Viktor Frankl

Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist who, before the war, had developed a third school of Viennese psychotherapy he called logotherapy — therapy through meaning. The Nazis took his manuscript along with everything else. He survived three years in Auschwitz, Dachau, and two other camps; his mother, father, brother, and pregnant wife did not. After liberation he sat down and in nine days dictated Man's Search for Meaning — the first half a clear-eyed memoir of the camps, the second half a sketch of logotherapy. His central claim: a human being can endure almost any "how" if they have a "why." Meaning, he insisted, is not invented but discovered — in work, in love, and in the attitude we take toward suffering we cannot change.