Logotherapy (fourth lecture)
Everything Depends on Our Attitude
In this talk I am continuing my discussion of some of the main ideas in logotherapy, the school of psychology founded by Viktor Frankl.
As we have seen according to Frankl we can discover meaning in life in three different ways:
Frankl contends that one choice remains to us and that is the choice
of our attitude towards it. I have previously discussed the experiential and creative values. Today I propose to discuss attitudinal values.
In my view Frankl's attitude towards unavoidable suffering is one of the most valuable of his contributions to the art of living. While he had already formulated it before he was imprisoned in a concentration camp it was there that its validity was tested and confirmed and it was there that he was able to see the living proof of its efficacy in the way in which his fellow prisoners were able to cope with, and rise above, their miserable situation. Everything had been done to deprive them of everything that made life worthwhile, of opportunities of encountering either experiential values or creative values. It was Frankl's great discovery that experiential and creative values are not the only sources of meaning, that even if we are facing a fate which cannot be changed, there is still meaning available in our lives. "When you can no longer change the situation you may change yourself, which means you may change your attitude towards your fate," he says. "Changing yourself in such cases means rising above yourself, going beyond yourself."
Frankl has declared that as the director for a quarter of a century of a neurological hospital department he had watched people turning their tragedy into triumph -- girls who yesterday were dancing in discos and today are paralysed from the neck down, young men riding motor cycles and then paralysed.
Since my last talk I have received a tape of a recent lecture by Dr. Frankl and so I am in a position to quote from some memorable examples that he gave. One was a case of a twenty-four year old woman who at the age of 18 was injured by a gunshot wound as she walked to the grocery store. She could only accomplish tasks by means of a mouth stick. She feels however that the purpose of her life is quite clear. She watches the newspapers and television for stories of people in trouble and writes to them, typing with the mouthpiece, to give a word of comfort and encouragement.
Dr. Frankl also cited a case reported by one of his students. This was that of a thirty-one year old mechanic who had received hundreds of thousands of volts of electricity either gangrenous or already mummified and had to be amputated. Dr. Frankl's student was assigned to him as a special nurse. In her report she said: "The surgeons', physiologists' and nurses' faces were wet with tears, their bodies shuddering with occasional ucontrollable sobs, as they went through the necessary tasks of removing one by one both legs and both arms from the young and healthy body of a fellow human being."
When he awakened he had to be told by the nurse that his arms and legs had been removed. She goes on to say in her report:
"I searched for thoughts by which I might spark him with a meaning for his life and his predicament. There was a young man who was paralysed from the neck down. He had learned to use his teeth and so forth. I took Bob to visit him. They became friends and looked forward to seeing each other."
The nurse the felt that Bob was transcending his human condition She began to ro read to hi for short periods. She read "Man's Search for Meaning." He would say: "Stop. Read that over again." He would discuss different parts of the book and how they related to his own condition. He was particularly impressed with the meaning one finds in suffering. He memorised some sentences. His favorite quotation was the statement: "It is the spiritual freedom which cannot be taken away, which makes life meaningful and purposeful."
"Bob opened a small business and was able to support his family," the nurse reported. "Last summer in a specially equipped car he drove his wife and two children on a tour of the United States and he told me: "I was very empty before my accident. I stayed drunk all the time and was bored to death. Now, I truly know what it means to be happy."
"A man who had lost both arms and both legs and after the accident know what it truly means to be happy." Dr. Frankl exclaims on the tape -- "Fulfilling a meaning and finding a meaning n suffering. This is true happiness and this is a real triumph." And I may add myself that it is indeed an awe-inspiring example of squeezing meaning out of suffering and turning tragedy into triumph.
Dr. Fabry in his book "The Pursuit of Meaning" also gives examples of the same process taking place. He tells, for instance, of a woman who was in despair because she was going blind. With the help of another woman who had been born blind she learned Braille and became so interested in the method that she volunteered to transcribe books in Braille script. Her work brought her into contact with other blind people and they formed a book discussion group for the blind. By the time she had lost her eyesight entirely, she was no longer in despair.
As Dr. Fabry points out, logotherapy cannot prevent unavoidable suffering; it can keep people from despair. By Frankl's definition despair is caused by suffering in which the sufferer sees no meaning. "Suffering in itself has no meaning." Dr. Fabry says, "but we can assume meaningful attitudes towards events that in themselves are meaningless."
