Talk:Viktor Frankl

Grieving process

Wasn't he one of the founders (through his terrible experience) of the "five-step" grieving process (see Grief)?

No, he was not. Apparently he did it without grieving, read this, please [1].

Bias

This is a terrible article, very biased. Nothing about "man's search for meaning" reception, etc, fame as a book. It is fine to include criticism but this article is all criticism, not reflective of the general scholarship or journalism on Frankl. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.154.13.218 (talk) 05:22, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

YES: this article is ridiculously devoted to a couple of non-entities carping at trivial inconsistencies they claim to have found in Frankl's account of his experience....and who say that his philosophy and psychology condone Nazism: BLATANT and cynical misrepresentations of Frankl's work. Why is more than 2/3 of the entry on Frankl dedicated to these losers? 2601:2C4:4382:5B80:1DD3:F1EF:4C2D:3EB0 (talk) 18:58, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

This article has similar problems with the Man's Search for Meaning article in that it's written like a hit piece rather than being unbiased.

edit: I wrote to the USHMM store at the email provided by their website (Museum_shop@ushmm.org) inquiring Man's Search for Meaning and Frankl. A representative told me that the store does in fact sell books by Frankl including Man's Search. I will edit the article to reflect this

Kilometerman (talk) 02:52, 10 March 2019 (UTC)

This article does have problems but not the ones you suggest, instead it is WP:PRIMARY promotional claims of Frankl, that Frankl saved people and this is mentioned in the article, yet no one has ever come forth, ever, to even hint that what Frankl claims. Ever transpired. Not a soul.

Your email suffers from this same problem. Do not remove WP:SECONDARY sources but seek to add them in the future, if you feel that there is a bias problem.

213.202.136.143 (talk) 20:11, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Frankl's grandson mass-edited this page

It appears that around April 2020, Frankl's grandson Alexvesely made mass edits to the Viktor Frankl page. e.g. this edit, rewriting the whole page, including deleting all of the large Controversy section, replacing it with 2 lines. That all seems extremely inappropriate. I had looked up a lot of the references that were linked to by that Controversy section a couple of years ago, and they seemed reliable sources. I tried to revert today but must be done manually, it said. I don't have time but it doesn't seem like someone's grandson should be totally rewriting, whitewashing, their grandfather's page. I'm not sure how this was allowed to happen. 122.148.184.131 (talk) 21:28, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

please put back one or two bits of the previous content? JCJC777 (talk) 13:49, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

Ok, so it seems Frankl's grandson's whitewashing of this page has been allowed to stand. Including his deletion of the sizable Controversy section and all references to anything negative. Do this often happen on wikipedia?! What is the proper way of protesting and reverting such an inappropriate intervention in a page as Frankl's grandson has done here? It's totally outrageous. As has been well said elsewhere on this talk page, this page has been lobotomised. (This is a reference to Frankl's own "experiments", but you can't read about them on wikipedia now.) 122.148.184.131 (talk) 10:27, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

The idea

The idea you survive a death/extermination camp "because" you find the meaming of life is profoundly unscientific as it cannot be falsified. More concretely, the fact that your life has a meaning doesn't prevent the SS from murdering you. There could be a million witnesses to that, but most of them died. As a couter-example, ANNE FRANK could do.

The idea of surviving s death camp "because" you find a meaning in life is an 🤬 insult to the millions of people whose life DID HAVE A MEANING, and whget slaughtered ny the SS anyway. ANNE FRANK among others. It seems to me that the best explanation for FRANKL's survival is that he was a doctor!! 80.62.116.109 (talk) 14:11, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

That's a great point: his being a doctor seems to have helped him get into a more survivable situation. To me, the explanation for his survival is probably unknowable. Luck or fate (depending on your point of view)? The kaleidoscope of a thousands of moments and circumstances? Es1964 (talk) 13:29, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

Obviously, having a meaning doesn't make you undestructible. But it can also be true that eating vegetables makes you healthy even if it doesn't prevent you from being hit by a car.

Some might say that people with meaning in their lives can also die of disease or whatever but the claim isn't that it makes you inmune or anything, it just says that it makes people's health and behavior more adaptative. And even if someone say s their grandmother died at 100 while smoking 5 boxes of cigarettes per day, it doesn't necessarily make cigarettes healthy, just like saying that the average person tends to survive more with found meaning doesn't mean everyone would survive. 83.49.89.20 (talk) 09:33, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

False Claims in "Controversy" section

Full disclosure:

As disclosed in earlier commentaries, I am indeed Viktor Frankl's grandson. Consequently, I possess an intimate understanding of his life story and have extensive access to the documents housed in the Viktor Frankl Archives in Vienna. These documents, available for research purposes, remain untapped by Mr. Pytell, leading to speculative conclusions on his part regarding Frankl's actions and thoughts during specific periods of his life.

