Viktor Frankl’s Shoah memoir adapted for big screen

Viktor Frankl’s inspirational Holocaust memoir Man’s Search For Meaning will be adapted for the big screen,  Deadline reports.

Author and life coach Tony Robbins has teamed up with screenwriter Angela Workman and Straight Up Films, as well as Frankl’s grandson Alexander Vesely for the project, which will relate how the Austrian-born psychiatrist endured four Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, during the Second World War.

Born in Vienna in 1905, Frankl began cultivating an interest in psychology  as a teenager and started corresponding with Sigmund Freud.
He went on to study medicine at the University of Vienna and specialised in neurology and psychiatry, with a focus on depression and suicide. 

From 1926 onwards, he began cultivating a theory, known as logotherapy, which proposed meaning was the central motivational force in humans, not just the pursuit of pleasure.

After the war, he continued to work as  a psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna and published his memoir, which went on to sell more than 16 million copies. Frankl argues that the prisoners who were able to find meaning in their existence were more likely to survive the horrors of camp life.

Robbins said: “The ability to find meaning in the most difficult times, even in times of injustice or extreme stress, is perhaps the most important skill we can develop in life. Viktor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning, provides the most compelling and triumphant account I have ever read of humanity’s ability to persevere through the unimaginable.”