Editing Viktor Frankl (section)

== Controversy ==

=== "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]], surveys 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.<ref name="szasz.com2">[http://www.szasz.com/exitana.html Szasz, T.S. (2003). The secular cure of souls: "Analysis" or dialogue? Existential Analysis, 14: 203–212 (July).]</ref>  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", as contrary to the impression Frankl gives of staying at Auschwitz for months, he was held close to the train, in the "depot prisoner" area of Auschwitz, and for no more than a few days. Frankl was neither registered at Auschwitz nor assigned a number there before being sent on to a [[List of subcamps of Dachau|subsidiary work camp of Dachau]], known as [[Kaufering concentration camp|Kaufering III]], that (together with Terezín) is the true setting of much of what is described in his book.<ref>[Viktor Frankl's Search for Meaning: An Emblematic 20th-Century Life By Timothy Pytell pg 104]</ref><ref name="portal.ehri-project.eu2">[https://portal.ehri-project.eu/units/il-002798-o_41-1248-1#desc-eng List of inmates who were transferred to Kaufering III camp, 11/07/1944-16/04/1945]</ref><ref>See Martin Weinmann, ed., Das nationalsozialistische Lagersystem (Frankfurt: Zweitausendeins, 1990), pp.195, 558.</ref>

=== Origins and implications of logotherapy ===
Frankl's doctrine was that one must instill meaning in the events in one's life, and that work and suffering can lead to finding meaning, with this ultimately what would lead to fulfillment and happiness. In 1982 the scholar and Holocaust analyst [[Lawrence L. Langer]], critical of what he called Frankl's distortions of the true experience of those at Auschwitz,{{r|n=Szasz|r=Suicide Prohibition: The Shame of Medicine By Thomas Szasz|pp=60&ndash;62}} and of Frankl's amoral focus on "meaning", that in Langer's assessment could just as equally be applied to Nazis "finding meaning in making the world free from Jews",{{r|n=Szasz|p=62}} went on to write that "if this [logotherapy] doctrine had been more succinctly worded, the Nazis might have substituted it for the cruel mockery of [[Arbeit Macht Frei]]" ["work sets free", read by those entering Auschwitz].<ref>[Lawrence Langer, Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), p.24. [End Page 107]]</ref>  In Pytell's view, Langer also penetrated through Frankl's disturbing subtext that Holocaust "survival [was] [[Man's Search for Meaning#Reception|a matter of mental health]]." Langer criticized Frankl's tone as self-congratulatory and promotional throughout, so 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.

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 [[Communication accommodation theory|accommodations]] in ideology without the knowledge that Victor Frankl was an advocate/"embraced"{{r|n=Bischof|r=Austrian Lives By Günter Bischof|pp=241&ndash;242}} the key ideas of the [[Matthias Goring|Nazi psychotherapy]] movement ("will and responsibility"<ref>Viktor Frankl's Search for Meaning: An Emblematic 20th-Century Life By Timothy Pytell pg 70–72, 111</ref>) as a form of therapy in the late 1930s. When at that time Frankl would submit a paper and contributed to the [[Matthias Göring|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",{{r|n=Bischof|p=242}} both at a time before [[Anschluss|Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938]].{{r|n=Bischof|p=255}}{{r|n=Pytell-foot104|r={{cite journal|last=Pytell|first=Timothy|year=2003|title=Redeeming the Unredeemable: Auschwitz and Man's Search for Meaning|journal=Holocaust and Genocide Studies |language=en |volume=17 |issue=1 |pages=89&ndash;113|url=http://muse.jhu.edu/article/43137#FOOT104|quote=What is perhaps most impressive about Langer's reading is that he was unaware of Frankl's 1937 article promoting a form of psychotherapy palatable to the Nazis.}}}} Frankl's founding logotherapy paper, was submitted to and published in the {{sic|''Zentrallblatt fuer Psychotherapie''|expected=Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie}} the journal of the Goering Institute, a psychotherapy movement, with the "proclaimed agenda of building psychotherapy that affirmed a Nazi-oriented worldview".<ref>{{cite web | url=https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/authoritarian-therapy/201702/is-there-fascist-impulse-in-all-us | title=Is There a Fascist Impulse in All of Us? &#124; Psychology Today }}</ref>

