SOURCE: "A Conversation with Viktor Frankl of Vienna," in Psychology Today, Vol. 1, No. 9, February, 1968, pp. 57-63.

[In the following interview, Frankl discusses his concentration camp experiences and his views on existentialism and modern psychotherapy.]

[Hall]: You were already a psychiatrist in Vienna when Hitler marched into Austria. How did that affect you immediately?

[Frankl]: After Hitler came, I stayed in Vienna. My sister immigrated to Australia and my brother tried to get shelter in Italy. He was captured by the SS and taken with his wife to Auschwitz. I had been assigned to run the Neurological Department of the Jewish Hospital, so I was not only allowed to stay in Vienna myself, but even could keep my old parents with me. My father at that time was a bit more than eighty years old.

Was there any opportunity for you to leave the country?

I tried to get an immigration visa to the United States. Finally, I did. I was free to leave, to develop my theory and to promulgate it. My parents were so happy. They said, "Now Viktor will finally leave here." But at the last minute I hesitated to use the visa for which I had waited so long. I knew that a few weeks after I left the country, my old parents would be brought to a concentration camp. I didn't know what to do.

And they wanted you to leave even though your position was their protection?

Yes. They were insisting. You know, I've never told anyone this—But about this time I had a strange dream, one that belongs to my deepest experiences in the realm of dreaming. I dreamed that people were lined up—psychotics, patients—to be taken to the gas chambers. And I felt so deep a compassion that I decided to join them. I felt that I must do something and working as a psychotherapist in a concentration camp, supporting the people there mentally, would be incomparably more meaningful than just being one more psychiatrist in Manhattan.

As I said, I didn't know what to do. So with a briefcase I covered the yellow star I had to wear on my coat and sat down in the largest cathedral in the center of Vienna one evening. There was an organ concert, and I thought, "Let's sit down and listen to the music and ponder the whole question. Relax, Viktor, you are very distracted. Just contemplate and meditate far from the turmoil of Vienna." Then I asked myself what I was to do. Should I sacrifice my family for the sake of the cause to which I had devoted my life, or should I sacrifice this cause for the sake of my parents. When confronted with this kind of question, one longs for an answer from Heaven.

What you were confronting was yourself, wasn't it? Yourself and the question of how committed you were to what you said you believe.

Yes. I left the cathedral and went home. There, on the radio set, was a piece of marble. I asked my Father what it was. He was a pious Jew and had picked up at the site of a large Viennese synagogue this stone, a part of the [tablets] containing the Ten Commandments. On the stone was an engraved and gilded Hebrew letter. My father told me the letter occurred in only one of the commandments, "Honor thy father and mother and you will stay in the land." Thereupon I decided to stay in Austria and let the American visa lapse.

But you already knew your decision, really, didn't you?

You would be justified in saying this was a projective test. I had made the decision in the depth of my heart long ago and projected it into this piece of marble. You would be perfectly right, but allow me then to add that if I had seen nothing in this marble but calcium carbonate, CaCO3, that also would have been a projective test, but it would have been only the projection of my inner existential vacuum. And so I made the decision and deliberately risked everything. But I couldn't help it.

And so you were sent to Auschwitz. Once in the concentration camp, were you able to help as a psychiatrist?

Only underground, illegally. My time in the camp, except for the last few weeks, was spent in digging and laying tracks for railway lines, in digging a tunnel for a water main. The opportunities for psychotherapy were naturally limited. But I remember once when the lights were out and we lay in our earthen huts. The whole camp had been forced to fast for the day because no one would identify the half-starved prisoner who stole a few pounds of potatoes. Someone asked me there in the dark: "Tell us now, psychiatrist. Where is there hope?" I told them we all faced death. But I told them that, in spite of this, I had no intention of losing hope and giving up. For no man knew what the future would bring, much less the next hour. And I spoke of the many opportunities of giving life a meaning. Human life never ceases to have a meaning and this infinite meaning of life includes suffering and dying, privation and death. Unless there is such an unconditional meaning to life, there would be no point in surviving. When the electric bulb flared up again, I saw the miserable figures of my friends, limping toward me to thank me.

