The Doctor and the Soul

Preface to the Third Edition (1985)
 
This third revised and enlarged edition of The Doctor and the Soul is the fifty-seventh that has been published in nine languages (in addition to the German original and the English edition, there are Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Finnish, Dutch, Danish ,and Portuguese versions). Let me, therefore, say a few words regarding the story behind the book a story that has often been obscured by the misconceptions of the mass media whose representatives never weary of proclaiming that Viktor Frankl came out of Auschwitz with a brand-new psychotherapeutic system he had developed in the concentration camp. The very opposite is true: I entered  the camp with a full-length book manuscript (hidden under the lining of my overcoat) which was indeed an outline of the basic concepts of logotherapy. I had worked on it up to the last moment and hoped to save it during the period of imprisonment. I could not anticipate that it would be taken away from me immediately and, of course, destroyed. Under the circumstances, I felt like a father who was not spared watching his children murdered before his eyes. The book was, in fact, my spiritual child who I d hoped would survive even if I did not do so myself.

To be sure, the concentration camps I went through did in fact serve as a testing ground that confirmed one of the main tenets of logotherapy, the theory that the basic meaning orientation of an individual or, as I am used to calling it, the will to meaning has actual survival value. Under comparable circumstances, those inmates who were oriented toward the future, whether it was a task to complete in the future, or a beloved person to be reunited with, were most likely to survive the horrors of the camps (I say camps because the same lessons can be learned from the psychiatric literature on American soldiers kept in Japanese, North-Korean, and North-Vietnamese Prisoner of War camps).
 
Certainly this is true in my own case

VIKTOR E. FRANKL (1905-1997) was Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Vienna. During World War II, he spent three years in Auschwitz, Dachau, and other concentration camps. He was the founder of the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy--the school of logotherapy--and President of the Austrian Medical Society of Psychotherapy. His forty books, which include Man s Search for Meaning, Psychotherapy and Existentialism, and The Will to Meaning, have been translated into fifty languages.

Perhaps the most significant thinking since Freud and Adler. American Journal of Psychiatry

His most important book. . . . It gives an existential and spiritual dimension to the work of psychotherapy. Positive Health
 
[Frankl] subject[s] the great phenomenon of life to a new evaluation. . . . Well written and backed by powerful personal conviction. American Journal of Psychotherapy