My objective is not to romanticize my grandfather's image or sell anything, but rather to counter, with facts, the speculations of a single individual, who openly admits to “despising” Frankl and who fabricates a non-existing “controversy” based on his own sloppy research. Mr. Pytell’s curious scientific procedure has been criticized by several authors who came across his publications:

• Pytell has simply not done his homework (Janik, A. (2007). Viktor Frankl. Review. Central European History, 2, 3.)
• [The book] shows contemporary history at its muck-raking weakest. (ibid.)
• [...] hardly excusable ignorance [...] (ibid.)
• [...] ignores much of the literature on Viennese Jewry’s role in the wider cultural arena (Kauders, A. D. (2016). Review. German History, 34, 3.)
• [...] outdated discourse about Vienna’s kaleidoscopic Jewish culture exacerbated by numerous inaccuracies and misrepresentations [...] (Corbett, T. (2016). Viktor Frankl’s search for meaning: An emblematic 20th-century life by Timothy Pytell (review). Journal of Austrian Studies, 49(3–4), 181.)
• Statements, which abound in the work, rankle in the face of the vast wealth of literature on Central European and Viennese Jewish culture that has proliferated in the two decades since Pytell began his research on Viktor Frankl. (ibid.)
• Not surprisingly, the footnotes reveal that this is a result of the most recent litera- ture cited dating from the 1980s (his misreading of Lisa Silverman’s brilliant work notwithstanding). (ibid.)
• Erroneous renditions of German nomenclature and quotations abound, whether owing to the author or the editor is yet unclear, enhancing the sense that this work could have engaged better with the Central European context. (ibid.)
• [...] frankly patchy in its narration of Frankl’s life in his Central European environs. (Engstrom, E. J. (2018). Timothy E. Pytell. Viktor Frankl’s search for meaning: An emblematic 20th-century life. Review. American Historical Review, 123, 1419.)
• underdeveloped, lacking a conclusion and too often indulging in superficial digressions into scholarly literature on the Holocaust (ibid.)

The former head of the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance (DÖW), Dr. Wolfgang Neugebauer wrote another scathing commentary about his personal encounter with Mr. Pytell (see bottom).

False Claim #1:

"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, conveys 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.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", when rather the impression of staying for months, Frankl was held close to the train, in the "depot prisoner" area of Auschwitz and for no more than a few days, he was neither registered there, nor assigned a number before being sent on to a subsidiary work camp of Dachau, known as Kaufering III, that together with Terezín, is the true setting of much of what is described in his book.

Refutation #1:

On page 3 of “Mans Search for Meaning” Frankl writes: “Most of the events described here did not take place in the large and famous camps, but in the small ones where most of the real extermination took place.” [Man’s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press, Boston 2006, ISBN 9780807014271]. Frankl never made a secret of having spent just three nights at Auschwitz, and many recordings are available in which he publicly mentions that fact, for example this one from 1993: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga9CVU1L55Y (see 4:30) ]

False Claim #2:

With Langer criticizing Frankl's tone as almost self-congratulatory and promotional throughout, 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.

Refutation #2:

Frankl always pointed out that meaning can not be made but must be found. Any attempt of “Meaning-making” can indeed be seen as a problematic idea that Frankl himself rejected:

- “Properly speaking, meaning cannot be bestowed, and least of all can the therapist give meaning - that is, give meaning to the life of the patient or provide the patient with this meaning along the way. Rather, meaning must be found, and it can only be found by oneself.” (Frankl, On the Theory and Therapy of Mental Disorders, Brunner-Routledge, London-New York 2004, ISBN 0415950295, page 9)

- (...) meaning must be discovered, it cannot be invented. Sense cannot be created, but what may well be created is nonsense.” (Frankl, The Unheard Cry for Meaning, Simon & Schuster, NY 1978, ISBN 0-671-24736-0, page 90)

