Few books have a history quite like this one. The German translation was published in an abridged version a decade before the English original. I reviewed that translation at the time in Central European History (June 2007), and the author, responding privately to criticisms about crucial omissions, informed me that the German version represented only that part of his study that the German publisher deemed appropriate for a German readership, and that the full study would appear later with the English original text. That has taken ten years. What seemed to be missing—such as information about Viktor Frankl's pseudonymous play about Nazi evil, Synchronization in Birkenwald, published in the Innsbruck journal Der Brenner in 1948—is indeed there, along with an analysis of Frankl's role in postwar Austrian life and letters. The book nevertheless remains a curious one.

On the face of it, Pytell aims to demonstrate how Frankl's reputation rested upon a peculiar blend of humanistic psychoanalysis largely connected with suicide prevention (something for which he was internationally celebrated, as the study well documents) and a certain barefaced opportunism that recurs in his life story—something Pytell considers “typically Austrian.” From his school days Frankl was distinguished both for his brilliance and for the boldness of his thinking (in some ways reminiscent of his exact contemporary Karl Popper in the philosophy of science). Even then he managed to propel himself into the debates between Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler about the etiology of neurosis, and apparently he even won a certain respect among critics of the former within the nascent Viennese community of psychiatrists. From the beginning, philosophy had a prominent place in Frankl's thinking about mental health. Following Adler, he would object virulently to Freud's reductionist claims about the unconscious determinism behind human action (summed up in slogans such as “biology is destiny”), emphasizing first the social causation of feelings of inferiority and later the individual's will to meaning as the ultimate source of mental health and the key to survival under the most extreme circumstances—to wit: in Nazi concentration camps.

By the time Frankl received his MD in 1930, he was thus clearly established in the ranks of Viennese humanistic psychoanalysts. His career only began to soar after World War II, however, when his contribution to existential psychiatry took humanistic psychoanalysis by storm. His international bestseller Man's Search for Meaning (originally published in 1946 as From Death Camp to Existentialism) sold some ten million copies in twenty-four languages. The book's success rested to a considerable extent upon the author's self-description as a survivor of Auschwitz—proof of the depth of his views on the humanistic, philosophically grounded account of psychodynamics that he had espoused over the previous twenty-five years, and for which he would later receive international honors, especially in the United States from such eminent authorities as Gordon Allport, Rollo May, Carl Rogers, and Abraham Maslow. The closer look into his biography that Pytell offers yields a somewhat different, and decidedly disappointing, story.

Frankl's stay in Auschwitz lasted only three or four days, in fact. For the most part, his experience of the camps was drawn from his extended time at Theresienstadt and Dachau. In any case, he was scarcely subjected to the sorts of horror typical of Auschwitz, but he presented his experiences quite differently and, indeed, the persuasive nature of his ideas rests, at least in part, upon that distortion. Frankl was also not keen to make people aware of his work for the Vienna branch of the Nazi Göring Institute of Psychoanalysis during the 1930s. Further, he did not later hesitate to accept the sponsorship of Jörg Haider's Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) when awarded honorary citizenship by the city of Vienna in 1995. Nor did he shy away from accepting in 1988 the Grand Silver Decoration of Honor with Star from the hands of the beleaguered Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, who had come under massive criticism at home and abroad after unsuccessfully trying to cover up his wartime activities as a Nazi officer and was thus deeply in need of legitimation at the hands of a respected moral figure like Frankl. Pytell intimates a sort of psychological affinity between the two that he takes to be morally dubious and, at the same time, typical of a certain type of Austrian public figure: the postwar “Austrian soul.”

This is what lends Pytell's study its curious character: it is not at all clear from his account of Frankl what claims he wants to make on the basis of the proffered evidence. Frankl's idea that there were good Nazis and bad ones, good prisoners and bad ones, good SS men and bad ones, doubtless has some truth to it. But the idea can easily be used to defend those in Austrian society who more than happily—and evasively—embraced the pronouncement of the 1943 Moscow Declaration that Austria was the first victim of National Socialism. For Pytell, like most contemporary historians of his generation, this counts as something akin to the Big Lie about Austria. But it is not at all clear what one should conclude as a result. It looks as if Pytell is trying to deconstruct an inflated reputation, but he offers no comparisons—except with the parallel case of Kurt Waldheim—that put this story into perspective. In the end, readers do not know what is so emblematically “Austrian” about Viktor Frankl's biography beyond the fact that he cultivated an embellished reputation well beyond his actual accomplishments.

In fact, it is not at all clear just what those accomplishments were. Once again, comparisons are lacking. As a result, the study offers an account of the growth of Frankl's reputation without providing a sense of what his genuine achievements as a philosophically oriented, humanistic psychiatrist were. Obvious extended comparisons with Karl Jaspers, whose experiences during World War I ultimately led him from medicine into philosophy, and with Carl Gustav Jung, the most famous representative of the thesis that psychoanalysis is first and foremost about coping with problems related to the meaning of life, are entirely lacking (though references to these figures and others are copious). Frankl's contribution of logotherapy to psychotherapy is not assessed at all. Indeed, the author explicitly avoids the question of logotherapy's importance within psychiatry. But what is the sense of discussing Frankl at all in its absence? Pytell remains content with adding one more case to the long line of figures who, in one way or another, benefited unjustly from Austria's postwar status as “the first victim of National Socialism.” In the absence of any account of Frankl's genuine contribution to a humanistic—as opposed to a merely biological/medical—conception of mental illness, one response might simply be to ask, so what? In short, if Pytell had spent as much time documenting the recognized achievements of logotherapy as a contribution to healing mental disorders, this would have become a much stronger and more worthwhile study.