Viktor Frankl

1905–1997 · Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist and founder of logotherapy

Viktor Frankl was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist who founded logotherapy, often called the “Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy” after Freud’s and Adler’s. He survived Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and two further camps, and drew on that experience in Man’s Search for Meaning, first published in German in 1946 and in English in 1959. His central claim inverted Freud: the primary human drive is not the will to pleasure but the will to meaning — and where that will is frustrated, he argued, pleasure and power rush in to fill the void.

Traced to source

5 quotes we’ve traced to Viktor Frankl

“Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it”

Verified

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way”

Verified

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves”

Verified

“Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose”

Disputed

“When a person can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure”

Disputed

Not actually Viktor Frankl

Often misattributed to Viktor Frankl

Famous lines widely pinned on Viktor Frankl that we’ve traced to someone else.

“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how”

actually Friedrich Nietzsche

“He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how”

actually Friedrich Nietzsche

“To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering”

actually Gordon W. Allport

“What is to give light must endure burning”

actually Anton Wildgans

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