Contrary to the idea of “Meaning-making”, Frankl attributed an objective quality to meaning, which is to be perceived and recognized similar to Wertheimer's “Gestalt”-perception: “in a Gestalt perception in the traditional sense of the term we are perceiving a figure against a background; in finding meaning, however, we are perceiving a possibility embedded in reality.” (Frankl, The Unheard Cry for Meaning, Simon & Schuster, NY 1978, ISBN 0-671-24736-0, page 38)

False Claim #3:

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 accommodations in ideology without the knowledge that Victor Frankl was an advocate/"embraced" the key ideas of the Nazi psychotherapy movement ("will and responsibility") as a form of therapy in the late 1930s. When at that time Frankl would submit a paper and contributed to the 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", both at a time before Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938. Frankl's founding logotherapy paper, was submitted to and published in the Zentrallblatt fuer Psychotherapie [sic] the journal of the Goering Institute, a psychotherapy movement, with the "proclaimed agenda of building psychotherapy that affirmed a Nazi-oriented worldview".

The origins of logotherapy, as described by Frankl, were therefore a major issue of continuity that Biographer 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.]

Refutation #3:

Frankl was a Jewish doctor, and as such could never have submitted papers to the Goering Institute whose explicit goal was “to rid psychotherapy of Jewish influence and propagate a new Aryan form of psychotherapy” [Alexander Batthyány, Viktor Frankl and the Shoa – Advancing the Debate, Springer Briefs in Psychology, NY 2021, https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-83063-2, p. 37]. Rather, Frankl's article was published in the Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie, the Journal of the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy. The Zentralblatt had been founded in 1928 under C.G. Jung in his capacity of head of the International Society; and Jung had made clear in a circular that the Zentralblatt was, and would remain, not a political mouthpiece, and retain its political neutrality. [Batthyány 2021, p. 44]. And it was in this journal that Frankl published his criticism of National Socialist psychotherapy [V. Frankl, “Zur geistigen Problematik der Psychotherapie”, Zbl. f. Psychoth. 10, 33-75, 1938]

Frankl had been a member of the Austrian section of the General International Medical Society for Psychotherapy, the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Psychotherapie und psychische Hygiene (Austrian Society for Psychotherapy and Mental Hygiene) founded in March 1936, two years before the “Anschluss,” i.e. at a time when Austria was still governed by the Vaterländische Front and all Nazi activities were strictly prohibited. Frankl was a regular attendant of the meetings of this Society in its founding year, 1936.

In 1938, after the “Anschluss,” the Austrian chapter of the International General Medical Society was dissolved— precisely because it was not politically aligned with the Nazis and because the majority of its members were, as Frankl, Jewish. At the same time the Berlin-based Göring Institute established an Austrian section – which obviously would not accomodate any Jewish members. Pytell, however, turns Frankl's membership at the dissolved Austrian Society for Psychotherapy into work for the Vienna branch of the Göring Institute.

[Sources:

- Alexander Batthyány, Viktor Frankl and the Shoa, Springer Briefs in Psychology, NY 2021, p. 29-35

- Aichhorn, T. & Rothländer, C. (2012). Zur Errichtung der Wiener Arbeitsgemeinschaft des Göring-Instituts und der Arbeits- und Ausbildungsgruppe von August Aichhorn. In: Ash, M. G., & Aichhorn, T. (2012). Materialien zur Geschichte der Psychoanalyse in Wien 1938-1945. Frankfurt: Brandes & Apsel, p. 347ff. ]

False Claim #4:

[...] 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."

Refutation #4:

Frankl did not take different stances on this matter but one stance only. Pytell accuses Frankl of having „changed his stance“ on the matter, yet he fails to provide any direct quote of Frankl claiming he had indeed conceived his theories in the camps. Yet numerous records exist in which Frankl points out that he did not ”come out of“ but ”went into the camps“ with his theories already developed and that any opposite statement having come from some of his publishers was simply false. In the book Man’s Search for Meaning itself, Frankl writes about having to let go of the “book manuscript containing his logotherapeutic concepts” upon entering Auschwitz. [Man’s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press, Boston 2006, p.14]. To then claim to have conceived Logotherapy in Auschwitz would have been contradictory to Frankl's own account. That false claim was indeed put on a backcover text of an edition of Man's Search for Meaning by the American publisher (Beacon Press) in the 1950s, which obviously happened without Frankl's approval and was soon after removed. On countless occasions Frankl mentioned this marketing text to have been a misleading publicity stunt by his American publishers:

- “What my American publishers have sometimes stated of the back of my books is not correct. I did not come out, as they say, from Auschwitz with a brand new type of psychotherapy, but I had entered it already with the respective manuscript. “ [V. Frankl, On the Development of Logotherapy, 1989, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEKBMPeHY1Q , 2:10]

- (Interviewer:)“You yourself spent three years in 4 German concentration camps in World War II. It’s been said that you came out of the concentration camps with your new theory.” - (Frankl:) “This is not exactly the truth. When I entered the concentration camp of Auschwitz I had the full-length manuscript of my first book ( (The Doctor and the Soul) in my pocket, but of course it was confiscated ...”

