Biography Viktor Franklay

When creating a training course, we constantly delved into the primary sources in German, finding more and more facts not only of the biographies of the creator of the logotherapy of Viktor Frankl, but also the reviews of his colleagues and relatives. Ekaterina Resch Viktor Frankl was born in Vienna, in a mid -social Jewish family. His mother, which he always mentioned with pride, led his family from one of the famous Hasid sages Rabbi Lev from Prague.

The social and economic situation of the family was distinguished by instability and even at the end of his life, despite the enormous worldwide glory that came to him, and his extraordinary ambition, he had a feeling of uncertainty in communicating with aristocracy, the authorities, and the powerful of this world. Relations with parents were very positive. Frankl described his mother as the embodiment of good, a very cordial, emotional woman.

Father was an example of righteousness for him, a strict, gathered, Spartan in his life style, economical, albeit not stingy, distinguished by a very strong consciousness of duty, strong solid principles up to some pedantry and stubbornness. Victor always experienced great love and affection for his father. Father, like his mother, was very religious, maintaining a serious, but critical, reformist attitude towards commandments.

In the character of Frankl, the features of his parents were manifested: from his father - stubbornness, principledness, deep religiosity, stoicism and perfectionism, from the mother - a positive mood of sympathy for people. Victor's childhood was very prosperous, he felt care, support, protection and at the same time freedom. The family had two sons and one daughter.

The Second World War, except Victor, only his younger sister, far from the spiritual interests of his brother, who had left for Mexico, then to Australia, and survived to an old age before the war. Victor's elder brother, like their parents, died in a concentration camp. Frankl was a deeply religious man, it was a personal attitude to God, who had nothing to do with confessional religiosity; He later defined God as the most intimate interlocutor in your internal dialogs.

In many ways, probably, thanks to his religiosity, he was carried away by socialism in the youth years, became one of the noticeable functionaries of the Socialist Union of Austria gymnasium students. He classified political parties, figures, programs solely by the ethical criterion: does the means justify the means for this policy, or are there unacceptable means of achieving any goal for him?

Pretty early, already from three years old, Victor Frankl had a desire to become a doctor. Around the same time, an awareness of the fact of mortality came to him: at four years old he realized that he would die once. The main question that excited him in his youth is from the fact that everything is mortal, the conclusion that life does not make sense? It was not a fear of death, but a painful problem of the limb of life - what follows from this, and what influence it has on life.

Thus, his interest in spiritual problems, in meaning began to form in the early years. Another episode from the elementary grades of the gymnasium: a teacher of natural history, describing the life of different organisms and a person, said that life ultimately is nothing more than a process of oxidation. Frankl jumped up from his place and asked: “In this case, what kind of life does it make sense?

He often recalled this episode as one of the first manifestations of interest in the meaning.

From gymnasium times, Frankl was distinguished by the desire for knowledge, he asked a lot of questions, and the strongest side of his intellectual style saw not so much in the creative creation and reflection of something new, how much he thought out, which he consistently thought out, which was consistent, which consistently thought out. He brought his thoughts to the end, he studied well, went to open public lectures in the so -called “folk school”, carried away by philosophy, psychology, politics.

As a temptation by psychologism, as well as sociologism. The strongest of these temptations was psychoanalysis, which in the end of the 10th - early xg. For some time, faith in God took the background and he began to lean towards nihilism regarding religious values, faith in science came, revolutionary faith in political activity, characteristic of the age of “storm and onslaught”.

This was also facilitated by the political atmosphere: there were sharp changes that resonated with the political and social views of the young Frankl.A certain influence on his general worldview was also affected by Adler’s circle, who was then married to Russian, constantly communicated with the circle of Russian political emigrants, sympathized with the revolution and was a fan of Trotsky, who lived in Vienna and in many respects, under the influence of psychoanalysis, Frankl decided to become a psychiatrist.

He had no doubt about the medical career, but there was a question of choosing a specialty. Ultimately, he preferred psychiatry. This was partly due to his desire to influence others. He then experienced great interest in hypnosis, already at the age of 15 he mastered it and knew how to professionally, competently hypnotize people. Frankl wrote and published a completely solid, but not original psychoanalytic article in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis [3].

However, the fascination with psychoanalysis in the orthodox version did not last long. After passing the examination of maturity, Frankl wanted to receive psychoanalytic training, having passed his own psychoanalysis, which was a necessary step for working as a psychoanalyst. He wrote a letter to Freud, turning to him about this educational analysis. Freud in response sent him to his student and at that time to the secretary of the Society of Society Federn, this exchange of letters was the only communication between Freud and Frankl, they personally never met.

Frankl agreed with Federn to meet, came to him. After a few minutes of silence, he asked: “So, Mr. Frankl, what is your neurosis? Frankl was a little taken aback, began to say something about the anal character and anxious-informing features. About a quarter of an hour, Federn completed the conversation and advised him to wait for the end of his studies, because his studies and analysis could interfere with each other, and then agree on the analysis.

After communicating with Federn, two points were finally clear for Frankl, which repelled him from psychoanalysis. Frankl experienced at a meeting with Federn what he later fought all his life, namely, double reductionism. Firstly, this truncation of the human dimension in a person is no greeting, apologies, explanations, no introductory words, understanding, and even handshake when goodbye.

