Why Viktor Frankl is the father of the self-help genre

livemint.com:

Man’s Search for Meaning (published in German in 1946, followed by an English translation in 1959), has long occupied a peculiar niche in the publishing industry. Part memoir, part moral philosophy and part psycho-social treatise, you are most likely to find the book in the all-encompassing self-help section, right next to the Dale Carnegies and the Steven Coveys of the world. And in a sense, Man’s Searchis indeed an amalgamation of all the above genres.

It’s the father of the self-help book, as it were, that spawned one of the most successful publishing categories ever. The fact that nearly 80 years later Frankl’s work continues to be put out by trade publishers with titles alluding to the best-seller—a case in point being the recent Embracing Hope: On Freedom, Responsibility and the Meaning of Life—is a testimony to the writer’s long-standing popularity, especially in the US. Of course, it’s also a clever SEO tactic, with Instagram-friendly hashtag-like phrases and words making up the title and the subtitle.

This prelude isn’t meant to scoff at Frankl’s work, which is recognised and lauded as the third branch of psychotherapy to have emerged from Vienna, after Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler. Frankl called his practice logotherapy, a form of cure that focused on finding logos, the Greek word for meaning. While Frankl’s contemporaries Freud and Adler focused on pleasure and power, respectively, the youngest doctor built his ideas on the pillar of the purpose.

But like Freud’s and Adler’s, Frankl’s ideas, too, have been misunderstood, and mythologised. One of the popular misconceptions about Frankl’s famous book is the belief that it was written at Auschwitz, when he was a prisoner at the concentration camp. While this