24/04/2026
Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist in Vienna when he was deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1942. He was subsequently transferred to Auschwitz, then to two subcamps of Dachau.
His wife, his parents and his brother died in the camps.
He survived.
In 1946, one year after liberation, he wrote Man's Search for Meaning — a documented account of his psychological observations across three years in four camps. It has since sold over sixteen million copies and been listed by the US Library of Congress as one of the ten most influential books ever written.
His central observation was this.
The prisoners who survived longest — not physically necessarily, but psychologically intact — were not the ones with the most comfortable circumstances, the most food, or the most favorable treatment. They were the ones who maintained what Frankl called a sense of meaning. A reason. Something they were surviving for.
He watched prisoners give away their last piece of bread to help someone else. He watched men walk through the camp with dignity in conditions designed specifically to eliminate it. He watched people choose, under circumstances of total external powerlessness, how they would respond internally to what was being done to them.
And he built an entire school of psychotherapy from that observation.
Logotherapy — meaning-centered therapy — is based on one premise: the primary human drive is not pleasure, as Freud argued, or power, as Adler argued.
It is meaning.
And meaning, Frankl documented, cannot be removed by external circumstances.
It can only be abandoned from within.
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is your power to choose your response. In your response lies your growth and your freedom.
He wrote that in Auschwitz.
Think about where you are writing your excuses.
