Talk:Viktor Frankl

The word Existentialism
Did Frankl really coin the word Existentialim? And if so, can we have a reference? The Gabriel Marcel entry also claims coinage for its subject. no, he did not, that was sartre and camus —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.27.102.40 (talk) 09:29, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

In fact, it was Soren Kierkeegard. He is widely recognized as the founder of Existentialism, preceding Marcel, Sartre, Camus, Frankl, etc

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_S%C3%B8ren_Kierkegaard — Preceding unsigned comment added by 201.230.48.231 (talk) 04:58, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

The Existentialism page says "The term existentialism (French: L'existentialisme) was coined by the French Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel in the mid-1940s". 122.148.184.131 (talk) 21:30, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

Before Auschwitz?
I am completely new here so I don't know if this is appropriate, but from my knowledge Frankl found long before the concentration camp his thesis that a goal, a meaning in life will cure. He found it after a statistic he made in an Austrian clinic. I do not have my books here, but I can look it up. Thank you everybody for Wikipedia -- Thomas
 * Hi Thomas -- please do. Much information was recently transfered from the German article, and so apparently it was also not there. If you add it, make your comment here and maybe to the german article talk page. --Otheus 08:25, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
 * I too have read things along these lines--that he developed his theories before being arrested, and the "miracle" of his experience was that he was able to reconstruct the book while in a concentration camp (while also adding some data from that experience, but the basic principles had already been established). Also I read that advertising the book as having been "inspired" by the Holocaust was the idea of his American publisher because he thought it would help sales (but I don't recall where I read this so I don't have any references).


 * (ok I just saw the sentence "This conclusion served as a strong basis for his logotherapy and existential analysis, which Frankl had described before WWII." but I think that needs to be emphasized much more strongly to avoid perpetuating a major misconception.)


 * also i recall reading that some have accused frankl of low-level cooperation with the conservative forces, indeed it seems a little strange that he wasn't imprisoned until late 1942, survived and then moved back to Vienna as soon as the war ended and was immediately made the director of a clinic (and married a catholic woman).


 * P.S. The German article doesn't really seem to address any of these topics either.Historian932 (talk) 08:07, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

Grieving process
Wasn't he one of the founders (through his terrible experience) of the "five-step" grieving process (see Grief)?
 * No, he was not. Apparently he did it without grieving, read this, please.

substantial edit
I edited the article and had really trouble to verify this paragraph: ''In Theresienstadt, he worked as a general practitioner in a clinic until his skill in psychiatry was noticed and he was asked to establish a special unit to help newcomers to the camp overcome the shock. He later set up a suicide watch unit, and all intimations of suicide were reported to him. To maintain his own sanity in the dismal conditions, he would frequently march outside and deliver a lecture to an imaginary audience about "Psychotherapeutic Experiences in a Concentration Camp."''

If someone can confirm this, please put this paragraph back into the article. Themanwithoutapast 22:36, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I'm not sure about the suicide watch unit; in his book he breifly discusses how rare suicide was. Other than that, the rest of it is valid. --Crucible Guardian 02:38, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * Look here, the article about Regina Jonas, part of it sounds similar to me:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regina_Jonas Austerlitz 88.72.4.143 17:05, 23 November 2006 (UTC)


 * I reinserted the material (excluding the suicide watch unit) back into the section. Please review. --Otheus 08:28, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

The Question of God
Experiences in a concentration camp, taken from Frankl's book Man's Search For Meaning Viktor Frankl, can we take the link from the German wikipedia site to this english one, too? The text sheds much light on the problem of imagination vs. reality.

Is is valid for the section External links? Austerlitz 88.72.4.77 12:00, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Copy-edits and conciseness
I did some copy-editing, both minor and major. The major copy-editing was to make the article more concise. While this article needs more "meat", it does need more "fluff". --Otheus 19:57, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Beamtenfamilie
If someone knows a proper word or phrase that could be used instead of Beamtenfamile that would be great. To really understand the word it would be useful to know that in Austria (and maybe other countries as well) it used to be that you stayed in the same level of work as your fathers. For examples there were lots doctor-families, or families where everyone was a civil servant, and the point here is that Frankl found his way out of that pattern... --VeronikaMM 09:14, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
 * I used the phrase "family of civil servants", but I don't think this is as impactful to English readers who are not familiar with the Old Europe patterns of employment. The closest thing we Americans would have is "family business", but that doesn't sound accurate, especially not to the tag "civil servant". --Otheus 09:05, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Makes sense... Family Businesses exist here too and always did, but I never really considered it to be even close to what I was refering to. The fact is that children took (take) over the family business is that they identify with it (probably they had worked there as kids already and grew into it, whereas I see the families of civil servants more as something that is a tradition more than anything else.--VeronikaMM 13:55, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Adding biographical info
I am adding information from the German site, to mainly complete the biographical information...--VeronikaMM 10:18, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:1frankl-book.JPG
Image:1frankl-book.JPG is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in Wikipedia articles constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.

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I don't understand
Though assigned to ordinary labor details until the last few weeks of the war,: what kind of "ordinary labor details" are you talking about?
 * Austerlitz -- 88.72.17.8 12:23, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

I've added some information from the book University over the Abyss.
 * Austerlitz -- 88.72.17.8 12:24, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

Why is it that he never mentioned Regina Jonas in his book(s) on Concentration camp?
 * -- 88.72.18.59 11:03, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

Robert Schuller's Magazin POSSIBILITIES, The International Magazine of Hope
In the March-April edition 1991 there should be an interview with Viktor Frankl saying that he had been in Auschwitz camp for some days only. Until now I have not been able to find that interview online or elsewhere. and I still don't know the english title of Timothy Pytell's biography about Frankl.
 * 
 * Austerlitz -- 88.72.11.148 14:11, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

ISBN's
Please correct the ISBN for The unconscious God : psychotherapy and theology. Thanks in advance! Best regards

‫·‏לערי ריינהארט‏·‏T‏·‏m‏:‏Th‏·‏T‏·‏email me‏·‏‬ 06:12, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Pronounciation?
How do you pronounce his last name? Like "Frankle"? --antilivedT 09:39, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

Need correct quote please.
I'm looking for the quote from "Man's Search for Meaning" dealing with our last freedom is the freedom to choose our attitude about what we are experiencing. Can someone please provide this for me????? I would truly appreciate it. Thanks so much —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.197.21.145 (talk) 17:29, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

"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” Is that the quote you were thinking of? Its from Man's Search for Meaning, but I'm not sure on the page number. ANB (talk) 19:57, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia syntax for describing individual's worldview
I find it odd that some articles use "religious stance" and some use "religious beliefs". I corrected this to religious stance in this article. 128.214.9.63 (talk) 12:16, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

'Interesting facts' incorporated into text
Following the addition of a trivia tag by Koavf on 30 January 2010, I have incorporated the information into the body of the article as it is currently structured, with further citations. The tag was reasonable. The problem with placing such information into an 'interesting facts' section is that it does indeed give the impression of trivial significance. On the contrary, these bits of information point to fundamental principles underlying Frankl's approach, which makes them far from trivial.

But a reader is not to know that unless incorporated into the text with some sort of explanation, which I have attempted to do. Having done that, I have removed the 'interesting facts' section. If something about what Frankl said or wrote captures one's attention and imagination, it is probably not trivial. The question then is why did it capture one's attention? What does it tell us about this person's philosophical approach? In answering that question, you are almost bound to get also the context to help you place it into the article.

Sometimes the process of that builds the article in a way we decide to restructure it. You could go in that direction with the Frankl article if you wanted, for his approach was not just therapeutic. It had philosophical underpinnings. You can see just from the Yalom citations, or pretty much any description of his work really, because answering the question of how he arrived at the title Man's Search for Meaning will just take you in that direction. But you don't have to take the article in that direction, you can just build it around the existing structure to make sense. If you can't get the article to make sense without ommitting key descriptions of his work, then you pretty much have to restructure the article. In the current case, I saw no need. It all naturally follows on from the concentration camp experiences, which fundamentally shaped everything about his philosphical and therapeutic approach to life. And I was pleased to note that Yalom provided a nice quotation to link to the 'Sunday neurosis' citation. The bracketed term in the Yalom quote is directly from the Yalom book, just so you know that I wasn't creatively inferring it. Wotnow (talk) 09:00, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

Death and is family
I know it seemed almost redundant but out of respect I added his surviving family member and was wondering if anyone knew where he died so mabe that can be added? Desette (talk) 18:18, 23 July 2010 (UTC)Desette

Religion	Jewish ?
Frankl was clearly racially Jewish but is there any evidence that he believed in the God of Judaism? Man's Search for Meaning is a key book for those interested in a secular spirituality that does not require any belief in God. Should his beliefs therefore be classified as "agnostic" or "humanist" or "unknown"? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.71.43.37 (talk) 11:35, 9 October 2010 (UTC) I agree with this from what I have read there is no evidence to support that he was religiously jewish. --Desette (talk) 12:24, 31 May 2012 (UTC)
 * See Klingberg's When Life Calls Out To Us: the love and lifework of Viktor and Elly Frankl. He remained Jewish his entire life, and even practiced some Jewish observances. Larryyr (talk) 18:50, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

I wouldn't say that he was totally Jewish in religious practice. His second wife was a Christian and he also celebrated all the Christian holidays with her that she normally celebrated. 67.230.224.152 (talk) 11:18, 12 June 2016 (UTC)

Why the umbrella category Nazi concentration camp survivors?
I removed the umbrella Category:Nazi concentration camp survivors, but User:Zymurgy has restored it here. Frankl is in the Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and Dachau survivors' sub-categories, so why do we need this one as well? --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  01:48, 13 January 2014 (UTC)
 * The guideline is in WP:CAT. "... each categorized page should be placed in all of the most specific categories to which it logically belongs. This means that if a page belongs to a subcategory of C (or a subcategory of a subcategory of C, and so on) then it is not normally placed directly into C...." – S. Rich (talk) 02:55, 13 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Yes, that's exactly my understanding too. --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  05:02, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

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Considering his fellow Austrian, Hitler
Considering the other Austrian incidentally also viewed his suffering & survival in the trenches of WWI as fate, and assigned the "meaning" to it, that he would one day be destined to save Germany, these whole generation of dangerous Austrian, magical thinkers, really, really need to have a controversy section. I'm going to put everything here and then begin to condense and summarize the main points in the article.

Controversy
In The Missing Pieces of the Puzzle: A Reflection on the Odd Career of Viktor Frankl, Timothy Pytell of California State University, conveys the numerous discrepancies and omissions in Frankl's "Auschwitz survivor" account and later autobiography, which many of his contemporaries, such as Thomas Szasz, similarly have raised. In Frankl's Search for meaning the book devotes some thirty pages to Auschwitz and the psychology of its prisoners, suggesting a long stay at the death camp, however his wording is contradictory and to Pytell, deceptive, when rather than the impression of staying for months, Frankl was held in the "depot prisoner" area of Auschwitz for no more than a few days, he was neither registered there, nor assigned a number and was soon sent to a subsidiary work camp of Dachau, known as Kaufering III which held some 2000 prisoners pressed into constructing aircraft hangars and transport routes.

While Frankl did not mention them in his 1973 autobiography of his life before the war, in a private 1981 interview with Canadian filmmaker Tom Corrigan, Frankl described both authorizing and personally conducting involuntary lobotomies and trepanation in the Rothschild Hospital, alongside inserting the amphetamine drug pervitin into the aquaedustus slyvii of jews, who rather than be taken prisoner, had attempted suicide to escape the fate of forced labor and the holocaust. Pytell and Szasz raises the issue that Frankl was not trained as a brain surgeon to conduct these procedures and writes "These ethically questionable experiments could be viewed as bordering on collaboration with the Nazis. Not only was Frankl's research supported by the Nazis, but his actions stood outside a vision of Jewish communal solidarity".

