Digging In to After Ashley: Dr. Viktor Frankel

In After Ashley the character of Julie is very taken with the writings of Dr. Viktor Frankl. Here's a little background on the good doctor. 

Born: March 26, 1905, Vienna 

Died: September 2, 1997, Vienna 

Academic titles

M.D. (1930), Ph.D. (1949), Dr.h.c.mult.

Life and Work

Viktor Emil Frankl, M.D., Ph.D. was Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Vienna Medical School. 

1940-42 Frankl was director of the Neurological Department of the Rothschild Hospital

During World War II he spent 3 years in various concentration camps, including Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Dachau. 

1946-70 he was director of the Vienna Neurological Policlinic. 

He was Visiting Professor at Harvard and at universities in Pittsburgh, San Diego and Dallas. The U.S. International University in California installed a special chair for logotherapy - this is the psychotherapeutic school founded by Frankl, often called the "Third Viennese School" (after Freud's psychoanalysis and Adler's individual psychology.) He received 29 honorary doctorates from universities in all parts of the world. 

Frankl authored 39 books which to date (2011) have been published in 40 languages. His last two books are "Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning" and "Viktor Frankl - Recollections", both published in 1997. Up to 1997 the book "Man's Search for Meaning" had sold over nine million copies in the USA alone. According to a survey conducted by the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club it belongs to "the ten most influential books in America." (New York Times, November 20, 1991). And the readers of Japan's "Yomiuri Shimbun" newspaper voted for "Man's Search for Meaning as "one of the ten books to be passed to the twenty-first century" (Yomiuri Shimbun, Tokyo, 2000/11/30) 

Frankl held lectures at 209 universities on all 5 continents. 

According to the American Journal of Psychiatry, his work is "perhaps the most significant thinking since Freud and Adler." 

Watch Dr. Frankl give a talk about man's search for meaning. 

Bio provided by http://www.viktorfrankl.org