50 euro – Viktor Frankl

The author of 32 books and the recipient of 29 honorary doctorates, Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl was most famous for his bestselling book Man's Search for Meaning. He was also the founder of Logotherapy, a form of existential analysis and the ‘Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy’. Born in Vienna in 1905, like Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler before him, Viktor Frankl was of Jewish heritage. But unlike the founders of the two other Vienna Schools of Psychotherapy, Frankl lived through the darkest moments of the holocaust, during which he was interned in four different Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz. His parents, brother and first wife lost their lives in the camps, but Frankl survived and, not long after his release, published his account of his experiences in the concentration camps in the form of Man's Search for Meaning. The book recounts how Frankl discovered the importance of finding meaning in all forms of existence and, thus, a reason to continue living. That is a combination of two of the basic principles of logotherapy, the fact that we have the freedom to find meaning in what we do and what we experience, however terrible, is the third. Meaning is symbolised on the coin by a young woman who, lost in her thoughts with her eyes closed, holds a flower in her hand while leaning on a medallion, upon which a bird flies at the centre of a maze.