On Frankl's doctrine that one must instill meaning in the events in ones life, that work and suffering to find meaning, will ultimately lead to fulfillment and happiness, in 1982 the highly cited scholar and holocaust analyst Lawrence L. Langer, who while also critical of Frankl's distortions on the true experience of those at Auschwitz, along with Frankl's amoral focus on "meaning" that could just as equally be applied to Nazis "finding meaning in making the world free from Jews" would remark that: "If this doctrine [of logotherapy] had been more succinctly worded, the Nazis might have substituted it for the cruel mockery [that was positioned over the entry to Auschwitz] of Arbeit Macht Frei".

Pytell later would remark on the penetrating insight of Langer's reading of Frankl, with Langer writing in 1982 before Pytell's biography, the former had thus found the criticism and drawn the parallels in ideology without the knowledge that Victor Frankl had prior to the writing of Man's search for Meaning, become an advocate of the key ideas of the Nazi psychotherapy movement ("will and responsibility") as a form of therapy in the late 1930s, at a time when Frankl voluntarily worked at the Göring institute in Vienna 1936, some two years prior to Austria being annexed by Nazi Germany.

The origins of logotherapy, as described by Frankl, were and remain a major issue of continuity that Biographer Pytell argues were potentially problematic for Frankl because he had laid out the main elements of logotherapy while working for the Nazi-affiliated Göring Institute. Principally Frankl's 1937 paper, penned while employed at the institute. This association, as a source of controversy, that logotherapy and National Socialism are ideologically linked, or that it was palatable to the Nazis is the reason Pytell suggests, Frankl took two different stances on how the concentration-camp experience affected his psychotherapy theory. While the original English edition of Frankl's book suggests that logotherapy was itself derived from his camp experience, with the claim that this form of psychotherapy was "not concocted in the philosopher's armchair nor at the analyst's couch; it took shape in the hard school of air-raid shelters and bomb craters; in concentration camps and prisoner of war camps." Frankl's statement to this effect would be deleted from later editions. In 1963 a similar statement again appeared on the back of the book jacket of Man's Search for Meaning. Frankl would over the years switch between the claim that logotherapy took shape in the camps and the claim that the camps justified his already preconceived theories, though as the definitive word on the matter, in 1977 Frankl himself began to clarify the controversy, stating "People think I came out of Auschwitz with a brand-new psychotherapy. This is not the case."

In the post war years, Frankl's attitude towards not pursuing justice nor assigning collective guilt to the Austrian people for collaborating with or acquiescing in the face of Nazism, led to "frayed" relationships with many Viennese and the larger American Jewish community, such that in 1978 when attempting to give a lecture at the institute of Adult Jewish Studies in New York, Frankl was confronted with an outburst of boos from the audience and was called a "nazi pig".

In 1988 Frankl would further "stir up sentiment against him" by being photographed next to and in accepting a holocaust survivor medal from President Waldheim, a controversial president of Austria who during the ceremony, was gripped by revelations that he had lied about his WWII military record and was under investigation for complicity in Nazi War crimes. Frankl's acceptance of the medal was viewed by a large segment of the international Jewish community as a betrayal and by a disparate group of commentators, that its timing was politically motivated to rehabilitate Waldheim's reputation on the world stage.

Boundarylayer (talk) 20:19, 24 September 2018 (UTC)
 * It's great that you're working about this article, but please consider Wikipedia guidelines of WP:NPOV and WP:UNDUE. It's preferable to intersperse these criticisms with the life events (for example, having a section for Man's Search for Meaning which summarizes the main points of the book and its reception, or adding the award to his life) as well as considering, if there are any positive reception for his life. Catrìona (talk) 23:50, 25 December 2018 (UTC)


 * I have from your suggestion, just pointed to that book with a -main- section. However this article is not actually about a book reception, it's about the author?  I'm similarly not familiar wihh any positive reception for his life? In fact I think we're actually still missing the fact that Rollo May charged Frankl and his 'therapy' as deeply authoritarian, in Logotherapy and that resulted in considerable scholarly discussion at the time. Do you think adding this would be WP:UNDUE? If you however would like to add a positive reception, or actually know of one, then go ahead, you would however need to keep it scholarly, an actual multivariate analysis supporting logotherapy or Frankl would be required if what you propose as an edit sounded suggestive of being a treatment or endorsement, in order to meet the basic tenets of WP:RSMED. Otherwise as you can imagine, every single anecdotal case of some positive guru-therapy and their followers would litter wikipedia, wouldn't that be chaos, along with ethically questionable? A look at the closely related biography of Teal Swan and Jordan Peterson and their articles, you hopefully will notice the general template doesn't include any of your suggested anecdotal positive reviews. Though I would still be interested in hearing what if any positive reviews of frankl, you know of?


 * Boundarylayer (talk) 05:38, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

Bias
This is a terrible article, very biased. Nothing about "man's search for meaning" reception, etc, fame as a book. It is fine to include criticism but this article is all criticism, not reflective of the general scholarship or journalism on Frankl. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.154.13.218 (talk) 05:22, 1 March 2023 (UTC)


 * YES: this article is ridiculously devoted to a couple of non-entities carping at trivial inconsistencies they claim to have found in Frankl's account of his experience....and who say that his philosophy and psychology condone Nazism:  BLATANT and cynical misrepresentations of Frankl's work. Why is more than 2/3 of the entry on Frankl dedicated to these losers? 2601:2C4:4382:5B80:1DD3:F1EF:4C2D:3EB0 (talk) 18:58, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

This article has similar problems with the Man's Search for Meaning article in that it's written like a hit piece rather than being unbiased.

edit: I wrote to the USHMM store at the email provided by their website (Museum_shop@ushmm.org) inquiring Man's Search for Meaning and Frankl. A representative told me that the store does in fact sell books by Frankl including Man's Search. I will edit the article to reflect this

Kilometerman (talk) 02:52, 10 March 2019 (UTC)


 * This article does have problems but not the ones you suggest, instead it is WP:PRIMARY promotional claims of Frankl, that Frankl saved people and this is mentioned in the article, yet no one has ever come forth, ever, to even hint that what Frankl claims. Ever transpired. Not a soul.


 * Your email suffers from this same problem. Do not remove WP:SECONDARY sources but seek to add them in the future, if you feel that there is a bias problem.
 * 213.202.136.143 (talk) 20:11, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Incoherent Sentence
If we're going to allow the following sentence to exist in this Wikipedia article, can we please get the original author, or someone, perhaps ANYONE to edit it? This is perhaps one of the worst, most convoluted, meaningless sentences I have ever read:

Frankl has been the subject of criticism from several holocaust analysts[5][6] who questioned the levels of Nazi accommodation that the ideology of logotherapy has and Frankl personally willingly pursued in the time periods before Frankl's internment, when Frankl voluntarily requested to perform unskilled lobotomy experiments approved by the Nazis on Jews,[7] to the time period of his internment, in what is hinted upon in Frankl's own autobiographical account and later under the investigative light of biographical research.[8][9]

Please. UGH.

Monoxide (talk) 01:58, 3 July 2019 (UTC) Monoxide

This text includes a considerable number of false and defamatory claims. In addition they are almost all pointing towards one single source. Here is the (incomplete) list of false statements:

Claim: The book is an account within the concentration camp hierarchy, where in various camps he practiced, 'concluded' and several times quotes, the validity of means for a Nietzschean survival.

Fact: Frankl frequently used one Nietzsche quote (He who has Why to live endures almost any How); however, quoting Nietzsche does not make one a Nietzschean. Frankl’s model is in fact decidedly not Nietzschean, but follows the personalist tradition.

Claim: Frankl was, for a time, a minor figure in existential therapy.

Fact: Together with Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss, Viktor Frankl is widely acknowledged as one of the founding fathers of European existential psychotherapy and psychiatry; hence he is not a minor figure, but rather one of the European pioneers of this movement. In the Handbook of Positive Psychology (Oxford UP), renowned psychologist Roy Baumeister describes the reception of Frankl’s work in the States as follows:

Psychologists gradually have begun to study meaning in life. Frankl’s (1959/1976) early work emphasized the importance of finding value in life, and he is widely credited with being a pioneer in the study of meaning. His work constituted a courageous rebellion against the behaviourist and psychodynamic paradigms that dominated psychological theorizing at that time. [...] Still, these works were isolated intellectually from the main work of their time

Claim: He has been the subject of some criticism from notable holocaust analysts [5] [6]  who question the levels of Nazi collaboration by Frankl, the inherence in the ideology of logotherapy and its origins itself.

Fact: This allegation is wrong. No notable holocaust analysts make these allegation. The first reference is Lawrence Langer who was critical of Frankl’s interpretation of the holocaust, but never alleged that Frankl collaborated with the Nazis (on whatever level). The second reference names Timothy Pytell who indeed attempts to ‘expose’ Frankl as a fellow traveller of the Nazi regime. However, Pytell is decidedly not a “notable holocaust analyst”. He published one book (his dissertation on Frankl), and his citation index consists mostly of self-citations. As to the quality of this “notable historian”: Intellectual historians in fact issued scathing critiques of Pytell’s discussion of Frankl and the Holocaust:

[…] outdated discourse about Vienna’s kaleidoscopic Jewish culture exacerbated by numerous inaccuracies and misrepresentations […]; Statements, which abound in the work, rankle in the face of the vast wealth of literature on Central- European and Viennese Jewish culture that has proliferated in the two decades since Pytell began his research on Viktor Frankl. […] Not surprisingly, the footnotes reveal that this is a result of the most recent literature cited dating from the 1980s (his misreading of Lisa Silverman’s brilliant work notwithstanding). Erroneous renditions of German nomenclature and quotations abound, whether owing to the author or the editor is unclear, yet enhancing the sense that this work could have engaged better with the Central European context.

[…] frankly patchy in its narration of Frankl’s life in his Central European environs. […] underdeveloped, lacking a conclusion and too often indulging in superficial digressions into scholarly literature on the Holocaust

[…] Pytell has simply not done his homework. [The book] shows contemporary history at its muck-raking weakest […] hardly excusable ignorance […]

[…] ignores much of the literature on Viennese Jewry’s role in the wider cultural arena.

In brief, someone who published one single book during his whole career (his dissertation), and gets these reviews for his work is not, by any stretch of imagination, “notable holocaust analyst”.

Claim: A disparate group of others also raise doubts in regard to acts which Frankl willingly pursued in the time before his internment …

Fact: No reference is given as to who this “disparate group of others” is. The links below again only refer to the one person discussed above (and below), i.e. Timothy Pytell. It might be useful to know that Pytell in his book freely admits that he feels ‘contempt’, that he is ‘biased’ against Frankl, that he feels ‘revulsion’ for Frankl, that he is ‘glad not to have known him’ (idem). As the following will show, this is not an overstatement. Pytell is indeed the only source of the “non-flattering” allegations, though attempts are made in this Wikipedia entry to hide this (as will be shown in a number of instances).

Claim: […] during that time, as a member of the austro-fascist Fatherland Front, without any medical precedence or training as a surgeon, Frankl - under the oversight of the Nazi administration - insisted on performing experimental Lobotomies on Jews who had resisted arrest...

Fact: This is false and – unsurprisingly – not referenced. Additionally, lobotomy was a (brutal) technique for psychotic patients. The Vienna Rothschildspital – i.e. the last Jewish Hospital in Vienna and thus the only remaining work place where Frankl, as a Jew, could work as a medical doctor after the Nazi annexation of Austria, did not have Psychiatry Dept (only a Neurology Dept).