[V. Frankl, U.S. Radio interview 1970s, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=venMlKH2eKE ]

False Claim #5:

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 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.

Refutation #5:

At said event at the Institute for Adult Jewish Studies Frankl talked about antisemitism in Austria not being significantly more prevalent than in other countries. To support this impression, he said: “After all, Austria's democratically elected chancellor at the time (Bruno Kreisky) is Jewish.” That statement was correct, however Kreisky at the time had fallen into unpopularity for his politics of initiating talks with the PLO. Mentioning Kreiskys name stirred up high emotions and protest from the audience for these political reasons. They had nothing to do with the point Frankl had tried to make, or his opinions about collective guilt. [ Source: The Jewish Week – American Examiner, November 19, 1978, p. 12; https://viktor-frankl-archiv.org/time_window/img/591.010B.pdf ]

False Claim #6:

In his "Gutachten" Gestapo profile, Frankl is described as "politically perfect" by the Nazi secret police, with Frankl's membership in the 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.

Refutation #6:

Frankl was Jewish and therefore could not possibly have been accepted as a member of the Austro-fascist “Fatherland Front”, which was a famously fiercely antisemitic organization. The very idea that a Jewish man would be a member is ridiculous, and shows the sloppiness of Pytells historic research. Pytell fails to produce the “Gutachten” - document describing Frankl as “politically perfect”, which, given Frankls involvement in the Zionist movement, is highly unlikely to exist:

At the time (late 1930s) Frankl maintained close relations to the Austrian Zionist movement, occasionally delivering lectures at their gatherings. In the period preceding the "Anschluss" - the forced annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany - an atmosphere of apprehension and despair was prevalent. This is vividly illustrated by the invitation extended to Viktor Frankl by the Zionist Youth Section to deliver two lectures on the "Psychological Problems of Jewish Youth." The announcement of the second lecture was published on March 11, just one day before Hitler's forces crossed the border, bringing an abrupt halt to all activities of the organization; https://anno.onb.ac.at/cgi-content/anno?aid=dst&datum=19380311&seite=4

False Claim #7:

None of Frankl's obituaries mention the unqualified and unskilled brain lobotomy and trepanation medical 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.

Refutation #7:

None of the obituaries mention this, because it did not happen. The Nazis did not “approve” any of Frankl's surgeries. Their interest was not in doctors rescuing Jewish patients, but rather the opposite. Jews did not commit suicide as a form of “resistance” against the Nazis. [ Batthyány 2021, p. 64)

Standardized qualification for performing brain surgeries was introduced in Austria after the war. Frankl could not acquire such a specialist qualification because it did not yet exist. Such training was, at that time, much more informal and largely depended on whether one’s teachers and mentors were active in the field of neurosurgery. And indeed, Frankl had learned and worked under the supervision of Otto Pötzl in the years before and Pötzl was widely known and respected as one of the pioneers of Viennese psychosurgery, i.e. the neurosurgical therapy of severe mental disorders [ Hoff, H. (1952). Professor Dr. Otto Pötzl - 75 Jahre. Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift, 102, 971f. ]**

Furthermore, we know that the clinical director of the Rothschild Hospital, Dr. Reich, called Frankl to the hospital outside the latter’s regular on-call shifts, for him to treat patients with barbiturate poisoning (Frankl, 1995, p. 58), suggesting that he supported and encouraged Frankl’s rescue attempts. Had Frankl not been professionally qualified, the clinical director of the hospital would hardly have encouraged, or asked for them. Hence certainly among most of the medical superintendents of the Israelite Community’s hospital, Frankl’s intervention to treat severe barbiturate poisoning was supported and even requested. Secondly, he had developed a successful intervention to treat these very patients (which was, incidentally, taken up by other researchers in the 1950s, see, for example, zur Verth [1951] and Dönhardt [1959]). [ zur Verth, C. (1951), ”Pervitinbehandlung bei Schlafmittelvergiftung,” Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift, 76(24), 806–807. ]

Therefore Frankl was neither “unqualified” nor “unskilled” and saved lives with his surgical interventions, most famously in the case of Ms. Geldner, one of the Rothschild Hospital patients who had tried to commit suicide, and who tells the story of an (unnamed) young doctor at the Neurology Department who “eagerly tried everything he could to save my life.” Given the facts above there can be no doubt that she was referring to Frankl. Ms. Gelder, after being successfully resusciated, managed to flee the country. [Batthyány 2021, p. 63 ]

False Claim #8:

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..

