Viktor Frankl

Frankl was a Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist who had already begun working out a psychology built around meaning before the war, and who spent the years that followed in the camps. The book most people have met him through was written in nine days afterwards, and he first published it anonymously: he expected it to be read as a case report rather than as a memoir, and he did not want his name deciding how it was read.

His central claim is narrower than the slogans it turned into. He did not say that suffering is good, or that a positive attitude changes outcomes. He said that a person can be deprived of almost everything and still choose what to make of what is left, and that having something to live for is what makes that choice available at all.

It is worth being precise about the status of that claim, because Frankl was. It is a philosophical position about what a person is, argued from what he saw, and he presented it as one. It is not a finding, and the school he founded around it is not what Omzoe is doing here.

What Omzoe takes from him is the ordering. A reason comes first, and the practices follow from it — which is why the Compass asks what a life is for before anything is generated, rather than handing somebody a routine and hoping a reason turns up later.