Claim: [… continues]: with an overdose of sedatives, and were declared dead by other doctors of the Reich,[7]  which psychiatrists and biographers alike suggest comprises a link to Nazi human experimentation.

Fact: The Rothschildspital was NOT under Nazi administration. It was the last and only hospital under administration of the Isrealitische Kultusgemeinde (i.e. the Jewish Community). The SS regularly raided the Rothschildspital; however, regular raids do not constitute administration, but rather disruption.

Claim: These and other incidents, hinted at in Frankl's own autobiographical account, such as receiving Nazi premium coupons, then promotion into the senior prison warden position, the Kapo; that, as well as further events after the war, such as the possible cleansing of Frankl's Gestapo file, continue to be looked at by researchers.[8] [9].

Fact: This is not true, either, and both references are false, too – Szazs does not refer to Frankl’s Gestapo file or any of the above, but discusses Frankl’s work after 1945; and the reference to Bischof is misleading insofar as Bischof was the editor of a book in which – again – Timothy Pytell published an abridged version of his dissertation (the one book he wrote mentioned above).

[… skipping a number of equally wrong details]

Claim: Early in 1942, Frankl approached Nazi officials and requested to operate without any surgical qualifications, nor medical precedence, in support for the procedure, exploratory brain lobotomy and trepanation medical experiments approved by the Nazis on unnamed Jews who had committed suicide with an overdose of sedatives, in an act of resistance toward a fate of intended arrest, interrogation, imprisonment and enforced labour in the concentration camps system.

Fact: None of this is true, and – again, there is no reference.

Claim: Following the approval of Frankl's request and operating without any training as a surgeon, Frankl would publish some of the details on his experiments in Nazi medical journals

Fact: Not true, either. Frankl never approached Nazi officials to do exploratory “lobotomies” on Jewish patients “who had committed suicide”, and he never published in Nazi medical journals – which, anyway, would have been impossible for a Jewish psychiatrist.

Claim: … detailing the methods of insertion of his chosen amphetamine drugs into the brains of individuals who resisted, resulting in, at times, an alleged partial resuscitation, in 1942, prior to his own arrest and internment at Theresienstadt ghetto in September later in that year.[19][9][20]

Fact: His last paper before he was deported to Theresienstadt was published in a Swiss medical Journal – in this paper, he reports about the intracisternal amphetamine injections on patients with respiratory arrest due to barbiturate overdoses. This article could only be published in (then neutral) Switzerland as Jewish psychiatrists could no longer publish scientific papers in the “Reich”. Again, the references are misleading. One refers to Bischof’s anthology (but means Pytell’s article within this anthology); the other refers to another paper by Pytell (with large overlaps with the one published by Bischof); and the third does not refer to the content of this paragraph at all.

Claim: In The Missing Pieces of the Puzzle: A Reflection on the Odd Career of Viktor Frankl, Professor of history, Timothy Pytell of California State University, San Bernardino,[54]  conveys the numerous discrepancies and omissions in Frankl's "Auschwitz survivor" account and later autobiography, which many of his contemporaries, such as Thomas Szasz, similarly have raised.[8]

Fact: Only Pytell makes such claims – and for how holocaust historians' view his work, see above. Thomas Szasz, however, does not claim to have found “numerous discrepancies”, but merely includes a footnote on Frankl’s work after 1946. So this is another misleading reference.

Claim: Pytell later would remark on the particularly sharp insight of Langer's reading of Frankl's holocaust testimony, noting that with Langer's criticism published in 1982 before Pytell's biography, the former had thus drawn the controversial parallels, or accommodations in ideology without the knowledge that Victor Frankl was an advocate/"embraced"[60]  the key ideas of the Nazi psychotherapy movement ("will and responsibility"[61] ) as a form of therapy in the late 1930s.

Fact: Langer does not claim that Frankl was an advocate/"embraced"[60]  the key ideas of the Nazi psychotherapy movement ("will and responsibility"[61] ) as a form of therapy in the late 1930s.

Claim: When at that time Frankl would submit a paper and contributed to the Göring institute in Vienna 1937 and again in early 1938 connecting the logotherapy focus on "world-view" to the "work of some of the leading Nazi psychotherapists",[62] both at a time before Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938.[63][64]

Fact: Again, all references direct to Timothy Pytell. Secondly, there was no Göring Institute Vienna in 1937. The Göring Institute Vienna was founded after the “Anschluss”, i.e. March 1938, as a partner institution of the Berlin Göring Institute (founded in 1936). Jews were not allowed to contribute to the Göring Institute Berlin or Vienna. Additionally, Frankl published two articles 1937/1938, both were scathing critiques of Göring and the Nazi psychotherapy movement

Claim: Frankl's founding logotherapy paper, was submitted to and published in the Zentrallblatt fuer Psychotherapie [sic] the journal of the Goering Institute, a psychotherapy movement, with the "proclaimed agenda of building psychotherapy that affirmed a Nazi-oriented worldview".[65]

Fact: The “Zentralblatt” was not the Journal of the Göring Institute, but of the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy (IGMSP), which was founded in 1927 by Goldstein, Hahn, Arthur Kronfeld, Ernst Kretschmer and Wladimir Eliasberg. Frankl was active in the Austrian Chapter of this Society. Only after the Anschluss in 1938, this Chapter was closed and replaced by the Vienna Göring Institute. The former Jewish members were expelled: Frankl, along with: Karl Nowotny (co-founder of the International Association for Individual Psychology), Wladimir Eliasberg (emigrated 1938), Erich Wellisch (emigrated 1938), H. Loewy (his fate is unknown), Josef Berze, Otto Kauders (after 1945 head of the Austro-American Medical Society and of the Vienna Neurological University Hospital), Rudolf Allers (emigrated 1938) und probably Oswald Schwarz (emigrated 1938)

Claim: Frankl over the years would with these widely read statements and others, switch between the claim that logotherapy took shape in the camps to the claim that the camps merely were a testing ground of his already preconceived theories. An uncovering of the matter would occur in 1977 with Frankl revealing on this controversy, though compounding another, stating "People think I came out of Auschwitz with a brand-new psychotherapy. This is not the case."[19]

Fact: Again, Pytell is the only source; yet Frankl – from 1945 onwards – said that he developed logotherapy before his deportation when he wrote the textbook of logotherapy (The Doctor and the Soul) in 1942 – a copy of which he smuggled into the camps, lost in Auschwitz and rewrote and published in 1946.

Claim: In his "Gutachten" Gestapo profile, Frankl is described as "politically perfect" by the Nazi secret police, with Frankl's membership in the Austro-fascist "Fatherland Front" in 1934, similarly stated in isolation, Frankl was interviewed twice by the secret police during the war, yet nothing of the expected contents, the subject of discussion or any further information on these interviews, is contained in Frankl's file, suggesting to biographers that Frankl's file was "cleansed" sometime after the war.[69]

Fact: Again, Pyell is the only source for this claim. Frankl was, by all means, not “politically perfect” according to Nazi standards, as he was active in the Anti-Nazi Zionist Movement

Claim: Historian Günter Bischof of Harvard University, suggests Frankl's approaching and requesting to perform lobotomy experiments could be seen as a way to "ingratiate" himself amongst the Nazis, as the latter were not, at that time, appreciative of the international scrutiny that these suicides were beginning to create, nor "suicide" being listed on arrest records.[19][9][20]

Fact: Günter Bischof is not at Harvard; nor did he write ANY of this. The reference again refer to a text written by Pytell published in a book edited by Bischof; the 2nd reference is yet another reference to another version of the very same paper, again written by Timothy Pytell, and the third is an unrelated reference to Thomas Szasz. And this is the third time in this article that reference is made to lobotomies (which were not conducted at the Rothschildspital, nor would it by any stretch of imagination make any sense to conduct lobotomies on dying or – as Pytell alleges – dead patients). Additionally, contrary to what is claimed here, the National Socialists encouraged Jewish suicides, - at any rate, they did so immediately after the Anschluss. Thus Goeschel in his standard reference work on Suicide in Nazi Germany reports:

After a Jewish shopkeeper had committed suicide together with his family in Vienna, storm troopers plastered his shop windows with placards saying: ‚Please imitate‘.

Conclusion: The current Wikipedia entry on Viktor Frankl contains a considerable number of false allegations, all made by one single person: Timothy Pytell. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Alexvesely (talk • contribs) 14:41, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

False and defamatory claims
This text includes a considerable number of false and defamatory claims. In addition they are almost all pointing towards one single source. Here is the (incomplete) list of false statements:

Claim: The book is an account within the concentration camp hierarchy, where in various camps he practiced, 'concluded' and several times quotes, the validity of means for a Nietzschean survival.

Fact: Frankl frequently used one Nietzsche quote (He who has Why to live endures almost any How); however, quoting Nietzsche does not make one a Nietzschean. Frankl’s model is in fact decidedly not Nietzschean, but follows the personalist tradition.

Claim: Frankl was, for a time, a minor figure in existential therapy.

Fact: Together with Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss, Viktor Frankl is widely acknowledged as one of the founding fathers of European existential psychotherapy and psychiatry; hence he is not a minor figure, but rather one of the European pioneers of this movement. In the Handbook of Positive Psychology (Oxford UP), renowned psychologist Roy Baumeister describes the reception of Frankl’s work in the States as follows:

Psychologists gradually have begun to study meaning in life. Frankl’s (1959/1976) early work emphasized the importance of finding value in life, and he is widely credited with being a pioneer in the study of meaning. His work constituted a courageous rebellion against the behaviourist and psychodynamic paradigms that dominated psychological theorizing at that time. [...] Still, these works were isolated intellectually from the main work of their time

Claim: He has been the subject of some criticism from notable holocaust analysts [5] [6]  who question the levels of Nazi collaboration by Frankl, the inherence in the ideology of logotherapy and its origins itself.

Fact: This allegation is wrong. No notable holocaust analysts make these allegation. The first reference is Lawrence Langer who was critical of Frankl’s interpretation of the holocaust, but never alleged that Frankl collaborated with the Nazis (on whatever level). The second reference names Timothy Pytell who indeed attempts to ‘expose’ Frankl as a fellow traveller of the Nazi regime. However, Pytell is decidedly not a “notable holocaust analyst”. He published one book (his dissertation on Frankl), and his citation index consists mostly of self-citations. As to the quality of this “notable historian”: Intellectual historians in fact issued scathing critiques of Pytell’s discussion of Frankl and the Holocaust:

[…] outdated discourse about Vienna’s kaleidoscopic Jewish culture exacerbated by numerous inaccuracies and misrepresentations […]; Statements, which abound in the work, rankle in the face of the vast wealth of literature on Central- European and Viennese Jewish culture that has proliferated in the two decades since Pytell began his research on Viktor Frankl. […] Not surprisingly, the footnotes reveal that this is a result of the most recent literature cited dating from the 1980s (his misreading of Lisa Silverman’s brilliant work notwithstanding). Erroneous renditions of German nomenclature and quotations abound, whether owing to the author or the editor is unclear, yet enhancing the sense that this work could have engaged better with the Central European context.

[…] frankly patchy in its narration of Frankl’s life in his Central European environs. […] underdeveloped, lacking a conclusion and too often indulging in superficial digressions into scholarly literature on the Holocaust

[…] Pytell has simply not done his homework. [The book] shows contemporary history at its muck-raking weakest […] hardly excusable ignorance […]

[…] ignores much of the literature on Viennese Jewry’s role in the wider cultural arena.

In brief, someone who published one single book during his whole career (his dissertation), and gets these reviews for his work is not, by any stretch of imagination, “notable holocaust analyst”.