What a moving experience! The early title of your book, Man's Search for Meaning, was From Death-Camp to Existentialism. I am going to ask a stupid question. Please forgive me.

There are only stupid answers. No stupid questions.

Was your existential decision made when you stayed in Vienna instead of coming to Manhattan?

That was not my existential decision, for everyone has to make an existential decision in each moment of his life. What is true is that it was one of my existential decisions. What is not true is that I came out of Auschwitz with my theory of psychotherapy. I entered Auschwitz with the manuscript of my book in my pocket. In the camp we were allowed to keep nothing. Not a wedding ring, a medal, or a good-luck piece. But the tenets of logotherapy were justified by the acid test of the concentration camp. My experiences in the camp were my empirical validations of existentialism.

Why do you call your theory of psychotherapy "logotherapy"?

Logos is a Greek word that denotes "meaning." Logotherapy focuses on the meaning of human existence as well as on man's search for such a meaning. It is this striving to find a meaning in one's life that is the primary motivational force in man. That is why I speak of a will to meaning in contrast to the pleasure principle of Freudian psychoanalysis or the will to power of Adlerian psychology.

Do you regard this concept of man as human only to the extent he reaches beyond himself as a religious concept?

It has nothing to do with theology and the supernatural whatsoever; but it is a tradition of European philosophy, even atheistic philosophy. And this self-transcendence is lived out by what I call man's will to meaning. This will to meaning is frustrated today. More and more patients are approaching psychiatrists with the complaint of an inner void and emptiness, with a sense of meaninglessness, with the feeling of a total and ultimate futility of life. And this condition is not restricted to our culture. Communist psychiatrists have expressed frankly this condition I have called the existential vacuum, this feeling of meaninglessness. It is spreading among youth in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Russia.

Then this isn't just a critical problem in the Western world where we fear this as a sign of our approaching decadence.

Definitely not. But you must not close your eyes to the fact that in your country existential frustration is observed more than anywhere in the world. A random sample gathered by my staff in Vienna among German-speaking students from Switzerland, West Germany, and Austria revealed that 40 per cent of them confessed that they knew this feeling of total meaninglessness from their own experience. But among my American students, not 40 but 80 per cent confess to the same inner meaninglessness. Perhaps this is why the paperback edition of Man's Search for Meaning has sold 355,000 copies in the United States within a few years.

Existential psychiatry and psychology certainly are growing in influence in this country.

Existentialism is greatly misused in this country. Everybody regards himself as an existentialist if he uses the term "being in the world" in every second or third line. In my eyes, this is no credential for an existentialist. The term "being in the world" is borrowed from Martin Heidegger and usually is misinterpreted in a way not at all appropriate to Heidegger's concept of human reality. I discussed this at length with Heidegger himself. And it is for this reason that I don't wish to be identified totally with the movement in this country called existential psychiatry or psychology.

All right, tell me what you, Viktor Frankl, mean by existentialism. Not what Sartre means, nor anyone else but you.

You would be mistaken, Mary, if you assumed that existential psychiatry continues the tradition of Jean Paul Sartre's existentialism. First, let me say what existentialism is not. It is a misconception to think that existentialism teaches and preaches the nothingness of man. What it really teaches, the true lesson to learn from existentialism, is the no-thingness of man. Man is not just one thing among other things. He must not be totally objectified. He must not be manipulated. Man has value and dignity. Existentialism does not teach the nothingness of life or the world.

There is a world of difference between no-thing and nothing.

