whole range of races, nationalities or professions. In his work after the war he described how, having lost all of his family and suffering greatly himself with extreme humiliation, deprivation and sheer misery, he struggled to find a way of continuing to lead a meaningful life. After the war he applied the principles that he had arrived at to a type of psychotherapy that he named ‘logotherapy’, from the Greek ‘logos’, which stands for word, concept or meaning. Frankl founded what he called the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy (the first two being those of Freud and Adler).