Claim: A disparate group of others also raise doubts in regard to acts which Frankl willingly pursued in the time before his internment …

Fact: No reference is given as to who this “disparate group of others” is. The links below again only refer to the one person discussed above (and below), i.e. Timothy Pytell. It might be useful to know that Pytell in his book freely admits that he feels ‘contempt’, that he is ‘biased’ against Frankl, that he feels ‘revulsion’ for Frankl, that he is ‘glad not to have known him’ (idem). As the following will show, this is not an overstatement. Pytell is indeed the only source of the “non-flattering” allegations, though attempts are made in this Wikipedia entry to hide this (as will be shown in a number of instances).

Claim: […] during that time, as a member of the austro-fascist Fatherland Front, without any medical precedence or training as a surgeon, Frankl - under the oversight of the Nazi administration - insisted on performing experimental Lobotomies on Jews who had resisted arrest...

Fact: This is false and – unsurprisingly – not referenced. Additionally, lobotomy was a (brutal) technique for psychotic patients. The Vienna Rothschildspital – i.e. the last Jewish Hospital in Vienna and thus the only remaining work place where Frankl, as a Jew, could work as a medical doctor after the Nazi annexation of Austria, did not have Psychiatry Dept (only a Neurology Dept).

Claim: [… continues]: with an overdose of sedatives, and were declared dead by other doctors of the Reich,[7]  which psychiatrists and biographers alike suggest comprises a link to Nazi human experimentation.

Fact: The Rothschildspital was NOT under Nazi administration. It was the last and only hospital under administration of the Isrealitische Kultusgemeinde (i.e. the Jewish Community). The SS regularly raided the Rothschildspital; however, regular raids do not constitute administration, but rather disruption.

Claim: These and other incidents, hinted at in Frankl's own autobiographical account, such as receiving Nazi premium coupons, then promotion into the senior prison warden position, the Kapo; that, as well as further events after the war, such as the possible cleansing of Frankl's Gestapo file, continue to be looked at by researchers.[8] [9].

Fact: This is not true, either, and both references are false, too – Szazs does not refer to Frankl’s Gestapo file or any of the above, but discusses Frankl’s work after 1945; and the reference to Bischof is misleading insofar as Bischof was the editor of a book in which – again – Timothy Pytell published an abridged version of his dissertation (the one book he wrote mentioned above).

[… skipping a number of equally wrong details]

Claim: Early in 1942, Frankl approached Nazi officials and requested to operate without any surgical qualifications, nor medical precedence, in support for the procedure, exploratory brain lobotomy and trepanation medical experiments approved by the Nazis on unnamed Jews who had committed suicide with an overdose of sedatives, in an act of resistance toward a fate of intended arrest, interrogation, imprisonment and enforced labour in the concentration camps system.

Fact: None of this is true, and – again, there is no reference.

Claim: Following the approval of Frankl's request and operating without any training as a surgeon, Frankl would publish some of the details on his experiments in Nazi medical journals

Fact: Not true, either. Frankl never approached Nazi officials to do exploratory “lobotomies” on Jewish patients “who had committed suicide”, and he never published in Nazi medical journals – which, anyway, would have been impossible for a Jewish psychiatrist.

Claim: … detailing the methods of insertion of his chosen amphetamine drugs into the brains of individuals who resisted, resulting in, at times, an alleged partial resuscitation, in 1942, prior to his own arrest and internment at Theresienstadt ghetto in September later in that year.[19][9][20]

Fact: His last paper before he was deported to Theresienstadt was published in a Swiss medical Journal – in this paper, he reports about the intracisternal amphetamine injections on patients with respiratory arrest due to barbiturate overdoses. This article could only be published in (then neutral) Switzerland as Jewish psychiatrists could no longer publish scientific papers in the “Reich”. Again, the references are misleading. One refers to Bischof’s anthology (but means Pytell’s article within this anthology); the other refers to another paper by Pytell (with large overlaps with the one published by Bischof); and the third does not refer to the content of this paragraph at all.

Claim: In The Missing Pieces of the Puzzle: A Reflection on the Odd Career of Viktor Frankl, Professor of history, Timothy Pytell of California State University, San Bernardino,[54]  conveys the numerous discrepancies and omissions in Frankl's "Auschwitz survivor" account and later autobiography, which many of his contemporaries, such as Thomas Szasz, similarly have raised.[8]

Fact: Only Pytell makes such claims – and for how holocaust historians' view his work, see above. Thomas Szasz, however, does not claim to have found “numerous discrepancies”, but merely includes a footnote on Frankl’s work after 1946. So this is another misleading reference.

Claim: Pytell later would remark on the particularly sharp insight of Langer's reading of Frankl's holocaust testimony, noting that with Langer's criticism published in 1982 before Pytell's biography, the former had thus drawn the controversial parallels, or accommodations in ideology without the knowledge that Victor Frankl was an advocate/"embraced"[60]  the key ideas of the Nazi psychotherapy movement ("will and responsibility"[61] ) as a form of therapy in the late 1930s.

Fact: Langer does not claim that Frankl was an advocate/"embraced"[60]  the key ideas of the Nazi psychotherapy movement ("will and responsibility"[61] ) as a form of therapy in the late 1930s.

Claim: When at that time Frankl would submit a paper and contributed to the Göring institute in Vienna 1937 and again in early 1938 connecting the logotherapy focus on "world-view" to the "work of some of the leading Nazi psychotherapists",[62] both at a time before Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938.[63][64]

Fact: Again, all references direct to Timothy Pytell. Secondly, there was no Göring Institute Vienna in 1937. The Göring Institute Vienna was founded after the “Anschluss”, i.e. March 1938, as a partner institution of the Berlin Göring Institute (founded in 1936). Jews were not allowed to contribute to the Göring Institute Berlin or Vienna. Additionally, Frankl published two articles 1937/1938, both were scathing critiques of Göring and the Nazi psychotherapy movement

Claim: Frankl's founding logotherapy paper, was submitted to and published in the Zentrallblatt fuer Psychotherapie [sic] the journal of the Goering Institute, a psychotherapy movement, with the "proclaimed agenda of building psychotherapy that affirmed a Nazi-oriented worldview".[65]

Fact: The “Zentralblatt” was not the Journal of the Göring Institute, but of the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy (IGMSP), which was founded in 1927 by Goldstein, Hahn, Arthur Kronfeld, Ernst Kretschmer and Wladimir Eliasberg. Frankl was active in the Austrian Chapter of this Society. Only after the Anschluss in 1938, this Chapter was closed and replaced by the Vienna Göring Institute. The former Jewish members were expelled: Frankl, along with: Karl Nowotny (co-founder of the International Association for Individual Psychology), Wladimir Eliasberg (emigrated 1938), Erich Wellisch (emigrated 1938), H. Loewy (his fate is unknown), Josef Berze, Otto Kauders (after 1945 head of the Austro-American Medical Society and of the Vienna Neurological University Hospital), Rudolf Allers (emigrated 1938) und probably Oswald Schwarz (emigrated 1938)

Claim: Frankl over the years would with these widely read statements and others, switch between the claim that logotherapy took shape in the camps to the claim that the camps merely were a testing ground of his already preconceived theories. An uncovering of the matter would occur in 1977 with Frankl revealing on this controversy, though compounding another, stating "People think I came out of Auschwitz with a brand-new psychotherapy. This is not the case."[19]

Fact: Again, Pytell is the only source; yet Frankl – from 1945 onwards – said that he developed logotherapy before his deportation when he wrote the textbook of logotherapy (The Doctor and the Soul) in 1942 – a copy of which he smuggled into the camps, lost in Auschwitz and rewrote and published in 1946.

Claim: In his "Gutachten" Gestapo profile, Frankl is described as "politically perfect" by the Nazi secret police, with Frankl's membership in the Austro-fascist "Fatherland Front" in 1934, similarly stated in isolation, Frankl was interviewed twice by the secret police during the war, yet nothing of the expected contents, the subject of discussion or any further information on these interviews, is contained in Frankl's file, suggesting to biographers that Frankl's file was "cleansed" sometime after the war.[69]

Fact: Again, Pyell is the only source for this claim. Frankl was, by all means, not “politically perfect” according to Nazi standards, as he was active in the Anti-Nazi Zionist Movement

Claim: Historian Günter Bischof of Harvard University, suggests Frankl's approaching and requesting to perform lobotomy experiments could be seen as a way to "ingratiate" himself amongst the Nazis, as the latter were not, at that time, appreciative of the international scrutiny that these suicides were beginning to create, nor "suicide" being listed on arrest records.[19][9][20]

Fact: Günter Bischof is not at Harvard; nor did he write ANY of this. The reference again refer to a text written by Pytell published in a book edited by Bischof; the 2nd reference is yet another reference to another version of the very same paper, again written by Timothy Pytell, and the third is an unrelated reference to Thomas Szasz. And this is the third time in this article that reference is made to lobotomies (which were not conducted at the Rothschildspital, nor would it by any stretch of imagination make any sense to conduct lobotomies on dying or – as Pytell alleges – dead patients). Additionally, contrary to what is claimed here, the National Socialists encouraged Jewish suicides, - at any rate, they did so immediately after the Anschluss. Thus Goeschel in his standard reference work on Suicide in Nazi Germany reports:

After a Jewish shopkeeper had committed suicide together with his family in Vienna, storm troopers plastered his shop windows with placards saying: ‚Please imitate‘.

Conclusion: The current Wikipedia entry on Viktor Frankl contains a considerable number of false allegations, all made by one single person: Timothy Pytell. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Alexvesely (talk • contribs) 14:45, 24 April 2020 (UTC)


 * In his  book Faith in Freedom, pg 181 psychiatrist Thomas Szasz states that Frankl's "survivor" testimony was written to misdirect, and betrays instead an intent of a transparent effort to conceal Frankl's actions, his collaboration with the Nazis, his human experiments on jews and that in the assessment of Raul Hilberg, the founder of holocaust studies, Frankl's historical account is placed in the same category of a deception, a deceit as Binjamin Wilkomirski's infamous memoirs, itself translated into nine languages, before exposure as a fraud. In Hilberg's 1996 Politics of Memory.


 * Yet this is you derangedly claim, is Pytell, that solely makes the claim, Really?


 * Within this sad attempt to strawman Pytell, based primarily on a 2008 publication by A. Batthyany, a practitioner of the quasi-religious practice, an undisclosed conflict of interest if there ever was one, who also appears to work for the Frankl family, yet you present them here as though  you weren't connected and you don't know who they are and that they don't work for you? The complete 2008 novella by Batthyana is, as I'm sure you're aware, completely superseded by chair of history Timothy Pytell's 2015 publication that renders Batthyany as an outdated reference. Alex Batthyana... Who again, can you clarify for us, is what? ...works where? ...works for you?


 * As Pytell described in 2017 and this, a reference that was, for other editors to verify, a reference that was in this wikipedia article before its WP:VANDALISM by those with a conflicts of interest. Right down to the above grandson of Frankl, linking to Amazon, were readers can go buy Frankl's book, a move that leaves little wonder why they're really here? Pytell writes: In the 2015 revised biography of Viktor Frankl published by Berghahn Press I did my utmost to provide an accurate portrait of the life of Viktor Frankl. I spent over 20 years on the book and due to a number of circumstances both personal and professional there was a ten year gap between the publication of the German version of the book and the English.  Most significantly Alexander Batthyany the director of the Viktor Frankl Archive in Vienna wrote a short book in response to mine in 2008.  That led to a number of meetings between Alex and I going over our differences in 2010. I did my best to include his suggestions and the exchange made for a better book. However his interest in the therapeutic usefulness of Logotherapy and my focus on Frankl’s purported solution to the question of human meaning and issues 20th Century European History left a chasm between us on a number of issues.  Https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/authoritarian-therapy/201703/is-it-ok-criticize-saint-humanizing-viktor-frankl


 * Pytell's 2015 biography, the latest and most complete of which on Frankl, which received widespread acclaim from reviewing historians. https://academic.oup.com/hgs/article-abstract/31/2/327/4095055


 * The strawman that is going on here, is the presenting of a first draft german language work, printed in ~2005, a work that was never mentioned nor cited in the wikipedia article and one that Battyany talks about in 2008, as somehow the same as Pytell's 2015 engish book, which being in english, was what was being referenced here and used in this article.


