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psychiatry, and by 1939 he was head of the neurology department at the Rothschild Hospital, the only Jewish hospital in Vienna. This gave him and his family some protection against deportation, but in 1942, when the American consulate in Vienna told him he was eligible for a visa that would guarantee his survival, he decided to stay, probably because his parents were aged. In September that year Viktor and his family were arrested and deported, Frankl spending the next three years in four concentration camps—Theresienstadt, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Kaufering and Türkheim, part of the Dachau complex. He and his father had been separated from the rest of the family, and he watched his father die in the camp where they were then incarcerated. When Viktor returned home, he found that his mother, brother and wife had also perished.
    Before he went to the camps he had begun a book on a new form of psychotherapy (which we shall come to), but it was confiscated and he never saw it again. His experiences during those years, however, reinforced his beliefs, and when he returned to Vienna he wrote a new book, in nine days. It was published in 1946 in German as A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp , the title later changed to Say Yes to Life in Spite of Everything ; and in 1959 it appeared in English as Man’s Search for Meaning . It has since sold more than twelve million copies in twenty-four languages, and has been voted among the ten most influential books in America. 19
    Frankl evolved “logotherapy,” by which he meant a system of psychiatric treatment for what he called the “meta-clinical problem of our day”—namely, the “mass neurosis” concerning the meaning of life. His most vivid insight, he said, had come to him in the camps with his identification of what someone else had called “give-up-itis.” One day an individual in the camps would simply refuse to get out of bed in the morning, dig deep into a secret pocket to find one remaining cigarette, and start to smoke. Inevitably, within forty-eight hours that person was dead.
    Frankl’s main argument is that we have a choice of how we will respond to suffering. We all suffer—not to the same extent, of course—and for most of us nowhere near as much as people suffered in the camps. But we are free to respond to that suffering, to make it an achievement, even to make it ennobling. “We give suffering a meaning by our response.” He disagreed with Freud that the aim of life is pleasure, and with Adler that the aim is power. For Frankl, the main aim of life is the discovery of meaning, and he quoted various polls, in Europe and America, which showed that, at the time, more people were concerned about meaning in their lives than, say, money. He referred to Irvin Yalom’s book Existential Psychotherapy (1980), which said that 30 percent of the people who came to him for help were searching for meaning in their lives, and that 90 percent of alcoholics said they found their lives meaningless.
    For Frankl, modern life is lived in an existential vacuum, where we have been estranged from our instincts and have lost our traditions; we live within a “tragic triad” of pain, guilt and death. The way out of this triad, he insisted, was “out there” in the world, not within us, and meaning was to be found in one of three ways—by deed, actions in the world; by someone, love; or by turning our inevitable suffering into something ennobling. We must not fear death, but use its inevitability to underscore the transitoriness of the world so that we act now rather than later. He agreed with Carl Rogers that self-actualization was the aim, but that it could be achieved only as a side effect of self-transcendence—surpassing ourselves—in which the conquest of suffering offers the most widely available possibility. We must lead our lives constantly imagining we are on our deathbed looking back, and asking ourselves whether we have lived a life we can be at peace