Viktor Frankl and Little Me

You often see quotes “attributed” to famous people appearing on websites or coffee mugs, usually intended to make us feel a little better. Viktor Frankl is one of the most frequently quoted, alongside Winston Churchill.

I am not a trained therapist. I am an accountant and consultant by background. Yet Frankl’s work has become part of the backbone of how I approach my illness.

I want to explain why. Again.

I am a person of faith. On one level, perhaps I shouldn’t need Frankl. I believe in G-d and that He is good, so why should I need anything more?

Shouldn’t is the important word.

Because somehow it helps enormously to read the thoughts of a man who lived the life Frankl lived and witnessed the things he witnessed. Perhaps that is because he gave me language for some of the principles by which I try to fight PSP.

I have written many times about accepting PSP. But I mean accepting the diagnosis and accepting the reality of what is happening to me. If I needed another lesson in acceptance, the reaction of my eyes over the last few days has certainly provided one.

But acceptance is not the same as submission. I will not willingly submit to PSP. I will do my very, very best not to.

Whether I use the term “living with” or “fighting”, I mean essentially the same thing. I will not willingly give in to PSP.

Frankl provides a relatively modern example of that distinction. He was a psychiatrist and neurologist who developed an influential approach to meaning and human resilience, but he was also a man whose ideas were tested under circumstances almost beyond comprehension.

Before the war, he had an opportunity to escape Nazi-controlled Europe. He obtained a visa to America but allowed it to expire because he could not bring himself to abandon his elderly parents. He was later imprisoned in Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and camps within the Dachau system. His father died in Theresienstadt. His mother and brother were murdered. His first wife, Tilly, also died as a result of the Holocaust. His sister survived.

Yet after enduring circumstances that I cannot remotely comprehend, Frankl continued to believe that human beings could search for meaning and preserve some measure of inner freedom.

How?

One passage from Man’s Search for Meaning has become particularly famous:

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

But I think something important is lost when we put that sentence on a coffee mug and leave it there.

The context matters.

I think it is crucial to see the previous and following sentences:

“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become moulded into the form of the typical inmate.”

Those words change its meaning for me. He was saying that these few people provided evidence that some degree of inner freedom could survive even under almost unimaginable circumstances.

What follows matters just as much. Frankl describes choices presenting themselves “every day, every hour”, choices that could determine whether somebody surrendered his inner self entirely to circumstance or somehow retained a degree of inner freedom.

Read that whole argument rather than just the famous sentence and, for me, it becomes considerably more powerful.

Frankl never said it was easy.

Quite the opposite. “They may have been few in number.”

Those six words matter enormously.

Millions of people endured horrors during the Holocaust that I cannot begin to understand. Some lost hope. Some lost their faith. Some were destroyed physically or psychologically. I have absolutely no right to judge any of them.

Nor do I read Frankl as saying that people who broke under unimaginable suffering simply failed to make the correct decision. That would be both simplistic and, in my view, deeply unfair.

What I take from him is something much narrower, but enormously important to me.

There may still be a choice.

Not a choice about whether I have PSP. Not a choice about whether my eyes open tomorrow morning. Not a choice about whether I can walk, swallow, speak or move. And certainly not a choice about how far this disease ultimately progresses.

But perhaps there remains some choice about what I do with what PSP leaves me.

Frankl did not create my philosophy of life. He reinforces it. His ideas provide scaffolding around an approach that comes principally from my faith and my upbringing.

Nor, for this purpose, am I particularly concerned with the precise nature of Frankl’s own beliefs about religion or G-d. What matters to me is his attitude.

For one person, the driving force may be faith. For another, family. For somebody else, purpose or self-determination. I suspect that for most of us it is some combination of them all.

In Frankl, I have found a role model who helps me understand my own battle to retain my sense of self and my dignity while living with PSP.

I first wrote about him in 2025, not long after my initial PSP diagnosis. A year and a half later, I think it is significant that I still cling to him as a role model.

Because I have no illusions about what may happen.

PSP may yet claim much more of me.

There are already moments when I feel myself buckling beneath its physical and mental strain. The neurological progression of PSP may simply engulf me. Loneliness, fear and the reality of PSP may eventually alter the path I am trying so hard to follow.

I am certainly not claiming to be immune.

So far, I have been blessed to retain much of my cognition and communication. I even find myself wondering whether I am “getting off relatively lightly” compared with some of the pain and impact that other people with PSP describe. There was a time when I would never have described my own situation that way.

But right now, I am holding firm.

I am not a therapist. I am an accountant and consultant who happens to have PSP and what would probably be described as very high anxiety. Being the patient does, however, give me at least some right to describe what works for me.

Six and a half years into PSP, I am still here. Still frightened. Still struggling. Still occasionally buckling.

But I am also still fighting to preserve my identity, my dignity and my ability to choose how I respond.

Frankl is not the source of that strength. Its foundations lie in my faith, my family and my upbringing.

What Frankl does is help me understand what I am trying to do.

For that, I am profoundly grateful to his memory.