Before the war Viktor Frankl headed the neurological department of the Rothschild hospital in Vienna, the only clinic where Jewish patients could still be treated. In 1941 he obtained a visa for the United States. It lay ready, and leaving meant abandoning his parents.
He let it lapse.
In 1942 the family was deported to Theresienstadt. Then followed Auschwitz, Kaufering and Türkheim. His wife Tilly, his parents and his brother: none of them survived, and he learned that only after the liberation.
What he noticed in those years, and later wrote down, concerns the narrowest space there is. People from whom everything had been taken, down to their name, still differed from one another in how they behaved. Some walked along the huts giving away their last piece of bread.
After the liberation he wrote in nine days the book later known as Man's Search for Meaning. It appeared at first anonymously; he did not want his name attached to it.
The form of therapy he developed is called logotherapy and takes the search for meaning as the primary human drive, rather than pleasure or power. He went on practising into old age, remarried, and taught worldwide.
He explicitly resisted being seen as a saint. The best of us, he wrote, did not come back.
Everything a person can possess has been taken from you, including the people. There is nothing left to decide about. Except one thing.
The tempting sorting is that suffering makes you stronger. Frankl claims that nowhere, and he contradicts it from experience: most were not made stronger by it, they died.
What he did see was narrower and more exact. Everything had been taken: property, family, health, name, future. What could not be taken was the attitude with which you entered the next minute, and that held even for people with no room to act at all.
That is the dichotomy of control reduced to its last square inch. In ordinary circumstances the distinction is a useful exercise. There it was all that was left.
His later work reverses the question. Not: what do I expect from life, but: what does life expect from me. That reversal moves the weight from outcomes to actions, and it is the same movement the Stoa makes.
This is the case that calls for the most caution. Frankl's observation is real, but it was made afterwards by someone who survived, and survivors are never a cross-section. Whoever concludes from this that attitude determines whether you make it is saying something factually wrong and morally cruel; survival depended on chance, on which line you were standing in.
Frankl knew that and said so himself. His point is not that the right attitude saves you, but that even where nothing is left to choose, something is still left to choose. That is a far smaller claim, and that is exactly why it holds.
What in your life feels like compulsion, but on closer inspection is an attitude you choose?
Yours, Not Yours · A Stoic practice ground · All cases · Questions or suggestions