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Translator's Note

Logotherapy presents a particular challenge for the translator. Viktor Frankl's own works are full of humour and metaphor, and his distinctive way of making his point often relies heavily on wordplay, poetic forms of expression and nuances of language that combine colloquial language with philosophically suggestive formulations distilled from a profound understanding of the history of European thought. He coined a number of original terms and concepts that play a key role in his work. Frankl was often dissatisfied with the published translations of many of these key terms, and his own translations, where available, provide valuable clues to his thinking.

Elisabeth Lukas has a distinctive written style that shares the aforementioned features of Frankl's writing. She has continued in Frankl's footsteps linguistically as much as she has intellectually and spiritually. Frankl never saw the logotherapy he had originated as something finished and set in stone, but as a system of thought that should continually be developed in response to the inexhaustible insights into human nature arising from his focus on meaning and the possibilities of the human spirit. In this book, Elisabeth Lukas and Heidi Schönfeld have produced a remarkable testimony to how therapeutically effective this system of thought is in practice.

Translations of Frankl’s works have, where possible, been taken from the standard editions of his works in English cited in the footnotes. Where this is not possible, I have cited the German editions, and the translations are my own.

I would also like to thank Heidi Schönfeld for her close collaboration in producing this translation. Without her help, an accurate and faithful English-language account of Frankl’s methods in action would have been impossible.

Dr. David Nolland