Refutation #8:

He did have the required training to operate at the time. As mentioned, prior to 1946 no standardized training was required [ Diemath, H.E. (2014), “50 Jahre Neurochirurgische Universitätsklinik Wien. Neurochirurgische Erinnerungen – Von der Nachkriegszeit zur Erfolgsgeschichte.” Journal für Neurologie, Neurochirurgie und Psychiatrie 15:4; Krüger, J. (2005), Zur Geschichte der Neurochirurgie. Nervenheilkunde 24:09, p. 837-846. ]

The Rothschild hospital was a private hospital for Jewish patients run by Jewish doctors. No Nazis had any say in who was operated on. The notion that Frankl, as head of the neurological department would need to ask “the Nazis for approval” is historically innacurate. Pytell fails to specify which Nazis Frankl alledgedly asked for permissions.

False Claim #9:

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.

Refutation #9:

Three of the four citations Pytell lis listing here are his own articles. Guenther Bischof is the Editor of the book “Austrian lives”, which includes an article by Pytell in which he brings up this claim that Frankl tried to “ingratiate” himself. Pytell is self-referencing his own article in that book, misleadingly suggesting the claims he made therein were made by Guenther Bischof. The third source he quotes “Freud's World” contains no such claim.

Here the above mentioned commentary by Dr. Wolfgang Neugebauer:

(Excerpt from Alexander Batthyány, Viktor Frankl and the Shoa – Advancing the Debate, Springer Briefs in Psychology, NY 2021)

Foreword

by Wolfgang Neugebauer

[Wolfgang Neugebauer, Dr. phil., historian, 1983–2004 head of the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance (DÖW), since 1995 honorary professor of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna; numerous publications on the resistance and NS euthanasia. ]

To those who were personally acquainted with Viktor Frankl, the effect of his charismatic personality was inescapable. Like the many thousands of participants in the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Austria’s violent “Anschluss” to Nazi Germany that was held outside Vienna’s city hall on 10 March 1988, I was deeply moved by Viktor Frankl’s speech.

On the one hand, I was inspired by the captivating rhetoric and oratory artistry Frankl displayed at the age of 83; on the other hand, I was touched by the substance of his address: rejecting any notion of collective guilt from a position of reconciliation.

However, as a historian and head of the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance (DÖW), an organization that was set up by former resistance fighters and victims of National Socialism, I took a critical view vis-à-vis some of Frankl’s observations and I do not consider myself his apologist. Not least, I was concerned, back in 1995, that Frankl did not more emphatically and at an earlier date reject the politically motivated ingratiation of FPÖ chairman Jörg Haider, whom I judged to be a right-wing extremist and had journalistic as well as legal disputes with. In the course of my research into the resistance and Nazi euthanasia, I had previously come across Viktor Frankl’s efforts, in collaboration with Prof. Otto Pötzl, head of the Psychiatric-Neurological Clinic at the Vienna University Hospital, and the social worker for the Jewish community in Vienna, Franziska Löw, to save Jewish patients, particularly children, from Nazi euthanasia.

In 1993 I held, together with my DÖW colleague, Dr. Elisabeth Klamper, an extensive interview with Viktor Frankl at his apartment at Mariannengasse 1 in Vienna’s ninth district, where he talked inter alia about his difficult years as a physician at the Rothschild Hospital and paid homage to his fellow doctors. He had amazing memory and was able to identify all the doctors depicted on a photograph from 1941 or 1942.

I was all the more taken aback—indeed, horrified—when Prof. Alexander Batthyány sent me an excerpt from an article published by Dr. Timothy Pytell that ascribes the assertion that “Frankl did not sabotage any euthanasia” to me. I have never made this statement and it contradicts all my publications on the resistance and Nazi euthanasia that mention Frankl’s efforts to save Jewish patients from euthanasia. Maybe Timothy Pytell misunderstood my observation that most of those saved from euthanasia by Frankl and Löw became victims of the Shoah at a later date.