 * When the voices of righteousness have spoken about Frankl, in chorus, what lays the very admission that frankl only began conducting lobotomies on victims, who resisted, to their fate in a concentration camp, building munitions for the regime that interned them, those that commit suicide to prevent that fate or even to prevent being questioned, to prevent the machinations of the regime from going as planned, it was these that Frankl confesses he conducted medical experiments on, he did not operate prior to 1940 when suicide was desired by local members of that regime but as he states himself, only on those who took an overdose to prevent a fate of forced labor in the concentration camps, it was in that time period when the nazi regime didn't want suicides, it was then that Frankl began doing these human experimentations. To please the regime. As Günter Bischof graduate of Harvard, professor of history and editor of austrian lives,  peer reviews Pytell's entry, lobotomy experiments Frankl performed on the resistance, so that Frankl could "ingratiate" himself with the nazis.


 * As you dance around the context, Frankl publishes His human experiments on jews that resisted arrest, in as you admit, 1942(just out of curiousity, does frankl hold the dubious record for the last such journal publication by a jew, under nazi occupation?) Frankl began doing experiments in the precise time period that the nazis weren't pleased about suicides anymore and not a moment before, yet here you mendaciously cherry pick an anecdote from the 1930s to misdirect, that following the weight of international scrutiny, commencing circa 1940, the questioning of Nazi Germany by the red cross, it was then, within that backdrop, when frankl published his human experimentation, 1942 when at that time he was still living comparatively freely in Vienna while Lohner Beda(who's intellectual property, say yes to life in spite of everything, Frankl plagarised and passed off as his own, post-war) while Lohner Beda and all the other actual anti-nazis were incarcerated as far back as 4 years earlier, 1938, Frankl was walking round doing experiments on those who resisted arrest. Conducting experimental lobotomies on these human lives, without any animal trials in support of them and publishing the results of these his unskilled, "brutal" human medical experiments. With that, psychiatrist Thomas Szasz's adjective. In his  book Faith in Freedom.


 * So here lays the typical deranged tu quequo of logotherapy, headed with the charge of false accusations, yet proceeds to make a conclusion that in clear eyes is actually what they've just done.


 * Yet these WP:RS reliable sources, are no where to be seen, scrubbed from public view in the article. Visiters instead find links to Amazon placed by the grandson, were they can go buy Frankl's book.
 * Followed by here on the talk page we are given a mendacious story that ends with this is Pytell, that solely makes the claim, Really?


 * Conclusion, Frankl was a nazi collaborating lobotomist, it appears his grandson has come to lobotomise the article of all mention to the victims of Frankl's lobotomies and the view by holocaust analysts that Frankl's entire post war, publishing record, was all so rapidly published, scant on details, with no names of fellow interned ever mentioned, all to prevent anyone reading, from his identification and arrest, and use wikipedia as an avenue to direct readers to where they can buy Frankl's book.


 * If readers of this talk page find it incredulous that jewish, even zionist "doctors" were nazi collaborators, then unfortunately this is not an isolated case, the similar "doctor's" of Terezin extraction, gave Fredy Hirsch an overdose, to prevent his uprising in Auschwitz, an uprising, which in their view jeopardized their illusion of safety.


 * I would agree with this title "false claims" as your central strawman, timothy Pytell, is the subject of false claims. Not Frankl.


 * Moreover there is one other central hypocrisy here worth mentioning, that, it is not Pytell but actually all the acclaim of frankl and frankl's treatment, all that deceptive fiction as Raul Hilberg puts, all of that was were made by one single person :frankl. Yet you don't view that with scrutiny? A senior camp kapo, getting a book out, light as hell on details, conveniently commencing after and with no mention to the lobotomies he performed, at the exact time of the Knesset war crimes tribunal was coming. Frankl gets his book out.


 * Boundarylayer (talk) 19:35, 12 June 2020 (UTC)

victims of Frankl's lobotomies
There is as there was by Frankl himself, the continued effort by acolytes of what appears to be a cult of logotherapy, to deny, cast legal threats in the accusation of "defamation" of someone who is dead.

One of the many pieces of the puzzle that is supressed by those with the conflict of interest COI, os the fact that Frankl performed lobotomies under the watchful eye of the nazi administration, lobotomies on the resistance that Frankl, ever the meaning maker, brought to the nazis as something to make a meaning out of them, that aided Frankl.

In the blanketed, repressed state of the article as it stands, readers are not made aware of this.

Instead he was the greatest guy in the world and nothing but puffery to that advertising effect is in its place.

The claim that this was in fact all a conspiracy by Timothy Pytell, who are we to understand you think is, what is it, guilty of defamation?

Contrary to their flailing thesis above, it is actually something first printed in a secondary source not penned by Timothy Pytell, but likely before Pytell was even born, in 1961 by Thomas Szasz. On page 181 of The myth of psychotherapy

I don't have a copy of this book. However

____

Reply to the above unsigned entry:

Sorry, but this is not true. Szasz does not say that Frankl "perfomed lobotomies under the watchful eye of the Nazis". Nowhere. Ever. So why do you claim that he does? Additionally, transorbital lobotomy was developed in the US in 1946 and later came to Europe (i.e. after the Nazi reign).

So speaking of defamation - quoting a book which you do not have and making wild claims which are neither true nor even historically possible is, if not defamation, then what? Let me answer this: Whatever it is, it is neither rational nor helpful. Acaryadeva (talk) 09:38, 20 May 2020 (UTC)


 * One does not need to have the entire original edition to look it up.
 * There is such a technological wonder as google books. You may have heard of it? On page 205 of Myth of psychotherapy and pg 181 of Faith in Freedom. Both by Thomas Szasz he gives the account of frankl himself, of conducting lobotomies without any surgical qualifications in Vienna. Szasz also on page 181, countinues, conveying that Frankl's "survivor" testimony is questioned by holocaust analysts. Namely none other than Raul Hilberg the founder of holocaust studies, who placed frankl's so called historical account in the same category of deep suspicion as Binjamin Wilkomirski "Memoirs". In Hilberg's Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian (Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1996).


 * Yet as the article sits right now, the preferred limit on information for the public to know to see, approved by the frankl family? We have the above grandson of frankl, editing the article and suppressing the weight of all these secondary sources, omitting all and every reference that remotely touches on Frankl being in the austro-fascist fatherland front, of doing lobotomies without any surgical training, not even holocaust analysts finding frankl's book as highly suspect. His grandson has followed this up writing effectively a thesis above that aids nothing but obscurantism with the narrative that everything that was in the article was all by Timothy Pytell...that myth has just been exploded.


 * His Grandson did not stop there but has continued with what appears to be operating a number of single purpose(never edited anywhere else) meat or WP:SOCKPUPPET accounts, that have continued the attempt to legally chill this encylopedic article, one that had been written extensively with secondary sources, as somehow "defaming" or defamtory toward frankl (who is a dead, card carrying fascist lobotomist, who wrote a piece of fiction, that every scholarly source views as highly suspect) that instead, no it is allegedly here instead a Professor Pytell driven "defamation" attack on a lobotomist?


 * One wonders if the claim by the continuation of the fatherland front/nazi-psychotherapy movement here rebranded as "logotherapy", why they didn't they follow up their claim of defamation against Pytell? When Frankl was alive? Yet curiously did not and are instead here attempting to suppress, legally chill this encyclopedia and create yet another myth that "this was all Pytell's doing".  The very kind of deceptive "meaning making" to distract from the truth of what frankl actually was and just how far removed from reality that "logotherapy" clearly intends to make its victims.


 * Boundarylayer (talk) 17:04, 1 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Boundarylayer (talk) 17:04, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

Funny - I have the books at home, and nowhere does Szasz say what you claimed, namely that "Frankl performed lobotomies under the watchful eye of the nazi administration". The only source where I read this was a Scientology leaflet against psychiatry. The company you keep, or the company you are. Don't know, don't care. 62.178.180.16 (talk) 10:02, 3 June 2020 (UTC)


 * look a conflation with more fictitious, non-cited fantasy. Is this by another logotherapist? Curious, out of leftfield diversion though, do you perhaps do a lot of reading of Scientology pamplets? That is, between "not wondering" or caring who I am... yet going out of your way and taking the actual time to write...what you don't care about?


 * Though probably more troubling, with the lies-inside-of-lies, that typifies logotherapy, you also seem to conflate, lobotomies by a nazi Kapo, with the idea of ethical psychiatry? When I don't know  what your idea of psychiatry is but human lives, thoughts, futures, all getting carved out, under the hand of a member of the austro-fascist party, who wasn't even a surgeon and was more busy coming up with fantastical terms like "noogenic neurosis", that, than getting consent, that it isn't mine. Or is it any ethical societies idea, when you use the term psychiatry. In fact, like all of "logotherapy", it's all the very opposite.


 * Though from what I've read, lobotomies by un-qualified self-aggrandizers, that could probably be the kind of thing, or type of creature, that would fit right in with Scientology, which you seem to know more about. From what I understand of them. With that undeniable. Doing unethical medical experiments on "patients". Do you think people have a right to know about that? I do. Check the Scientology page and what Hubbard did and they've done to people is listed.  Yet for saintly Frankl, no mention of any of this WP:Controversy shall be permitted?


 * Though thank you for the insight into your idea  of psychiatry. While you "don't care" who I am,I am particularly curious about the number of single purpose accounts, with conflicts of interests here. So lets see. What we've got. One Grandson of the untrained lobotomist, who dictated to typists, his war crimes tribunal dodging fiction, as Raul Hilberg, founder of Holocaust studies, in essense describes Frankl's self aggrandizing hoax-survivor testimony, followed  by not one but now two single purpose, WP:MEATPUPPET or is it instead, nazi-logo-therapy-affiliates-united, WP:SOCKPUPPET accounts?


 * Is this something described in your scientiology pamphlet? As that's a tactic seen here by them too. Was this in the uncited fabled pamplet you read? As it looks to me like a re-run of the history of the page over there.


 * As Viktor Frankl, how different from the Hubbard of logotherapy? Right down to the fraudulent "meaning making". In fact, wouldn't Frankl give him high marks for "meaning making"? How does one get the gold prize in lobotherapy? Is it by adherence to any semblance of reality or truth? Clearly not. So what do you think Frankl would say about Hubbard? Frankl speaks well of the child killing "Dr.J" in his memoirs, so seen as you brought them up, can you give us the logotherapy opinion of Hubbard? Is he not in the exact vein of Frankl? Didn't hubbard "meaning-make" his way around the world too with similarly alleged "treatment" effect? Repeats of the word "therapy" and "Treatment" yet unsupported by a single placebo controlled, double blind trial. So really how different is scientology to logotherapy and both their claims to being cures?