You are right, Mary. And what I also am standing for in the field of psychotherapy is the fight against the nothing-but-ness of man. It is a two-front war. I am fighting the preachers of life's nothingness—pseudo-existentialists, pessimists—on the one hand and the preachers of nothing-but-ness on the other. For you cannot say that man is nothing but a computer, a set of mechanisms, hopefully to be repaired by a physician or a psychiatrist. Man is a human being and must be envisaged and reached in his very humanness. And he is human only to the extent to which he is reaching out beyond himself, directed toward something other than himself. It might be toward a purpose to fulfill, or another human being to encounter in love. And I would go even further. Above all, the meaning of his life, his existence, is more than just a goal he arbitrarily sets for himself.

What, in your opinion, is the reason for the prevalence of the existential vacuum?

To put it as briefly as possible, unlike an animal, man is not told by his instincts what he must do. And, in contrast to man in former days, he is no longer told by traditions what he should do. Now he often doesn't even know what he basically wishes to do. And what is the result? Either he simply does what other people do or else he simply does what other people wish him to do. Because of this, man increasingly falls prey to conformism. But another effect is neuroticism—an existential despair over the apparent meaninglessness of one's life.

And how does one go about giving meaning to his life?

Meaning is always available for each and every individual, and this is so up to the very last moment. Perhaps this will make it clear. Unless he has been indoctrinated through his college training that man is nothing but the battleground of the civil war between ego and superego, the result of a conditioning process, the simple man of the street will tell you that it is o.k. to be a successful businessman. But the man who courageously and heroically faces an unchangeable fate is held infinitely higher in his esteem. This we must show our patients. I cannot arbitrarily attach meanings to things. Meanings must be discovered and cannot be prefabricated, as is so prevalent in this country and, to a lesser degree, in Europe. Meaning has an objective quality, which is another way of saying it is to be discovered rather than invented. This is an important issue and this objectiveness of meaning is not just my philosophical conviction but comes from experimental psychological research.

What about subjective meanings?

There are, of course, also subjective meanings. One of the subjective meanings is experienced through LSD intoxication. And only those individuals who are no longer capable of discovering objective meaning resort to the subjective meanings that are induced by a biochemical tool such as LSD or marijuana. In other words, existential frustration to a large extent might be responsible for the indulgence in LSD and the like. Caught in this existential vacuum, this abysmal sense of meaninglessness, they also create their nonsense, the theater of the absurd. I don't wish to denigrate the theater of the absurd; it is the voice of our age. But we must not think that it offers a solution to the problems and questions of our age. The answers are beyond any age. They are eternal. But they must be verbalized in the language of our day. Consider the experiment conducted by James Olds, in which he inserted electrodes into the hypothalamus of rats who were then taught to close an electric current by pressing a lever. Finally, they were pressing the lever up to 50,000 times a day, perhaps because they experienced orgasm. These rats then neglected their food and their sexual partners. In the same way, young people who use LSD will neglect the objective and will lose the real meaning in life.

But how does one discover the objective meaning?

In an age when the ten commandments seem to have lost their unconditional validity, man's hearing capacity must be refined and sharpened for the ten thousand commandments that together form a man's life.

What is conscience, Viktor?

Conscience is that capacity of man that enables him to discover the unique meanings of his unique situations. Discover them, rather than give them arbitrary meanings. We have the freedom to give meanings more or less arbitrarily, but we have the responsibility to discover the true meaning in the unique situations. That is why I often tell my American audiences that freedom threatens to degenerate into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend to you Americans that your Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.

As we have been talking, I've been wondering about the things you have said. Here in America, we have our own psychology and our psychiatry. In Europe things are happening. What, and what is different?

