Last time I discussed finding meaning through self-discovery and experiencing our uniqueness. In a previous talk I referred Dr. Frankl's assertion that no matter what the situation we have the power of choice even in a situation which appears unalternable, for one choice remains -- the choice of your attitude towards it.

This matter of choice is closely related to and indeed almost inseparable from another doorway to meaning, namely, that of responsibility and this is the topic with which I propose to deal today.

In her book "Advice from a Failure" Jo Coudert describes a conversation that took place at a dinner party she was attending. She was sitting next a man, an artist, who was arguing with two guests who teach in the New York City school system that they were unfair to complain about the viciousness of their students in behavior and their apathy toward learning because the students undoubtedly came from backgrounds that might fairly be described as both deprived and depraved. The teachers did not disagree about the backgrounds; indeed they cited with compassion individual histories that typically included events of a girl being raped by her uncle and a boy having no known father but a succession transient ones; but they made the point that the children's behavior made it impossible to teach them. The artist was arguing the cause -- the children's horrendous backgrounds -- was producing the effect, the children's unteachableness. While not disputing this, teachers were pointing out the effect, their unteachablenss, was perpetuating the cause, lives of illiteracy, poverty, and degradation.

Jo Coudert pointed out that while there is no question but slums must be replaced by decent housing, poverty alleviated, and teaching methods improved, there is equally no question, however, but that the destroying circularity of a life must be broken by the person living it. She said "it seems harsh to say that delinquent raped by an uncle is responsible for her life." "But, harsh or not, it is a fact. Each of us, no matter what our experiences, is in charge of how we live our lives simply because no one else can drop the attitudes we hod which dictate our behavior. A therapist may tease attitudes out of the matrix of a life and hold them up to be seen, or a wise and good person may contravene attitudes by steadfastly behaving at variance with them, but only the person whose attitudes they are can decide to let them go. The fact that they were originally inculcated by others in true but academic, just as it is academic, if I fall downstairs and break my leg in three places, whether I tripped or was pushed. It is not two places if I tripped and three if I was pushed. It is the same number of bad breaks, it hurts no less, and I am the only one who can see to the healing. I can take responsibility and do everything I can this is therapeutic, or I can point someone else and say, 'You are why I shall limp the rest of life.' There will be a certain satisfaction in pointing, but it will not alter the fact that I am the one who is rippled."

Jo Coudert conceded that we may have been victims of circumstances and had no control over what happened to us. We may have been marked for ever by the experience. It is true that we did not perpetrate the maimed us.

"But," she points out, "we are the ones who preserve the attitudes that keep the influence of the events alive. And we are responsible for the attitudes. Though alien in origin, they are solely our own now, which means that we have a choice about them. We need not keep them. We can discard them. We are the only one who can."

Jo Coudert recognises that if the truth were know about the past of any one of us, no one would blame us for being what we are. But not being blamed for a distressed and diseased life is a far cry from leading a good and satisfying one.

Jo Coudert goes on to say: "The delinquent, male or female, remains mired in every circumstance he rightly blames for his failure, is trapped in every misery he is screaming in protest against, until, or unless, he can say, 'Okay, I have unarguable reasons for being like I am, it is not my fault and no one can blame me, but the life ruined by other people has to be lived by me and so I shall do what I can to make it livable."

Jo Coudert concludes: "We can win the struggle to avoid responsibility for our personal lives, but if we do, what we lose is our lives."

The same point of view is put by Herbert Fingarette in his book "The Self in Transformation" in dealing with the question "Why should I accept responsibility for that which I could no help?" He points out that the implication of this question is that this is an unjustifiable burden. He agrees that it will always appear unjustifiable as long as one looks to the past for the reason. It is to the future that we must look. It is not that we were children and thus non-responsible but rather that we are aiming to become mature persons. This ideal, and not the past, is the ground for the harsh demand that we accept responsibility for what we are, even though we could not help ourselves.

"Responsibility is based on a willingness to face the world as it is now and to proceed to do what can to make it the world as we would like it to be." Fingarette declares: "To accept responsibility is to be responsible for what shall be done."

A student of Dr. Jess Lair put it succinctly when he said, "For what I am, shame on my parents. But if I stay that way, shame on me."

Though they probably did not realise it, Jo Coudert, Herbert Fingarette, and Dr. Lair's student were taking the logotherapeutic approach with its emphasis on choice and responsibility as two doorways to meaning. Frankl has said: "We are responsible for what we do, whom we love and how we suffer."

As Dr. Fabry says, "We all like to find out the truth about ourselves, make choices, feel unique. But freedom of making choices will not lead to a meaningful life if it not lived responsibly and lived only for one's own sake. Responsibility presupposes a demand quality in life to which we have to respond and which requires transcending our elf-centredness."

So this topic of self-transcendence, a concept central in Frankl's thinking, will be the subject of my final talk in this series next month.