 * In both Frankl's What doesn't appear in my books published in english Recollections an autobiography and Suicide Prohibition: The Shame of Medicine pg 57 to 62. The latter by Thomas Szasz. It details the human lobotomy experiments Frankl conducted on those who resisted, here's the quote by the psychiatrist Szasz, on what the results of frankl's experimentations were, to  ".. please the regime by "saving" fellow jews". They're Szasz's scare quotes. With the use of pervitin and an acridine derivatives. Imagine being revived with your skull removed for sometimes up to "24 hours"(with your skull removed) before expiring. They weren't given any pain medication. After the war Frankl continued authorizing transorbital lobotomies and conducting them himself, without any training as a surgeon on more patients.


 * Szasz continues over the course of the pages, communicating such things as why suicide by Jews was not looked fondly upon by the nazis when they were wanted for other ends, for the prevasive "therapeutic state", again, Szasz's term. Frankl's open collaboration with the nazis both before and after his enjoyable "spiritual"experience in the camps, continues in Szasz's book. With Frankl running around as the nazi appointed head of the rothschild hospital, before internment were his fascist-doctor colleague at Steinhof (Vienna) "the  mass murderer of steinhof" Erwin Jekelius or "Dr. J" as frankl calls him, murdered children(while frankl was doing the aforementioned lobotomies on their older relatives) and then frankl went from there to the appointment of nazi camp psycho-hygienist scrubbing any thought of uprising out of your head, reporting on you as "suicidal". If you organized, when Frankl was in the camps. Gifted nazi-coupons, chocolates, cigarettes, throughout the war.


 * As isn't it another missing piece of the frankl mythos, the "survivor" myth... not a single photograph exists of frankl when he was "liberated", is it perhaps because he had a belly full of nazi chocolate? Eating comparatively well, unlike all the actual real survivors that the word invokes and one Frankl seized upon, to distract from what he really had done, was doing and what his real job titles were? His pet project the "stosstruppe" the shock troops which functioned as a suicide intelligence service. -Szasz's insightful terms.  Who and what were "suicidal"? In either the austro-fascist fatherland front,  or in the camps, but...those who would not live with collaboration, who were for resisting and the nazi resistance?


 * So the myth that this is only biographer and Professor Timothy Pytell solo, is a textbook deranged as it is perverse "meaning making" narrative devoid of any credibility. As in reality it was/is psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, beginning as far back as 1961, two of the most researched Holocaust analysts Raul Hilberg and Lawrence L. Langer, Harvard historian Gunter Bischoff, Rollo May... Groups of Jews yelling "nazi pig" at one of Frankl's perverse talks at the center of Adult Jewish studies...and on and on. What Pytell did is just put it together, as a biographer, his is the most complete WP:RS and one that will be cited.

Yes to Life In Spite of Everything
This article could point out that Frankl's book "Say Yes to Life in Spite of Everything" has just been published in English′ for the first time.Vorbee (talk) 20:29, 9 June 2020 (UTC)


 * Both WP:NOTPROMOTIONAL and I'm not sure how considering your time here, you also ignore WP:TRIVIA applies to the translating of this book and its publishing this year. Are you involved in the sale of this book? The only thing WP:NOTABLE about the book and title is also, as Szasz makes transparent on pg 57 of the shame of medicine is that frankl plagarized the entire title of that book from the buchenweldiad song, which was "sung by prisoner's on their way to work" in a concentration camp, Frankl never attended and was never in. The song, written by Austrian, Lohner Beda, who unlike frankl was a critic of nazism and thus immediately sent to buchenwald concentration in 1938 and murdered by Frankl's "decent nazis" in 1942 at a time when Frankl was still free to roam Vienna and was assisting the Nazis with medical experiments in the hospital, streets and rooms of Vienna. Just to put some perspective on Frankl's motivations for plagarising the title/ being found out. Which is notable.


 * for mdern audiences, especially english, are operating without the remotest awareness that the title of this book is not even a product of Frankl's mind, nor why scholars consider why he chose to plagarize it.


 * If you want to stick around and make the article encyclopedic instead of your (hopefully unwittingly) spreading of Frankl's co-opting and plagiarising of a title, of lyrics by someone politically at odds to him, who had an entirely different internment experience, that as a lobotomist Kapo, why Frankl would choose the title for his book, as an association as such, as mimicry, if not to serve, as Szasz states, as a "passport" in post-war Austria?  By all means stick around if you want to build an encyclopedia. Though without giving readers the awareness of what they're actually reading. Its deeply problematic. The Wikipedia project isn't the place to engage in cloaked promotional WP:COATRACKing, that financially benefit a blatant post-war deception and a passport for a criminal who engaged in human medical experimentation. All we know is that Lohner Beda didn't approve of Frankl's title. Its unfortunate that we could never ask Beda, what he would think of his intellectual property being co-opted by someone like Frankl and for the ends that he used it. Though why Frankl did, is obvious.


 * Boundarylayer (talk) 18:54, 10 June 2020 (UTC)

"over 39 books"
Language like this is common to the restaurant trying to stand out from the crowd. Rather than saying they have 16 wines, they have "over 15".

In this instance, it's just bizarre. Surely Frankl wrote a discrete number of books. He may have weighed less than 200 pounds or lived over 35 miles from the nearest hospital, but how many books he wrote is one number. Maybe it's 40. Perhaps its 163. Most meaningful of all, perhaps it's 42. We can only hope.

I'm marking the phrase as needing a cite in hopes of clearing this up. - Sum mer PhD v2.0 02:17, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

Frankl's grandson mass-edited this page
It appears that around April 2020, Frankl's grandson Alexvesely made mass edits to the Viktor Frankl page. e.g. this edit, rewriting the whole page, including deleting all of the large Controversy section, replacing it with 2 lines. That all seems extremely inappropriate. I had looked up a lot of the references that were linked to by that Controversy section a couple of years ago, and they seemed reliable sources. I tried to revert today but must be done manually, it said. I don't have time but it doesn't seem like someone's grandson should be totally rewriting, whitewashing, their grandfather's page. I'm not sure how this was allowed to happen. 122.148.184.131 (talk) 21:28, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

please put back one or two bits of the previous content? JCJC777 (talk) 13:49, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

Ok, so it seems Frankl's grandson's whitewashing of this page has been allowed to stand. Including his deletion of the sizable Controversy section and all references to anything negative. Do this often happen on wikipedia?! What is the proper way of protesting and reverting such an inappropriate intervention in a page as Frankl's grandson has done here? It's totally outrageous. As has been well said elsewhere on this talk page, this page has been lobotomised. (This is a reference to Frankl's own "experiments", but you can't read about them on wikipedia now.) 122.148.184.131 (talk) 10:27, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

needs a section on his concentration camp time?
seems to be a gap here? JCJC777 (talk) 13:48, 18 November 2020 (UTC)


 * Agreed! It seems like the omission might be due to some of the controversies being discussed above. How would everybody feel about me adding a short section just stating the most objective facts, while the issues above are resolved?
 * "In 1942, just nine months after marrying his wife, Frankl and his family were sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. His father died there of starvation and pneumonia. In 1944, Frankl and the surviving members of his family were taken to Auschwitz, where his mother and brother were gassed. His wife died later of typhus in Bergen-Belsen. Frankl himself spent a total of three years in four different concentration camps. "
 * This will be my first substantial Wikipedia edit, apologies in advance if I've done anything wrong :) Fifth Evasion (talk) 06:54, 6 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Agree, great if you can add! Qtea (talk) 10:51, 23 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Please add it, . I came to this article as a reader and was quite confused that the lead called him a Holocaust survivor yet the body's only mention was a vague "Prior to his deportation to the concentration camps...". Schazjmd   (talk)  16:16, 12 April 2021 (UTC)


 * I see that hasn't edited in two months, so I'm going to add their suggested text above to the article.  Schazjmd   (talk)  16:39, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

== The idea you survive a death/extermination camp "because" you find the meaming of life is profoundly unscientific as it cannot be falsified. More concretely, the fact that your life has a meaning doesn't prevent the SS from murdering you. There could be a million witnesses to that, but most of them died. As a couter-example, ANNE FRANK could do. ==

The idea of surviving s death camp "because" you find a meaning in life is an 🤬 insult to the millions of people whose life DID HAVE A MEANING, and whget slaughtered ny the SS anyway. ANNE FRANK among others. It seems to me that the best explanation for FRANKL's survival is that he was a doctor!! 80.62.116.109 (talk) 14:11, 26 September 2022 (UTC)


 * That's a great point: his being a doctor seems to have helped him get into a more survivable situation. To me, the explanation for his survival is probably unknowable. Luck or fate (depending on your point of view)? The kaleidoscope of a thousands of moments and circumstances? Es1964 (talk) 13:29, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Obviously, having a meaning doesn't make you undestructible. But it can also be true that eating vegetables makes you healthy even if it doesn't prevent you from being hit by a car.
 * Some might say that people with meaning in their lives can also die of disease or whatever but the claim isn't that it makes you inmune or anything, it just says that it makes people's health and behavior more adaptative. And even if someone say s their grandmother died at 100 while smoking 5 boxes of cigarettes per day, it doesn't necessarily make cigarettes healthy, just like saying that the average person tends to survive more with found meaning doesn't mean everyone would survive. 83.49.89.20 (talk) 09:33, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Adult Development Fall 2022
— Assignment last updated by Leggyregg (talk) 03:47, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

False Claims in "Controversy" section
Full disclosure:

As disclosed in earlier commentaries, I am indeed Viktor Frankl's grandson. Consequently, I possess an intimate understanding of his life story and have extensive access to the documents housed in the Viktor Frankl Archives in Vienna. These documents, available for research purposes, remain untapped by Mr. Pytell, leading to speculative conclusions on his part regarding Frankl's actions and thoughts during specific periods of his life.

My objective is not to romanticize my grandfather's image or sell anything, but rather to counter, with facts, the speculations of a single individual, who openly admits to “despising” Frankl and who fabricates a non-existing “controversy” based on his own sloppy research. Mr. Pytell’s curious scientific procedure has been criticized by several authors who came across his publications:


 * Pytell has simply not done his homework (Janik, A. (2007). Viktor Frankl. Review. Central European History, 2, 3.)
 * [The book] shows contemporary history at its muck-raking weakest. (ibid.)
 * [...] hardly excusable ignorance [...] (ibid.)
 * [...] ignores much of the literature on Viennese Jewry’s role in the wider cultural arena (Kauders, A. D. (2016). Review. German History, 34, 3.)
 * [...] outdated discourse about Vienna’s kaleidoscopic Jewish culture exacerbated by numerous inaccuracies and misrepresentations [...] (Corbett, T. (2016). Viktor Frankl’s search for meaning: An emblematic 20th-century life by Timothy Pytell (review). Journal of Austrian Studies, 49(3–4), 181.)
 * Statements, which abound in the work, rankle in the face of the vast wealth of literature on Central European and Viennese Jewish culture that has proliferated in the two decades since Pytell began his research on Viktor Frankl. (ibid.)
 * Not surprisingly, the footnotes reveal that this is a result of the most recent litera- ture cited dating from the 1980s (his misreading of Lisa Silverman’s brilliant work notwithstanding). (ibid.)
 * Erroneous renditions of German nomenclature and quotations abound, whether owing to the author or the editor is yet unclear, enhancing the sense that this work could have engaged better with the Central European context. (ibid.)
 * [...] frankly patchy in its narration of Frankl’s life in his Central European environs. (Engstrom, E. J. (2018). Timothy E. Pytell. Viktor Frankl’s search for meaning: An emblematic 20th-century life. Review. American Historical Review, 123, 1419.)
 * underdeveloped, lacking a conclusion and too often indulging in superficial digressions into scholarly literature on the Holocaust (ibid.)

The former head of the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance (DÖW), Dr. Wolfgang Neugebauer wrote another scathing commentary about his personal encounter with Mr. Pytell (see bottom).