Again, Mary, you are a catalyst. You elicit for me not only influences, but even thoughts and ideas. For the first time in my life, I am immediately provoked to thought, by your stimulating way of asking questions, by a statement or a judgment. In Europe we still have the tradition in the best sense of the tradition—the explicitness, the awareness of the philosophical background of the problems in the foreground. We know even the hardest clinical facts, the most clinical theories have a better clinical perspective if there is an awareness of the background. This is a thing I call meta-clinic. It's like metaphysical, where there is a metaphysical problem behind a physical reality. You can indicate a lobotomy or sign a prescription for a drug rather than beginning psychotherapy. Or, you can start psychotherapy rather than take a patient's philosophic despair at its face value. All this implies a meta-clinic statement. It means that you regard a patient in one case as a mechanism to be repaired, in the other as a human being to be assisted or helped. If your patient is nothing more than a damaged brain to be operated on, your assumption is like that of the Nazi doctor who sent his patients to the gas chambers. He made a meta-clinical basic assumption that man is nothing but what his brain or his blood makes him to be. If you adopt such a view, euthanasia is a consistent practice.

On the one hand we are sticking to the traditionally felt responsibility to make our underlying philosophy explicit, or to put it another way, to make the metaclinical background loom. It is this tradition of philosophical-psychological concepts that is precious to me and close to my heart and my brain.

Does American thought affect Europe in your field?

More than influence. We Europeans have become addicted to whatever comes from your country. We are not modern enough to develop our own new approaches, but are imitating the Americans. There is a great gulf in Europe, because we do not progress. We are not developing humanistic psychology but reimporting the old mechanistic concept. And it will take some time until Allport and Maslow and perhaps even Viktor Frankl will reach them in Europe.

Isn't it strange that Vienna, where it all started, would regard you as a maverick?

Consider, if you will, up to three times a year I am invited to give lecture tours in this country. By now I have lectured to 85 American universities, seminaries, and colleges, while in Vienna, except for my weekly one-hour lecture as a member of the University medical faculty, I give one public lecture every two years.

Who, in Europe, do you think are the best men in psychology and psychiatry today?

In psychiatry, I would say I admire the soberness of Hans-Juerg Weitbrecht in Bonn and then Professor Schulte in Tuebingen, the follower of the famous Kretschmer. Then, particularly Petrilowitsch. I mention his name as the last of the three, because he confesses to logotherapy; the others don't. Petrilowitsch is in Mainz, where he is at the University Clinic. Kranz, head of the department, is also an admirer of logotherapy. These are the first four, those whom I regard as the most outstanding, reliable, and sober psychiatrists.

As for psychology, there is Professor Lersch of Munich. In addition, I hold Arnold Gehlen in high esteem for philosophy and psychology and sociology and anthropology. I love all the writings of Peter Hofstaetter who heads the department of psychology at the University of Hamburg in West Germany. He has spent many years here in this country and he is experimentally oriented, but he is open-minded.

I'd like to know more about your background. Was your father a doctor?

My father studied medicine, but he was a poor young man from the countryside and could not afford to complete his preparation. For ten years he was a stenographer in the parliament of the Austrian monarchy. Afterwards, he became an official in the State Ministry of Social Affairs. He was particularly concerned with matters of Youth Welfare.

Was he the one who encouraged you to study medicine?

He was proud that I decided to study medicine, but he did not influence me very much.

How did you become interested in psychiatry?

I wonder if you know that when I was a young boy of 16, I began a correspondence with Sigmund Freud. In one of my letters to him, I enclosed a few pages of manuscript reflecting my thoughts on the origin of mimic affirmation and negation—its expression by shrugging or nodding or whatever. To my astonishment, Freud responded immediately and wanted to know if I would allow him to forward it for publication. In 1924, I was sent the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and there I found myself in print.

You were only 18 then. And you never met Freud? That's fantastic.

I met him once—later on. I was walking down the street close to the University, and I noticed a man before me. He reminded me of Freud from the pictures I had seen, but I thought it was impossible. This man was so tattered, his hat, his coat were so worn. He could not be the great Sigmund Freud, I thought. He carried a black wooden stick with a silver handle, and he was beating the pavement and moving his mouth. He suffered from some sort of cancer of the jaw bone, you know. I followed him. I thought, "if this is really Freud, he will turn at the corner into the Berggasse." I knew his address from our correspondence. He made the turn and I addressed him. "Oh, Dr. Freud," I said. "My name is Viktor Frankl." He replied, "Viktor Frankl, Czerningasse #6, Door #25, Second District of Vienna." At that time we had ceased contact because I had become affiliated with the inner circle of Adlerians. So we just talked there in the street. I kept all my letters and postcards from Freud, and I even possessed some case histories written by the young Freud when he was at the same clinic in Vienna where I worked. But they were all confiscated by the Nazis.

