Resilience in Life and Work of Viktor Emanuel Frankl

Abstract

This paper focuses on one of the great men of the 20th century, who devoted his life to questions regarding the quest for the meaning of life. We portray the life and work of a man who was not spared a number of pains that reached byond human capabilities, especially in the concentration camps, where he spent two and a half years. How did he face suffering, when it was extremely hard “to say yes to life”? Logotherapy and existential analysis (which he verified by his own drastical observations) give us answers to these and other questions. Both Frankl’s life and a number of his works testify about a great resilience of the human spirit. It is this resilience we focus on in the following text. Our goal is to answer the question: “How did resilience manifest itself in life and work of V. E. Frankl?”