Abstract

This paper focuses on the writing of the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl in his effort to understand his experience of the concentration camps. The subject emerging from Frankl’s attempts to tackle this experience corroborates his anthropology, on which he bases his psychotherapeutic method (i.e. Logotherapy and existential analysis). His understanding of human nature was partly shaped by his personal experience, which he used to document his theory in a hybrid form of writing where the personal and the scientific merge. Although Frankl is not a modernist writer (his texts have no literary pretentions), he is, in many respects, modern. Among other ways to approach modernity and its writing, Yves Lambert’s (2000) suggestion to treat it as a «new axial turning point, that is to say as a fundamental remodelling of the symbolic systems and particularly of the religious system», seems particularly pertinent to approach Frankl’s work. His concept of an «unconscious God», where God is redefined in terms of a constitutive component of man, is at the centre of his anthropology. To demonstrate the link between Frankl’s theory and his personal experience, I approach two of Frankl’s works: Experiences in a Concentration Camp, a hybrid text – both autobiographical testimony and treatise of psychology – written in 1945; and Synchronisation in Birkenwald. A Metaphysical Conference, play composed in 1946 and published under pseudonym in 1948. In those texts I detect the main theoretical concepts of Frankl’s psychoanalytic theory – self-distancing and self-transcendence – as writing techniques. I also examine the function of the anecdote both as a unit of narrative and as a means of claiming coherence and wholeness against the fragmentation of the subject, and demonstrate its relation to Frankl’s theory