So you were a member of the Adlerian group.

Yes. You know old Vienna and its coffee-house tradition. The Freudians met in the Cafe Arkaden and the Adlerians met in the Cafe Siller. But I was not orthodox enough and deviated from the Adlerian teachings. Two of my other professors had contradicted him. I loved them, and him also. I tried to take a middle position. Adler would not accept that, and he insisted that I leave the society. Since the Adlerians have shifted to this country, they have become very broad-minded and integrated. But it was not always so.

Was it your philosophical approach which made Adler expel you?

In a way. You see, Adler was a great man in many respects, but he simply was lacking what I would call a receptive organum for philosophical problems. For instance, throughout my life I struggled with the question of whether or not life had meaning—my personal life or any human's life. Adler published a book on the meaning of life, but if you look it up, you will find that in this excellent book the very question of the meaning of life has been answered in advance. This means that he had presupposed all along that life has a meaning. The question never came to his mind.

This is not a defect; perhaps the defect lies with those who raise the question. The same holds true for Freud. In a letter to Princess Bonaparte, Freud once said, "The moment a man raises the question of the meaning of his life, he is sick." He might be right. But if he is, today the whole of mankind is sick. You cannot say that everybody is sick because nobody is healthy. What point does it make to speak of sickness if there is no health? Today we no longer can say that a man who raises the question of life's meaning is sick. It might have been a valid statement in Freud's day, but no longer.

Then, because you are concerned with this problem, the orthodox view would be to say that you are neurotic.

Exactly. But let me be a neurotic. It has been said that each person offers his own case history when working out a new psychotherapeutic system. Take it for granted. If I can show how I, personally, have overcome this neurosis—if that is what the feeling of meaningless is—then perhaps my case history becomes a new approach to psychotherapy and other people will be able to overcome the same predicament.

What do you think of our American approach to these problems?

The usual way of thinking in this country, I am sorry to say, is unidimensional. You mix everything up. For example, when I wrote my book, From Death-Camp to Existentialism, I tried to combine in a sound and justifiable way both psychotherapy and philosophy. I was intrigued with the borderline problems, but I tried to recognize their separate dimensions.

Why is that different from the typical American view?

Here, you seem to feel that if anything is of neurotic origin, it must be false. Or, if anything is morally tenable, it must be related to mental health. For instance, there is a man running a monastery in Mexico, south of Mexico City, who insists that every young monk who joins the monastery must be psychoanalyzed—in the strict Freudian sense. Last year when I was in Mexico, I met this man. I asked him if he really believed that freedom of neurosis guaranteed truth. That is to say, that freedom from neurosis makes one truly religious. He seemed to believe that it did. I answered him, "On the one hand, I deny that truth can make you free from neurosis, but on the other hand, neither do I believe that freedom from neurosis makes for becoming truly religious."

But that's in Mexico. Do you believe that all Americans think thus?

I have always found that tendency in the American way of thinking. For instance, pragmatism is unidimensional thinking. What is true must be good, must make for good business, for a happy life, and so forth. And I deny this. Reality is multidimensional. But let me add this. The scientist has not only the privilege but the responsibility to deal with his particular aspect of reality as if every reality were unidimensional. He must, however, retain the awareness of what he is doing. Otherwise he becomes a victim of that fallacy that is so noticeable, particularly in your country—reductionism.

But not every American is guilty of this. Our best minds warn against this very thing. This month's magazine features a superb article by Rollo May—a powerful piece that makes just this point.