False Claim #1:

"Auschwitz survivor" testimony
In The Missing Pieces of the Puzzle: A Reflection on the Odd Career of Viktor Frankl, Professor of history Timothy Pytell of California State University, San Bernardino, conveys the numerous discrepancies and omissions in Frankl's "Auschwitz survivor" account and later autobiography, which many of his contemporaries, such as Thomas Szasz, similarly have raised.In Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, the book devotes approximately half of its contents to describing Auschwitz and the psychology of its prisoners, suggesting a long stay at the death camp, however his wording is contradictory and according to Pytell, "profoundly deceptive", when rather the impression of staying for months, Frankl was held close to the train, in the "depot prisoner" area of Auschwitz and for no more than a few days, he was neither registered there, nor assigned a number before being sent on to a subsidiary work camp of Dachau, known as Kaufering III, that together with Terezín, is the true setting of much of what is described in his book.

Refutation #1:

On page 3 of “Mans Search for Meaning” Frankl writes: “Most of the events described here did not take place in the large and famous camps, but in the small ones where most of the real extermination took place.” [Man’s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press, Boston 2006, ISBN 9780807014271 ]. Frankl never made a secret of having spent just three nights at Auschwitz, and many recordings are available in which he publicly mentions that fact, for example this one from 1993: (see 4:30)

False Claim #2:

With Langer criticizing Frankl's tone as almost self-congratulatory and promotional throughout, that "it comes as no surprise to the reader, as he closes the volume, that the real hero of Man's Search for Meaning is not man, but Viktor Frankl" by the continuation of the same fantasy of world-view meaning-making, which is precisely what had perturbed civilization into the holocaust-genocide of this era and others.

Refutation #2:

Frankl always pointed out that meaning can not be made but must be found. Any attempt of “Meaning-making” can indeed be seen as a problematic idea that Frankl himself rejected:

- “Properly speaking, meaning cannot be bestowed, and least of all can the therapist give meaning - that is, give meaning to the life of the patient or provide the patient with this meaning along the way. Rather, meaning must be found, and it can only be found by oneself.” (Frankl, On the Theory and Therapy of Mental Disorders, Brunner-Routledge, London-New York 2004, ISBN 0415950295, page 9)

- (...) meaning must be discovered, it cannot be invented. Sense cannot be created, but what may well be created is nonsense.” (Frankl, The Unheard Cry for Meaning, Simon & Schuster, NY 1978, ISBN 0-671-24736-0, page 90)

Contrary to the idea of “Meaning-making”, Frankl attributed an objective quality to meaning, which is to be perceived and recognized similar to Wertheimer's “Gestalt”-perception: “in a Gestalt perception in the traditional sense of the term we are perceiving a figure against a background; in finding meaning, however, we are perceiving a possibility embedded in reality.” (Frankl, The Unheard Cry for Meaning, Simon & Schuster, NY 1978, ISBN 0-671-24736-0, page 38)

False Claim #3:

Pytell later would remark on the particularly sharp insight of Langer's reading of Frankl's holocaust testimony, stating that with Langer's criticism published in 1982 before Pytell's biography, the former had thus drawn the controversial parallels, or accommodations in ideology without the knowledge that Victor Frankl was an advocate/"embraced" the key ideas of the Nazi psychotherapy movement ("will and responsibility") as a form of therapy in the late 1930s. When at that time Frankl would submit a paper and contributed to the Göring institute in Vienna 1937 and again in early 1938 connecting the logotherapy focus on "world-view" to the "work of some of the leading Nazi psychotherapists", both at a time before Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938. Frankl's founding logotherapy paper, was submitted to and published in the Zentrallblatt fuer Psychotherapie [ sic] the journal of the Goering Institute, a psychotherapy movement, with the "proclaimed agenda of building psychotherapy that affirmed a Nazi-oriented worldview".

The origins of logotherapy, as described by Frankl, were therefore a major issue of continuity that Biographer Pytell argues were potentially problematic for Frankl because he had laid out the main elements of logotherapy while working for/contributing to the Nazi-affiliated Göring Institute. Principally Frankl's 1937 paper, that was published by the institute.]

Refutation #3:

Frankl was a Jewish doctor, and as such could never have submitted papers to the Goering Institute whose explicit goal was “to rid psychotherapy of Jewish influence and propagate a new Aryan form of psychotherapy” [Alexander Batthyány, Viktor Frankl and the Shoa – Advancing the Debate, Springer Briefs in Psychology, NY 2021, https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-83063-2, p. 37]. Rather, Frankl's article was published in the Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie, the Journal of the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy. The Zentralblatt had been founded in 1928 under C.G. Jung in his capacity of head of the International Society; and Jung had made clear in a circular that the Zentralblatt was, and would remain, not a political mouthpiece, and retain its political neutrality. [Batthyány 2021, p. 44]. And it was in this journal that Frankl published his criticism of National Socialist psychotherapy [V. Frankl, “Zur geistigen Problematik der Psychotherapie”, Zbl. f. Psychoth. 10, 33-75, 1938]

Frankl had been a member of the Austrian section of the General International Medical Society for Psychotherapy, the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Psychotherapie und psychische Hygiene (Austrian Society for Psychotherapy and Mental Hygiene) founded in March 1936, two years before the “Anschluss,” i.e. at a time when Austria was still governed by the Vaterländische Front and all Nazi activities were strictly prohibited. Frankl was a regular attendant of the meetings of this Society in its founding year, 1936.

In 1938, after the “Anschluss,” the Austrian chapter of the International General Medical Society was dissolved— precisely because it was not politically aligned with the Nazis and because the majority of its members were, as Frankl, Jewish. At the same time the Berlin-based Göring Institute established an Austrian section – which obviously would not accomodate any Jewish members. Pytell, however, turns Frankl's membership at the dissolved Austrian Society for Psychotherapy into work for the Vienna branch of the Göring Institute.

[Sources:

- Alexander Batthyány, Viktor Frankl and the Shoa, Springer Briefs in Psychology, NY 2021, p. 29-35

- Aichhorn, T. & Rothländer, C. (2012). Zur Errichtung der Wiener Arbeitsgemeinschaft des Göring-Instituts und der Arbeits- und Ausbildungsgruppe von August Aichhorn. In: Ash, M. G., & Aichhorn, T. (2012). Materialien zur Geschichte der Psychoanalyse in Wien 1938-1945. Frankfurt: Brandes & Apsel, p. 347ff. ]

False Claim #4:

[...] This association, as a source of controversy, that logotherapy was palatable to Nazism is the reason, Pytell suggests, Frankl took two different stances on how the concentration-camp experience affected the course of his psychotherapy theory. Namely, that within the original English edition of Frankl's most well known book, Man's Search for Meaning, the suggestion is made and still largely held that logotherapy was itself derived from his camp experience, with the claim as it appears in the original edition, that this form of psychotherapy was "not concocted in the philosopher's armchair nor at the analyst's couch; it took shape in the hard school of air-raid shelters and bomb craters; in concentration camps and prisoner of war camps." Frankl's statements however to this effect would be deleted from later editions, though in the 1963 edition, a similar statement again appeared on the back of the book jacket of Man's Search for Meaning.

Frankl over the years would with these widely read statements and others, switch between the idea that logotherapy took shape in the camps to the claim that the camps merely were a testing ground of his already preconceived theories. An uncovering of the matter would occur in 1977 with Frankl revealing on this controversy, though compounding another, stating "People think I came out of Auschwitz with a brand-new psychotherapy. This is not the case."

Refutation #4:

Frankl did not take different stances on this matter but one stance only. Pytell accuses Frankl of having „changed his stance“ on the matter, yet he fails to provide any direct quote of Frankl claiming he had indeed conceived his theories in the camps. Yet numerous records exist in which Frankl points out that he did not ”come out of“ but ”went into the camps“ with his theories already developed and that any opposite statement having come from some of his publishers was simply false. In the book Man’s Search for Meaning itself, Frankl writes about having to let go of the “book manuscript containing his logotherapeutic concepts” upon entering Auschwitz. [Man’s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press, Boston 2006, p.14]. To then claim to have conceived Logotherapy in Auschwitz would have been contradictory to Frankl's own account. That false claim was indeed put on a backcover text of an edition of Man's Search for Meaning by the American publisher (Beacon Press) in the 1950s, which obviously happened without Frankl's approval and was soon after removed. On countless occasions Frankl mentioned this marketing text to have been a misleading publicity stunt by his American publishers:

- “What my American publishers have sometimes stated of the back of my books is not correct. I did not come out, as they say, from Auschwitz with a brand new type of psychotherapy, but I had entered it already with the respective manuscript. “ [V. Frankl, On the Development of Logotherapy, 1989, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEKBMPeHY1Q, 2:10]

- (Interviewer:)“You yourself spent three years in 4 German concentration camps in World War II. It’s been said that you came out of the concentration camps with your new theory.” - (Frankl:) “This is not exactly the truth. When I entered the concentration camp of Auschwitz I had the full-length manuscript of my first book ( (The Doctor and the Soul) in my pocket, but of course it was confiscated ...”

[V. Frankl, U.S. Radio interview 1970s, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=venMlKH2eKE ]

False Claim #5:

Jewish relations and experiments on the resistance
In the post war years, Frankl's attitude towards not pursuing justice nor assigning collective guilt to the Austrian people for collaborating with or acquiescing in the face of Nazism, led to "frayed" relationships between Frankl, many Viennese and the larger American Jewish community, such that in 1978 when attempting to give a lecture at the institute of Adult Jewish Studies in New York, Frankl was confronted with an outburst of boos from the audience and was called a "nazi pig". Frankl supported forgiveness and held that many in Germany and Austria were powerless to do anything about the atrocities which occurred and could not be collectively blamed.

Refutation #5:

At said event at the Institute for Adult Jewish Studies Frankl talked about antisemitism in Austria not being significantly more prevalent than in other countries. To support this impression, he said: “After all, Austria's democratically elected chancellor at the time (Bruno Kreisky) is Jewish.” That statement was correct, however Kreisky at the time had fallen into unpopularity for his politics of initiating talks with the PLO. Mentioning Kreiskys name stirred up high emotions and protest from the audience for these political reasons. They had nothing to do with the point Frankl had tried to make, or his opinions about collective guilt. [ Source: The Jewish Week – American Examiner, November 19, 1978, p. 12; https://viktor-frankl-archiv.org/time_window/img/591.010B.pdf ]

False Claim #6:

In his "Gutachten" Gestapo profile, Frankl is described as "politically perfect" by the Nazi secret police, with Frankl's membership in the Austro-fascist "Fatherland Front" in 1934, similarly stated in isolation. It has been suggested that as a state employee in a hospital he was likely automatically signed up to the party regardless of whether he wanted to or not. Frankl was interviewed twice by the secret police during the war, yet nothing of the expected contents, the subject of discussion or any further information on these interviews, is contained in Frankl's file, suggesting to biographers that Frankl's file was "cleansed" sometime after the war.

Refutation #6:

Frankl was Jewish and therefore could not possibly have been accepted as a member of the Austro-fascist “Fatherland Front”, which was a famously fiercely antisemitic organization. The very idea that a Jewish man would be a member is ridiculous, and shows the sloppiness of Pytells historic research. Pytell fails to produce the “Gutachten” - document describing Frankl as “politically perfect”, which, given Frankls involvement in the Zionist movement, is highly unlikely to exist:

At the time (late 1930s) Frankl maintained close relations to the Austrian Zionist movement, occasionally delivering lectures at their gatherings. In the period preceding the "Anschluss" - the forced annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany - an atmosphere of apprehension and despair was prevalent. This is vividly illustrated by the invitation extended to Viktor Frankl by the Zionist Youth Section to deliver two lectures on the "Psychological Problems of Jewish Youth." The announcement of the second lecture was published on March 11, just one day before Hitler's forces crossed the border, bringing an abrupt halt to all activities of the organization; https://anno.onb.ac.at/cgi-content/anno?aid=dst&datum=19380311&seite=4

False Claim #7:

None of Frankl's obituaries mention the unqualified and unskilled brain lobotomy and trepanation medical experiments approved by the Nazis that Frankl performed on Jews who had committed suicide with an overdose of sedatives, in resistance to their impending arrest, imprisonment and enforced labour in the concentration camp system.