Pytell did not conduct an interview (with structured questions and subsequent authorization) with me in 1997, but asked me, in the course of a short conversation, in-depth questions about Frankl’s brain operations at the Jewish Hospital, which I could not comment on for lack of medical knowledge. Back then I already perceived (and I clearly remember to this day) that Timothy Pytell was driven by a downright fanatical rejection of Viktor Frankl.

I subsequently had the opportunity to read Alexander Batthyány’s critical works on the subject of Timothy Pytell’s publications on Frankl. I have rarely come across such a multitude of manipulations and factual errors, as well as ignorance of scientific literature and relevant archive materials, as in Pytell’s publications. I was particularly disconcerted by Pytell’s compulsive endeavor to depict the Jew, anti-Nazi, and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl in ostensible proximity to National Socialism.

I am very grateful to Alexander Batthyány for taking the trouble to delve into Timothy Pytell’s works and to refute every single allegation against Viktor Frankl. He comes to the conclusion that these publications mainly served the purpose of reinforcing a pre-existing rejection of Viktor Frankl and his work with insinuations, contrived “facts,” and misinterpretations, exacerbated by a lack of German language skills.

Whether publications of such “quality” as Timothy Pytell’s anti-Frankl works are in fact deserving of comprehensive rebuttal is up for discussion. However, I am convinced that Alexander Batthyány’s was and remains relevant, not least because impartial readers, who are not historians of the Nazi era, cannot discern the questionability of Pytell’s assertions—at least not at first glance.

Take for example Timothy Pytell’s assertion that Dr. Alfred Mauczka, who, as head of Steinhof, was Frankl’s superior until 1937, became an “applicant” for NSDAP membership on April 14, 1940. This assertion, which was intended to construe a—temporally far-fetched—link between Frankl and an alleged Nazi, can only be falsified by attentively reading the relevant index card of the Reichsärztekammer [Reich Chamber of Physicians], which is available at the German Federal Archive’s collection of the former Berlin Document Center. Timothy Pytell has turned the applicant for the Reich Chamber of Physicians into an applicant for the NSDAP, as can be gleaned from the detailed statement in the appendix.

Viktor Frankl, a scientist of international renown and founder of a new school of psychotherapy, who asserted himself against anti-Semitism, discrimination, and Nazi persecution in the course of his dramatic life, deserves to have his reputation defended against disparagement and hostility under the guise of science. Alexander Batthyány has convincingly succeeded in doing just that.

University of Vienna Wolfgang Neugebauer Vienna, Austria

Alexvesely (talk) 18:05, 21 November 2023 (UTC)

"I am very grateful to Alexander Batthyány for taking the trouble to delve into Timothy Pytell’s works and to refute every single allegation against Viktor Frankl. He comes to the conclusion that these publications mainly served the purpose of reinforcing a pre-existing rejection of Viktor Frankl.."

Gee...Perhaps your extensive activities on this page "mainly serves the purpose of reinforcing a pre-existing" acceptance of Frankl?!

Perhaps a more "full disclosure" would have mentioned that Alexander Batthyany, who you quote so extensively, apparently "holds the Viktor Frankl Chair for Philosophy and Psychology at the International Academy of Philosophy in the Principality of Liechtenstein" and is "Director of the Viktor Frankl Institute and the Viktor Frankl Archives in Vienna and first editor of the 14-volume edition of the Collected Works of Viktor Frankl." You merely mentioned that you "have extensive access to the documents housed in the Viktor Frankl Archives in Vienna". It seems you are actually "head of the Viktor Frankl Media Archives in Vienna", have directed a documentary about Frankl, and "traveled the world speaking on the topic of Logotherapy, the meaning-centered school of psychotherapy founded by his grandfather Viktor Frankl".

Maybe I suggest someone's grandson, whose life's work seems based around their grandfather's, quoting from their friend's book defending their grandfather, is the last place one would look for NPOV. At least you refrained from extensively editing the page this time, deleting the parts you took issue with; thank you for that. Oh - but that was in 2020, the year you "cofounded the Viktor Frankl Institute of America"! Amazing. Maybe have a look at the wikipedia pages on conflict-of-interest editing, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest - which says for example "If you have a personal connection to a topic or person, you are advised to refrain from editing those articles directly and provide full disclosure of the connection if you comment about the article on talk pages or in other discussions". 122.148.184.131 (talk) 14:47, 13 December 2023 (UTC)