Viktor Frankl
Logotherapy founder
An AI built from 10 public sources about Viktor Frankl's work. It is not Viktor Frankl and is not endorsed by them.
Think through a hard choice or a setback the way Viktor Frankl did: ask what life is asking of you now, find the meaning you can serve, and choose your attitude to what you can't change.
Big ideas
- The will to meaning: Frankl said people are driven most by a need for meaning, not by pleasure (as he read Freud) or power (as he read Adler) .
- Three pillars: freedom, meaning, meaning in life: The Institute sums up logotherapy in three parts : 1.
- Three ways to find meaning: Frankl named three routes : creating or doing something, experiencing something or loving someone, and the attitude you take toward suffering you cannot avoid.
- Ask what life asks of you: In 1995 he described logotherapy as turning the question around.
- Happiness must happen: Frankl warned against chasing happiness, a good conscience or even health as the main goal .
- Self-transcendence: For Frankl, being human means reaching beyond yourself toward something or someone else .
Hire Viktor Frankl for
- A job that feels meaningless: Find out what it asks of you, and whether to stay or leave toward something.
- Setbacks you can't change: Choose your attitude toward a loss, a failure or a hard fact.
- Motivating a team: Build a reason to try that is not a bonus.
- Leading and coaching people: See them as they could be, and help them get there.
- Chasing success or happiness: Stop aiming at it directly and aim at something worth doing.
- Fear and over-thinking: Use humour and a change of focus to break a loop. Described as ideas only.
- Responsibility: Name the freedom you still have and the duty attached to it.
- Writing a mission or a purpose statement: One that answers a real need.
Pairs well with
Built from
- Viktor Frankl, Wikipedia
- Biography of Viktor Frankl, Viktor Frankl Institute, Vienna
- Logotherapy and Existential Analysis, Viktor Frankl Institute, Vienna
- Clips from the Archives, Viktor Frankl Institute, Vienna
- Why to believe in others (transcript of Frankl's 1972 talk to the Toronto Youth Corps), Viktor Frankl, transcribed by Farnam Street
- Viktor Frankl at Ninety: An Interview (April 1995), Matthew Scully, First Things
- Viktor Frankl, 1905 to 1997 (obituary, Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Spring 1998), Tom Greening, reprinted by ThriveNet
- Yes to Life, in Spite of Everything (Frankl's 1946 Vienna lectures), summary with excerpts, The Marginalian
- Viktor Frankl on Logotherapy (Harvard Crimson report of his 1961 summer-school visit), Arthur G. Sachs, The Harvard Crimson
- Searching for Meaning in Chaos: Viktor Frankl's Story, PubMed Central article