The origins of logotherapy, as described by Frankl, were therefore a major issue of continuity that 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.{{r|n=Pytell-foot104}} 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."{{r|n=Pytell2003|r={{Cite journal |last=Pytell |first=Timothy |date=3 June 2003 |title=Redeedming the Unredeemable: Auschwitz and Man's Search for Meaning |url=https://muse.jhu.edu/article/43137 |journal=Holocaust and Genocide Studies |language=en |volume=17 |issue=1 |pages=89–113 |doi=10.1093/hgs/17.1.89 |issn=1476-7937}}}}

=== 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 [[Rohr Jewish Learning Institute|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.{{r|n=Bischof|p=255}}<ref>{{cite web | url=https://www.profil.at/home/psychotherapie-wille-sinn-viktor-frankl-26-maerz-100-106644 | title=Psychotherapie: Wille zum Sinn – Viktor Frankl wäre am 26. März 100 geworden | date=5 March 2005 }}</ref><ref name=freud/>

In 1988 Frankl would further "stir up sentiment against him" by being photographed next to and in accepting the [[Great Silver Medal with Star for Services to the Republic of Austria]] as a Holocaust survivor, from [[Kurt Waldheim|President Waldheim]], a controversial president of Austria who concurrent with the medal ceremony, was gripped by revelations that he had lied about his WWII military record and was under investigation for complicity in Nazi War crimes. It was later concluded that he was not involved in war crimes but had knowledge of them. Frankl's acceptance of the medal was viewed by many in the international Jewish community as a betrayal.<ref name=freud>[Freud's World: An Encyclopedia of His Life and Times, By Luis A. Cordón. pg 147]</ref> 

In his "Gutachten" [[Gestapo]] profile, Frankl is described as "politically perfect" by the Nazi secret police, with Frankl's membership in the [[Fatherland Front (Austria)|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.<ref>{{cite web | url=https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/authoritarian-therapy/201807/austrian-jews-respond-nazism-part-2 | title=Austrian Jews Respond to Nazism, Part 2 &#124; Psychology Today }}</ref><ref>{{cite book |last1=Pytell |first1=Timothy |title=Viktor Frankl's Search for Meaning: An Emblematic 20th-Century Life |date=2015 |publisher=Berghahn Books |page=62}}</ref>

None of Frankl's obituaries mention the unqualified and unskilled brain [[lobotomy]] and [[trepanation]] medical [[Nazi medical experiments|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. The goal of these experiments were to try and revive those who had killed themselves, 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 – published some of the details on his experiments, the methods of insertion of his chosen amphetamine drugs into the brains of these individuals, resulting in, at times, an alleged partial resuscitation, mainly in 1942 (prior to his own internment at [[Theresienstadt|Theresienstadt ghetto]] in September, later in that year). 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.{{r|n=Pytell2003}}{{r|n=Bischof|pp=241&ndash;255}}{{r|n=Szasz|pp=60&ndash;62}}<ref name=tp/>

===Response to Timothy Pytell===
Timothy Pytell's critique towards Viktor Frankl was used by Holocaust denier Theodore O'Keefe, according to Alexander Batthyány,<ref>{{Cite book |last=Batthyány |first=Alexander |date=15 October 2021 |title=Viktor Frankl and the Shoah |series=SpringerBriefs in Psychology |url=https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-83063-2 |publisher=Springer Cham |pages=3–12 |doi=10.1007/978-3-030-83063-2 |isbn=978-3-030-83062-5 |s2cid=244573650 |issn=2192-8363}}</ref> the director of the Viktor Frankl Institute and the Viktor Frankl Archives in Vienna. Throughout the first chapter of his book ''Viktor Frankl and the Shoah'', he reflects on Pytell's work about Frankl, and the flaws in it. Batthyány points out that Pytell never visited the archive to consult primary sources from the person about whom he was writing. Batthyány also critiques Pytell for not interviewing Viktor Frankl while Frankl was still alive. Pytell wrote in his book on Frankl that he had the opportunity to meet him – as a friend offered it – yet he decided that he could not meet Frankl.