"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, surveys 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. Frankl's book ''Man's Search for Meaning'' 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". Contrary to the impression Frankl gives of staying at Auschwitz for months, he was held close to the train in the "depot prisoner" area of Auschwitz, and for no more than a few days. Frankl was neither registered at Auschwitz nor assigned a number there before being sent on to a
subsidiary work camp of Dachau, known as
Kaufering III. That camp, together with
Terezín, is the true setting for much of what is described in his book. In the book
Man’s Search for Meaning there is no suggestion that Frankl was detained in Auschwitz long term, and most of his experience is specified to take place at a work-camp detachment of Dachau.
Origins and implications of logotherapy Frankl's doctrine was that one must instill meaning in the events in one's life, that work and suffering can lead to finding meaning, and that this would ultimately lead to fulfillment and happiness. In 1982, the scholar and Holocaust analyst
Lawrence L. Langer was critical of what he called Frankl's distortions of the true experience of those at Auschwitz, and of Frankl's amoral focus on "meaning". In Langer's assessment, that view could just as equally be applied to Nazis "finding meaning in making the world free from Jews". He continued, "if this [logotherapy] doctrine had been more succinctly worded, the Nazis might have substituted it for the cruel mockery of
Arbeit Macht Frei" ("work sets free"), which was read by those entering Auschwitz]. In Pytell's view, Langer also challenged Frankl's disturbing subtext that Holocaust "survival [was]
a matter of mental health." He criticized Frankl's tone as self-congratulatory and promotional, so 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". Pytell later remarked that with Langer's criticism published prior to Pytell's biography, the former had thus drawn the controversial parallels, or
accommodations in ideology without the knowledge that Victor Frankl was an advocate (had "embraced") the key ideas of the
Nazi psychotherapy movement ("will and responsibility") as a form of therapy in the late 1930s. Frankl submitted a paper at that time 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 published in the , the journal of the Göring Institute, with the "proclaimed agenda of building psychotherapy that affirmed a Nazi-oriented worldview". The origins of logotherapy raise a major issue of continuity, which Pytell argues was potentially problematic for Frankl because he had laid out the main elements of logotherapy while contributing to the Nazi-affiliated Göring Institute. This association was a source of controversy, since it suggested that logotherapy was palatable to
Nazism. Pytell suggested that Frankl took two different stances on how the concentration-camp experience affected the course of his psychotherapy theory. Over the years, Frankl would switch between the idea that logotherapy took shape in the camps and the claim that the camps were merely a testing ground of his already preconceived theories.
Post-war Jewish relations In the post war years, Frankl's preference for neither pursuing justice nor assigning
collective guilt to the Austrian people for collaboration with or acquiescence to Nazism led to "frayed" relationships with many Viennese and the larger American Jewish community. 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 had been powerless to do anything about the atrocities which occurred and could not be collectively blamed.
Response to Timothy Pytell According to Alexander Batthyány (the director of the Viktor Frankl Institute and the Viktor Frankl Archives in Vienna), Pytell's critique of Viktor Frankl was used by Holocaust denier Theodore O'Keefe. Throughout the first chapter of his book
Viktor Frankl and the Shoah, Batthyány reflects on the flaws in Pytell's work about Frankl. Batthyány points out that Pytell never visited the archive to consult primary sources, nor did he interview Viktor Frankl. Pytell wrote in his book on Frankl that he had the opportunity to meet him – as a friend offered it – yet decided that he could not. ==Decorations and awards==