Refutation #7:

None of the obituaries mention this, because it did not happen. The Nazis did not “approve” any of Frankl's surgeries. Their interest was not in doctors rescuing Jewish patients, but rather the opposite. Jews did not commit suicide as a form of “resistance” against the Nazis. [ Batthyány 2021, p. 64)

Standardized qualification for performing brain surgeries was introduced in Austria after the war. Frankl could not acquire such a specialist qualification because it did not yet exist. Such training was, at that time, much more informal and largely depended on whether one’s teachers and mentors were active in the field of neurosurgery. And indeed, Frankl had learned and worked under the supervision of Otto Pötzl in the years before and Pötzl was widely known and respected as one of the pioneers of Viennese psychosurgery, i.e. the neurosurgical therapy of severe mental disorders [ Hoff, H. (1952). Professor Dr. Otto Pötzl - 75 Jahre. Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift, 102, 971f. ]**

Furthermore, we know that the clinical director of the Rothschild Hospital, Dr. Reich, called Frankl to the hospital outside the latter’s regular on-call shifts, for him to treat patients with barbiturate poisoning (Frankl, 1995, p. 58), suggesting that he supported and encouraged Frankl’s rescue attempts. Had Frankl not been professionally qualified, the clinical director of the hospital would hardly have encouraged, or asked for them. Hence certainly among most of the medical superintendents of the Israelite Community’s hospital, Frankl’s intervention to treat severe barbiturate poisoning was supported and even requested. Secondly, he had developed a successful intervention to treat these very patients (which was, incidentally, taken up by other researchers in the 1950s, see, for example, zur Verth [1951] and Dönhardt [1959]). [ zur Verth, C. (1951), ”Pervitinbehandlung bei Schlafmittelvergiftung,” Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift, 76(24), 806–807. ]

Therefore Frankl was neither “unqualified” nor “unskilled” and saved lives with his surgical interventions, most famously in the case of Ms. Geldner, one of the Rothschild Hospital patients who had tried to commit suicide, and who tells the story of an (unnamed) young doctor at the Neurology Department who “eagerly tried everything he could to save my life.” Given the facts above there can be no doubt that she was referring to Frankl. Ms. Gelder, after being successfully resusciated, managed to flee the country. [Batthyány 2021, p. 63 ]

False Claim #8:

Frankl justified this by saying that he was trying to find ways to save the lives of Jews. Operating without any training as a surgeon, Frankl would voluntarily request of the Nazis to perform the experiments on those who had killed themselves, and once approved..

Refutation #8:

He did have the required training to operate at the time. As mentioned, prior to 1946 no standardized training was required [ Diemath, H.E. (2014), “50 Jahre Neurochirurgische Universitätsklinik Wien. Neurochirurgische Erinnerungen – Von der Nachkriegszeit zur Erfolgsgeschichte.” Journal für Neurologie, Neurochirurgie und Psychiatrie 15:4; Krüger, J. (2005), Zur Geschichte der Neurochirurgie. Nervenheilkunde 24:09, p. 837-846. ]

The Rothschild hospital was a private hospital for Jewish patients run by Jewish doctors. No Nazis had any say in who was operated on. The notion that Frankl, as head of the neurological department would need to ask “the Nazis for approval” is historically innacurate. Pytell fails to specify which Nazis Frankl alledgedly asked for permissions.

False Claim #9:

Historian Günter Bischof of Harvard University, suggests Frankl's approaching and requesting to perform lobotomy experiments could be seen as a way to "ingratiate" himself amongst the Nazis, as the latter were not, at that time, appreciative of the international scrutiny that these suicides were beginning to create, nor "suicide" being listed on arrest records.

Refutation #9:

Three of the four citations Pytell lis listing here are his own articles. Guenther Bischof is the Editor of the book “Austrian lives”, which includes an article by Pytell in which he brings up this claim that Frankl tried to “ingratiate” himself. Pytell is self-referencing his own article in that book, misleadingly suggesting the claims he made therein were made by Guenther Bischof. The third source he quotes “Freud's World” contains no such claim.

Here the above mentioned commentary by Dr. Wolfgang Neugebauer:

(Excerpt from Alexander Batthyány,  Viktor Frankl and the  Shoa – Advancing the Debate, Springer Briefs in Psychology, NY 2021)

Foreword

by Wolfgang Neugebauer

[Wolfgang Neugebauer, Dr. phil., historian, 1983–2004 head of the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance (DÖW), since 1995 honorary professor of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna; numerous publications on the resistance and NS euthanasia. ]

To those who were personally acquainted with Viktor Frankl, the effect of his charismatic personality was inescapable. Like the many thousands of participants in the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Austria’s violent “Anschluss” to Nazi Germany that was held outside Vienna’s city hall on 10 March 1988, I was deeply moved by Viktor Frankl’s speech.

On the one hand, I was inspired by the captivating rhetoric and oratory artistry Frankl displayed at the age of 83; on the other hand, I was touched by the substance of his address: rejecting any notion of collective guilt from a position of reconciliation.

However, as a historian and head of the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance (DÖW), an organization that was set up by former resistance fighters and victims of National Socialism, I took a critical view vis-à-vis some of Frankl’s observations and I do not consider myself his apologist. Not least, I was concerned, back in 1995, that Frankl did not more emphatically and at an earlier date reject the politically motivated ingratiation of FPÖ chairman Jörg Haider, whom I judged to be a right-wing extremist and had journalistic as well as legal disputes with. In the course of my research into the resistance and Nazi euthanasia, I had previously come across Viktor Frankl’s efforts, in collaboration with Prof. Otto Pötzl, head of the Psychiatric-Neurological Clinic at the Vienna University Hospital, and the social worker for the Jewish community in Vienna, Franziska Löw, to save Jewish patients, particularly children, from Nazi euthanasia.

In 1993 I held, together with my DÖW colleague, Dr. Elisabeth Klamper, an extensive interview with Viktor Frankl at his apartment at Mariannengasse 1 in Vienna’s ninth district, where he talked inter alia about his difficult years as a physician at the Rothschild Hospital and paid homage to his fellow doctors. He had amazing memory and was able to identify all the doctors depicted on a photograph from 1941 or 1942.

I was all the more taken aback—indeed, horrified—when Prof. Alexander Batthyány sent me an excerpt from an article published by Dr. Timothy Pytell that ascribes the assertion that “Frankl did not sabotage any euthanasia” to me. I have never made this statement and it contradicts all my publications on the resistance and Nazi euthanasia that mention Frankl’s efforts to save Jewish patients from euthanasia. Maybe Timothy Pytell misunderstood my observation that most of those saved from euthanasia by Frankl and Löw became victims of the Shoah at a later date.

Pytell did not conduct an interview (with structured questions and subsequent authorization) with me in 1997, but asked me, in the course of a short conversation, in-depth questions about Frankl’s brain operations at the Jewish Hospital, which I could not comment on for lack of medical knowledge. Back then I already perceived (and I clearly remember to this day) that Timothy Pytell was driven by a downright fanatical rejection of Viktor Frankl.

I subsequently had the opportunity to read Alexander Batthyány’s critical works on the subject of Timothy Pytell’s publications on Frankl. I have rarely come across such a multitude of manipulations and factual errors, as well as ignorance of scientific literature and relevant archive materials, as in Pytell’s publications. I was particularly disconcerted by Pytell’s compulsive endeavor to depict the Jew, anti-Nazi, and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl in ostensible proximity to National Socialism.

I am very grateful to Alexander Batthyány for taking the trouble to delve into Timothy Pytell’s works and to refute every single allegation against Viktor Frankl. He comes to the conclusion that these publications mainly served the purpose of reinforcing a pre-existing rejection of Viktor Frankl and his work with insinuations, contrived “facts,” and misinterpretations, exacerbated by a lack of German language skills.

Whether publications of such “quality” as Timothy Pytell’s anti-Frankl works are in fact deserving of comprehensive rebuttal is up for discussion. However, I am convinced that Alexander Batthyány’s was and remains relevant, not least because impartial readers, who are not historians of the Nazi era, cannot discern the questionability of Pytell’s assertions—at least not at first glance.

Take for example Timothy Pytell’s assertion that Dr. Alfred Mauczka, who, as head of Steinhof, was Frankl’s superior until 1937, became an “applicant” for NSDAP membership on April 14, 1940. This assertion, which was intended to construe a—temporally far-fetched—link between Frankl and an alleged Nazi, can only be falsified by attentively reading the relevant index card of the Reichsärztekammer [Reich Chamber of Physicians], which is available at the German Federal Archive’s collection of the former Berlin Document Center. Timothy Pytell has turned the applicant for the Reich Chamber of Physicians into an applicant for the NSDAP, as can be gleaned from the detailed statement in the appendix.

Viktor Frankl, a scientist of international renown and founder of a new school of psychotherapy, who asserted himself against anti-Semitism, discrimination, and Nazi persecution in the course of his dramatic life, deserves to have his reputation defended against disparagement and hostility under the guise of science. Alexander Batthyány has convincingly succeeded in doing just that.

University of Vienna Wolfgang Neugebauer Vienna, Austria

Alexvesely (talk) 18:05, 21 November 2023 (UTC)


 * "I am very grateful to Alexander Batthyány for taking the trouble to delve into Timothy Pytell’s works and to refute every single allegation against Viktor Frankl. He comes to the conclusion that these publications mainly served the purpose of reinforcing a pre-existing rejection of Viktor Frankl.."
 * Gee...Perhaps your extensive activities on this page "mainly serves the purpose of reinforcing a pre-existing" acceptance of Frankl?!
 * Perhaps a more "full disclosure" would have mentioned that Alexander Batthyany, who you quote so extensively, apparently "holds the Viktor Frankl Chair for Philosophy and Psychology at the International Academy of Philosophy in the Principality of Liechtenstein" and is "Director of the Viktor Frankl Institute and the Viktor Frankl Archives in Vienna and first editor of the 14-volume edition of the Collected Works of Viktor Frankl." You merely mentioned that you "have extensive access to the documents housed in the Viktor Frankl Archives in Vienna". It seems you are actually "head of the Viktor Frankl Media Archives in Vienna", have directed a documentary about Frankl, and "traveled the world speaking on the topic of Logotherapy, the meaning-centered school of psychotherapy founded by his grandfather Viktor Frankl".
 * Maybe I suggest someone's grandson, whose life's work seems based around their grandfather's, quoting from their friend's book defending their grandfather, is the last place one would look for NPOV. At least you refrained from extensively editing the page this time, deleting the parts you took issue with; thank you for that. Oh - but that was in 2020, the year you "cofounded the Viktor Frankl Institute of America"! Amazing. Maybe have a look at the wikipedia pages on conflict-of-interest editing, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest - which says for example "If you have a personal connection to a topic or person, you are advised to refrain from editing those articles directly and provide full disclosure of the connection if you comment about the article on talk pages or in other discussions". 122.148.184.131 (talk) 14:47, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

Logical Different Family and Single person Death
halfknoweladge to Life Time addicted to Life 2409:40F0:4B:B233:8000:0:0:0 (talk) 02:48, 6 January 2024 (UTC)