Yes, Mary. Reductionism also has been criticized more in America than anywhere else in the world. Reductionism means that when you interpret human beings exclusively in biological terms, you have simplified until your statement is no longer biology but biologism. If you only envision psychodynamics, you fall prey to psychologism. The same holds true for sociologism. In other words, science is turned into ideology because you make overgeneralized statements. We are living in an age of specialists, but let me define a specialist as a man, a scientist, who no longer sees the forest of truth for the trees of facts. We cannot do without the specialist in an age whose research style is characterized by teamwork. However, the danger does not rest on the fact that more scientists are specializing, but that too many specialists are generalizing. Nothing-but-ness again. They tell people that man is nothing but a computer.

But such analogies are useful and true in a limited sense.

As a professor of neurology, I agree that it is perfectly legitimate to use the computer as an analogy of the human central nervous system. The mistake doesn't rest on the fact that man in a sense is a computer, but only when you set out to say that man is nothing but a computer. Man is infinitely more than a computer and he is dimensionally more, in the same way that a square is included in a cube, which is constructed and built up on the basis of the square. So, the cube in a certain sense is also a square, but at the same time it is infinitely more than a square. It is not more or less than a whole dimension. The same holds true for man.

Then you don't believe the empirical approach holds the solution. Yet in a very real way your theories were put to the empirical test at Auschwitz and Dachau, in the death camps.

If we define empirical in the widest sense of the word, you are right. If we broaden and widen our visual field for man, finally and hopefully we might recognize that empirical means not only sticking to figures, sticking to statistics, sticking to experiments, but transcending them as well. Man is transcending himself, and we psychiatrists and psychologists must transcend mere experimentation and mere statistics. We can never seize hold of man by statistics and experimentation. Let me start again. Nothing is annulled of the sound findings within the lower dimensions: behaviorism, psychoanalysis, or Adlerian psychology. They are justified and obtain their true validity when they are placed into a wider horizon.

Actually you are overstating to drive home a point, aren't you? American psychology is hardly constricted.

Oh, no. While you Americans are thinking too unidimensionally for my taste, you are soundly developing, advancing, progressing from a subhumanism—as I used to define reductionism, reducing human phenomena to subhuman phenomena—to humanism. When I said that I did not wish to be totally identified with the existential psychological movement in this country, it was also because I wished to be connected with the humanistic psychological movement, as developed by Gordon Allport, Abraham Maslow, and Charlotte Buehler. This is a sound approach, counteracting the unidimensional mechanistic orientation of exclusively behavioristic thinking.

You obviously admire Maslow and the late Gordon Allport.

Yes, but not only as scientists, as human beings as well. I wonder if you know that it is exclusively due to Allport that my book came out in an American translation at all?

I wish I had know him. His death this year was a great loss to psychology in this country. How did he help you?

I didn't know him, either. The report of my experiences in the concentration camp had been translated by a British nurse in Bavaria immediately after the war. She just did it for her own pleasure, and then she translated the book and sent me a copy of the manuscript. I was giving a series of lectures in the United States and was introduced to Allport at Harvard. He read the manuscript and then twisted the arm of his publishers until he got a contract for me. He has, you know, written the preface to the expanded version.

And Maslow. Maslow is not only a humanistic psychologist, he is a human being in the truest sense of the word. He is the greatest among those who are promulgating the self-actualization theory. He is a great man.

Is self-actualization in accord with your tenets of logotherapy?

If self-actualization is made a direct target, if it is strived for directly, then it becomes self-defeat. You can actualize yourself only to the extent to which you fulfill a meaning or encounter another human being. In other words, self-actualization must come about through self-transcendence. I fear I must contradict your Declaration of Independence. Pursuit of happiness seems to me to be self-defeating, because man originally never pursued happiness. A human being doesn't care primarily for happiness or pleasure or power. Happiness and pleasure are side effects, destroyed precisely to the extent that they are aimed at.

I'd like to ask you more about the unhappy days when you were in charge of the Department of Neurology under the Nazis. Were you able to save any patients who might have been sent to the gas chambers?

