Frankl & Sartre in Search of Meaning

Georgia Arkell compares logotherapy and atheistic existentialism.

- Georgia Arkell

Both born in 1905, Viktor Frankl and Jean-Paul Sartre were two of the twentieth century's most influential thinkers about the human condition. Frankl was the father of logotherapy and Sartre of atheistic existentialism. While both rooted their thought in existentialist philosophy, sharing several key foundation-stones such as the centrality of human freedom, they had contrasting perspectives on the origins and implications of those shared ideas, and so reached diverging explanations of human existence. The purpose of this article is to summarise their ideas and compare how their thoughts converged and diverged over certain existential questions.

Comparing logotherapy and atheistic existentialism is particularly interesting because these two philosophical currents are the product of two minds which lived in the same historical period yet experienced it in dramatically different ways. This was partly by virtue of them belonging to different ethno-religious groups.

Existentialists Together & Apart

Viktor Frankl (1905-97) was a psychiatrist and neurologist from Vienna. He was the founder of logotherapy (from the Greek logos = meaning and therapeia = healing), a radical psychological doctrine based on the conception of meaning being the primary human motivational and (so) therapeutic force. Frankl was also an Austrian Jew, who in 1942 was deported with his family to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where his father died of starvation and pneumonia. He spent the remaining three years of the war as a prisoner in four different camps. He was finally liberated on April 27, 1945, by which time his mother and brother had been murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and his wife Tilly had died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen.