Ten things that circulate in logotherapy materials worldwide, that a specialist would catch, and that we will not repeat. Each with the correction and the source. This is our plagiarism rule applied to evidence: you do not get credit for something you did not earn — and neither does Frankl.
Not Frankl. It is the most-quoted sentence attributed to him. It appears on posters, in TED talks, in textbooks and on the websites of logotherapy institutes. We searched the full text of Man's Search for Meaning. The passage is not there. Zero occurrences of "between stimulus," "stimulus and response," or any equivalent phrasing.
Where it comes from, as far as can be established: it was popularised by Stephen Covey, who disclaimed authorship and said he found it in an unnamed book in a library in Hawaii around 1969. The strongest actual candidate for the idea, and for phrasing very close to it, is Rollo May, whose 1963 and 1975 writings contain nearly identical formulations about the pause between stimulus and response as the seat of human freedom. Attribution to Frankl appears online only from about 2004.
The irony is worth teaching. May was logotherapy's most substantive critic (see the practice page), and the sentence most used to sell Frankl is most likely his. Frankl's own formulations of freedom of will and self-distancing say the same thing, in his words, and are citable — for instance: "everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way" (MSFM, Part I). Use that one. It is his.
A paraphrase, not a quotation. This "three pillars" wording is a secondary summary that circulates through Wikipedia and from there into most introductory material. It is a fair gloss. It is not Frankl's text. His three assumptions are Freiheit des Willens, Wille zum Sinn and Sinn des Lebens, set out in The Will to Meaning (1969), chapter 2. Quote the German, or quote his own compressed statement: "Man's search for meaning is a primary force in his life and not a 'secondary rationalization' of instinctual drives" (MSFM, Part II).
True as far as it goes — and it does not go as far as people take it. The figure is Frankl's, and he sourced it: "statistical research conducted by Werner in London, Langen and Volhard in Tübingen, Prill in Würzburg, and Niebauer in Vienna" (D&S, Introduction), and later "ten researchers have, independent of one another, estimated that about twenty percent of neuroses are noogenic" (D&S, 1986). So it is not one man's impression of his own clinic, as some critics say. It is also mid-twentieth-century research, using diagnostic criteria that were never operationalised to modern standards, and it has not been re-examined epidemiologically since. Say both halves or say neither.
Almost certainly false. This is asserted on Wikipedia. ICD-11 contains no such category. Do not repeat it.
Contradicted by Frankl, explicitly, twice. In 1963: "suffering would not have a meaning unless it were absolutely necessary; e.g., a cancer that can be cured by surgery must not be shouldered by the patient as though it were his cross. This would be masochism rather than heroism" (MSFM, Part II). In 1984: "in no way is suffering necessary to find meaning… If it were avoidable, however, the meaningful thing to do would be to remove its cause" (Postscript). The third path is for unavoidable suffering, and it is the last resort, not the entrance. Any material that implies hardship is good for you, unqualified, is teaching against its own founder.
A dating error. The phrase does not appear in the 1963 edition. The framework, and the "in no way is suffering necessary" sentence, belong to the postscript "The Case for a Tragic Optimism," written in 1983 and added in 1984. Attributing it to the camp memoir is a mistake a specialist will catch on sight.
Denied by Frankl himself. From the preface to the 1986 edition of The Doctor and the Soul: he complains of "the misconceptions of the mass media whose representatives never weary of proclaiming that Viktor Frankl came out of Auschwitz with a brand-new psychotherapeutic system he had developed in the concentration camp. The very opposite is true: I entered the camp with a full-length book manuscript (hidden under the lining of my overcoat) which was indeed an outline of the basic concepts of logotherapy." Historians agree: Pytell (2015) dates the core of the theory to 1929–30. The camps tested it. They did not produce it.
The best trial in Frankl's lineage found small ones. Cohen's d = 0.10–0.34 in the largest, best-controlled trial of Meaning-Centered Psychotherapy (Breitbart et al., 2018). The d ≈ 1.9 figure from a 2025 meta-analysis of small trials against waitlist is not a plausible treatment effect and drops to 0.8 against active controls. Full account on the evidence page. If you cite the large number, cite the small one beside it. Otherwise cite neither.
Not in that paper. The 2003 paper gives no prevalence figures at all and says the necessary studies "have not yet been done." The number comes from later Stanford survey work reported in Damon's 2008 trade book The Path to Purpose. If you use it, cite the survey, give the sample and the criterion, and do not attach it to the peer-reviewed paper.
Was, in one indication, and is now unrated. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine endorsed it at "Guideline" level for sleep-onset insomnia in 2006. Its 2021 guideline made no recommendation, because fewer than three qualifying studies existed. The accurate phrase is: once guideline-endorsed, now unrated for want of trials. That is a more interesting sentence than "evidence-based," and it has the advantage of being true.
Link to it. If you run a logotherapy institute, a course, or a practice and your materials carry any of the ten items above, we would rather you fixed them than argued with us — and if you think we have one of them wrong, write to hello@logotherapist.com with the page reference and we will correct it here, dated. The page was last checked against the primary texts on 29 September 2026.