But we need not confine ourselves to specific examples of the application of logotherapy. The truth of the principle enunciated by Dr. Frankl is to be seen at work in people who have never heard of logotherapy but are unwittingly applying its principles.
The very day on which I was preparing this lecture an article by Alec Dickson, founder of Community Service Volunteers and Voluntary Service Overseas in England appeared in the Japan Times (March 2, 1981). In it Mr. Dickson cites a striking example very similar to those described by Dr. Frankl. I quote: "When polio struck Isamu Ito, an engineer in Tokyo, he was determined not to let it mar his enjoyment of winter sports -- and disciplined himself to ski on one leg. Then he wondered if there were others even more disabled whom his experience might help.
"So today Miss Sanae Sato, a young spastic unable to walk, careers radiantly down snowclad slopes because Ito, after long experimentation, devised a form of sledge which cradles her wheelchair ….." "His technical gifts and personal acquaintance with being handicapped, allied to her zest for life, are one reflection of human value in service," comments Mr.Dickson.
But perhaps the most striking example that has come to my notice and one that I shall never forget is the case of Ned Langford, an American soldier who served in the Philippines and who contracted leprosy. His story is told in a book entitled "Who Walk Alone" by Perry Burgess. When a doctor informed him that he was suffering from leprosy he was naturally overwhelmed. The doctor pointed out to him that he might play a special role in the fight against leprosy, saying "Man, if you could have a real part in that fight it would be worth ten ordinary lives like yours and mine." Langford's response was very understandable. "I'm no hero and I don't want to be one. I haven't any hero stuff in my makeup." The doctor looked at him for moment and then made a comment which marked the turning point in Langford's life "You have to do this, soldier, whether you are scared or not. You can take it standing up fighting or you can lie down and let it beat you. And you're the only one who can say about that." The doctor was a true logotherapist without knowing it.
Well, Langford did not take it lying down. He tool it standing up fighting. He proved that his own assessment of himself was false. There was hero stuff in his make-up and the account of the twenty-five year fight he put up is one of the most inspiring stories I have read. He fought what he called the good fight not only for himself but for his fellow human beings in the colony, doing everything he possibly could to help them help themselves.
Looking back on the twenty-five years of life in the colony he asked himself: "What did it mean? " And within him welled up this answer born of those years:
"Life, no matter how it is lived, is always a mystery. To take it as it comes, asking no quarter, fighting to the end, that is the creed the quarter century has brought to me. Balancing the scales at the end of twenty-five years in a lepro colony, the leper knows that he is, first of all, a man. For that man life has been worthwhile."
The decisive test was formulated in the statement of Yehuda Bacon, one of Israel's artists, who as a boy survived the Auschwitz death camp. "Suffering can have meaning," he said, "if it changes you for the better."
Frankl confidently affirms on the basis not only the experience of suffering human beings he has himself witnessed, but on the vast amount of evidence provided by the application of logotherapeutic principles in cases of unavoidable suffering, that the sources of meaning in life are inexhaustible. He declares that meaning is available under each and every circumstance to every human being, irrespective of age, sex, character, structure or religion.
I must confess that as I read those accounts of the heroic turning of tragedy into triumph I wondered whether if faced with such circumstances, I would be able to respond as they did. I am inclined to feel as Ned Langford did that "I'm no hero" but I take comfort from a statement of psychologist Bonaro Overstreet. She says: "People always do what makes sense to them in terms of what they see. They do not do things which from their point of view, in the moment of action are stupid and uncalled for. They obey the imperative of their own awareness. Behaviour changes only as some expanded awareness makes the individual take into account what he did not notice before."
I think this is precisely where logotherapy helps. It helps us to take into account what we did not notice before. It expands our awareness and introduces us to a possibility of meaningfulness for our lives that we might never have glimpsed or conceived before. We are thus enabled to see the possibilities of meaning that may be squeezed from it.
In his talk Frankl quoted a memorable saying of Jung's: "Meaning makes many things, perhaps even everything, endurable and bearable." This is saying in another way what Nietsche said: "If you have a why to live for you can put up with almost any how." It is discovery of a why to live for that is the core of the matter. But this applies not only to those who are faced with inescapable suffering. It applies to each of us here and now.