Viktor Frankl and the Shoah

This books takes a new and critical look at the development of logotherapy and existential analysis, a prominent existential school of psychotherapy. It explores the intellectual and political biography of its founder, the Austrian psychiatrist and holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, best known for his bestselling Man's Search for Meaning. The book focuses on his life and works and political thinking from the late 1920's to the years spent in Nazi-occupied Vienna, and finally the time he spent in the concentration camps Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Dachau. It presents new archival findings on Frankl's involvement with the Austrian Zionist Movement, his attempts to sabotage the euthanasia program of the National Socialists, and his scathing critiques of the NS-Psychotherapy school around Göring and his students, published during the years before Frankl's deportation to Theresienstadt. This book addresses recent attempts by the author Timothy Pytell to portray Frankl as a fellowtraveler of the Nazi regime and corrects the fundamental errors and misrepresentations in Pytell's work. It thus offers important perspectives on the intellectual history of ideas in psychology and existential psychotherapy, and also serves as key material on the development of psychotherapy before and during the Holocaust.

****

Provides a new perspective on the work of Viktor Frankl, the founder of logotherapy Adds important corrections in traditional historical accounts Explores the practice of psychotherapy before and after the Holocaust

Autorentext

Prof. Dr. Alexander Batthyány is Director the Research Institute for Theoretical Psychology and Personalist Studies at Pázmány Péter University, Budapest; he holds the Viktor Frankl Chair for Philosophy and Psychology at the International Academy of Philosophy in the Principality of Liechtenstein, and is faculty Professor for Existential Psychotherapy at the Moscow Institute of Psychoanalysis. He is Director of the Viktor Frankl Institute in Vienna and first editor of the 14-volume edition of the Collected Works of Viktor Frankl. His publications have been translated into over ten languages.

Inhalt
Part1. The Debate.- Chapter 1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. How not to reconstruct history.- Part2. 1925-1938 .- Chapter 3. 1925 1933: From Red Vienna to the Corporative State.- Chapter 4. 1936-1938: The Medical Society for Psychotherapy and the Göring Institute (Berlin/Vienna) .- Part3. 1940 - 1945.- Chapter 5. 1940 1942: At the Rothschild Hospital .- Chapter 6. 1942 1945: Theresienstadt Auschwitz Kaufering Türkheim .- Part4. Aftermath.- Chapter 7. 1946: Man's Search for Meaning .- Chapter 8. 1946-1997: Review Frankl on the Holocaust.