From death-camp to existentialism: A psychiatrist's path to a new therapy

By Viktor E. Frankl

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0006AVXC8
• Release Date: January 1959
• Publisher: Beacon Press
• Length: 111 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A pleasure to read Frankl's work in English

Having expressed my gratitude for a chance to read his words, I must say that I am distressed that Jews show so little interest in the engagement of Frankl with his medical patients, and the ethical and phenomenological work that Jew brought to medicine but that died with Oliver Sacks. As a former academic physician, I realize that from Maimonides forward, Jewish doctors were a resource to the world because of Maimonides' ethics and his syncresis of medical and religious inner work, as adapted and transmitting by Rabbi Ted Falcon in his book Journey of Awakening. Would I could discuss with someone who could understand Hippocrates and Maimonides and the latter's fusion of what was then called natural philosophy and esoteric religious practice. I wish the history nerds knew what they were missing in the work of Maimonides that reflects the times of the Cairo geniza that has been so carefully reconstructed. Maimonides' brother was in the India trade and others brokered Chinese silks. It was a global era, perhaps in medicine as well as trade, but who has the curiosity to delve into that history? Frankl was obviously aware of kabbalistic ideas like the hidden tzaddik and of the need to emphasize, for the good of medicine, the role of Jews as priests to the world as well as doctors to the world. Sadly, that era ended in mechanization and the engineering out of the art of medicine from modern systems. It is no small wonder that those who are most interested in Frankl are least interested in who he was before the Holocaust--the young man who gave birth to the old, and kept precious wisdom from more than one tradition. Anyhow, I take away his willingness to fulfill his Hippocratic oath by caring for all patients who came in the door, even those, like Albert Einstein, who have been wrongly interpreted as irreligious.