Yes, indeed, and with the help of a member of the Nazi party! My beloved teacher Poetzl was a Nazi. Once I had a patient suffering from a brain tumor who needed surgery. I lifted the receiver and called the Nazi Poetzl. He rushed to a taxi, left all his responsibilities, and came to the Jewish Hospital, to help me diagnose a Jew's ailment! He, in turn, telephoned the greatest brain surgeon and said, "I have a patient for you. When can he be admitted to the hospital?" After they said the day after tomorrow, he added, "Incidentally, he is Jewish." By then the brain surgeon could not withdraw his consent.

The Nazis were using euthanasia, you know, and each and every patient who was regarded as incurable was sent to the gas chamber. Even the relatives, mothers-in-law, and so forth of high-ranking party functionaries were gassed. And Poetzl could not help them. The only people he rescued were some Jewish psychotics, because they could be sent to a Jewish Home for the Aged. Whenever such a case occurred, I wrote up a false certificate. For example, a schizophrenic was diagnosed by me as a case of aphasia. After all, one might lose his facility to speak after a stroke. And a case of suicidal depression was diagnosed as a delirium from a feverish infection. Poetzl was the man who made it possible. This way Jewish psychotics were saved from euthanasia.

From this you will understand why I say that if one was a Nazi, it does not necessarily mean that one was guilty. There are only two races of people, the decent ones and the indecent ones, and they cross biological races and political parties. What matters is the man.

I have known only a few concentration-camp survivors. Those I do know seem always to be in need of justifying their existence. It is as though they constantly question their right of survival.

That is true. Let us take the case of a transport which prisoners knew was to take them to the gas chamber. There was neither time nor desire on the part of prisoners to consider moral or ethical issues. Every man was controlled by one thought only—to keep himself alive … and to save his friends. With no hesitation, therefore, he would arrange for another prisoner to take his place. On the average, only those survived who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, lost all scruples in their fight for existence. They were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, in order to save themselves. The best of us did not return.

My wife and I were married in Vienna in 1941. She died at Bergen-Belsen and I still do not know the date of her death.

How did you survive?

I was lucky. And I survived better as a person because I had a rich intellectual background, an inner life on which to draw. And I had a mission, to counsel other inmates. Do you know what my fantasy and finally compulsion became in those years? I wanted to live to go mountain-climbing again. Can you understand that?

Understand? But how could anyone fail to understand? It was good to meet your present wife. Do you have any children?

Only one, a daughter. Gabriele is my child by my present wife. She is in her third year at the Vienna University, and she is enthusiastically studying psychology. She is statistically minded and experimentally oriented and a strong opponent of her father's logotherapy. She has read only one of my books and that because her fiance was so enthusiastic about it. But I have only one child, and so I appreciate the fact that she is intellectually independent and can be my strong adversary.

The United States, as you know, is in the middle of a great group-therapy binge. What do you think of group encounters and therapy?

Group therapy or family therapy or community therapy is something particularly needed in your country at the present stage. As great as the number of psychologists might be in the United States, they simply cannot cope with the load of cases. Therefore, such devices as group therapy must be developed. But the principle of psychotherapy will remain forever in my eyes as a process that cannot do away with the intimate basis. This factor cannot be relinquished. Whether you reduce this phenomenon to the mere psychodynamic plane or take it at its face value as a truly human personal or—to use deliberately a so-misused term—existential encounter, this intimate relationship is needed. That is one of the great lessons we had to learn from Freud and the psychoanalysts. So I do have a reservation. Group therapy can never become the whole story.

One last question. Are you a formally religious man?

Let me be 100 per cent European by not answering this question. Let me say that the Hippocratic oath I took when I received my medical degree compels me to care for and insist that logotherapy be available for every patient, including the agnostic, and useable in the hands of every doctor, including the atheist.

You come through to me as a deeply religious man. I know I'm right in the true sense of the word.

Heaven only knows.