Secondly, this pathologism - the essence of a person is seen in his neurosis, protection and crowding out; A person is considered to be sick in advance. Thinking about this, Frankl came to the abandonment of his idea to engage in psychoanalysis and join a psychoanalytic society. In the coming week, he moved to the Adler group, the founder of the Second Vienna School of Psychotherapy.

He was also associated with Adler’s political beliefs: he was a social democrat, he worked hard primarily with clients from the lower, disadvantaged layers, creating a network of medical and pedagogical consultations in Vienna. In the city of Frankl, he passed theoretical exams in the Vienna section of the International Union of Individual Psychology, received a diploma and was admitted to the circle of adherents of “individual psychology”.

Here he found teachers who had a very great influence on him as individuals and as professionals - Rudolf Allers and Oswald Schwartz. However, being in this community was also very difficult, and the relations with it of the young Franc had taken a complex and dramatic form. There were discrepancies between the teachers of Frankl Allers and Schwartz on the one hand, and Adler - on the other, which ultimately led to the exclusion in the city of Allers and Schwartz from the International Union of Individual Psychology.

In this union there was a tough hierarchical structure, and its ordinary members, like the young Frankclay, according to the existing rules, could not communicate with Adler on scientific issues personally, but only through their teachers. When the Allers and Schwartz, who introduced Frankcé to the Adler society, were excluded from the Union, Frankl was in full isolation, he was soon excluded from all the forums of the Union of Individual Psychology and was beyond its borders.

Then he had interrupted communication with his teachers and at the end of the X. Frankl never considered himself a student of Adler, saying that he did not have an organ of perception of philosophical problems at all: Adler from the very beginning proceeds from the dogma, that life makes sense, and that it is mistaken to specifically ask this question. Adler, as a person, made a not very strong impression on Franca, although Frankl never directly evaluated Adler from this side.

In scientific terms, Frankl appreciated Adler very highly, seeing in him the forerunner of humanistic psychology. In particular, Frankl described as the Copernican coup for the first time introduced into psychology by Adler's idea of ​​target determination, orientation towards the meaning of the Freudian causal explanation emanating from the past, causal causal relationships [7].

Adler was really the first personality in the psychology of personality who was replacing the Freudian question “Why? Frankl developed this particular line, inheriting the Adler’s some fundamental moments of his approach.Often he quoted Adler, in particular he really liked the statement: "It is wrong that a person has experience, experience and a person." In addition to a constant threat to life, free self -expression was no longer possible, and Frankl began to try to get a visa to leave for the United States.

For a long time, his efforts remained fruitless. This position provided work and gave relative protection to relatives from deportation to a concentration camp; In addition, he was able to save quite a lot of patients from killing as inferior with the help of colleagues. He also developed a number of purely medical, neurological methods of helping people with failed suicidal attempts, but led to sufficiently severe damage.

Making certain intravenous injections, he returned to the life of people close to death within two days. At the end of the year, in the life of Frankl, a turning point appeared again, when he was given a long -awaited entry visa at the American consulate. The problem was with his parents who did not have it: only one real road remained for them - to a concentration camp.

Frankl was at a crossroads: either say goodbye to his parents and provide them with fate, or put his life, future, work for the sake of a foggy perspective to somehow help, protect parents. For a long time, he could not make a decision: on the one hand, the parents he loved warmly, turned out to be defenseless, on the other hand, to protect them, if he remained, was still very weak and non-obvious.

This question tormented him for many weeks. Once, being in this state of openness to any metaphysical signs, Frankl returned home after a walk and saw a piece of marble on the table, on which there was one letter in Hebrew. The father explained that this was a piece of marble from the ruins of the synagogue, recently destroyed by the Nazis, part of one of the commandments that were carved on it.

At that moment, Frankl made his decision to stay in Vienna, and his visa disappeared. Then, in December, from day to day, waiting for deportation to the concentration camp with his parents, Frankl wrote the book "Healing of the Soul", the first version of his main work. He proceeded from the fact that if he does not survive, then at least his book has a chance to survive.

Despite all the tragic circumstances, his life has gained a certain meaning and structure. After some time, the hospital in which he worked was closed, and in September G. Frankl, together with the whole family, was sent to a concentration camp. The only thing he took with him was the manuscript of a book sewn in a lining of a coat, in the hope of somehow maintaining it.

Until October, this camp was relatively soft compared to others, then it was called the "exemplary ghetto." There were no gas chambers in it, it was sent to other concentration camps from it to death, the prisoners there sometimes had the opportunity to communicate with each other. In Terezienstadt, he lost both parents. Father lived for several months, weakened by hunger and pneumonia.

Frankl described in detail a part with him. They were in one camp, but in different huts; The camp allowed them to see them at certain hours in the afternoon, and at night they diverged in their places. Father was already over 80, he was very ill, he was dying, and Frankl, like a doctor, knew that he had a few hours to live. Victor managed to somehow get the ampoule of morphine, and he had an injection to his father to alleviate his pain.