Viktor Frankl

Yeah.

So how can we get them out? Alexander Botjani is a philosopher and psychologist who directs the Viktor Frankl Institute in Vienna.

He ran the first modern study of a phenomenon that modern medicine ignored, the unexpected return of memory and speech in people whose brains have failed them.

His work has fundamentally changed how I think about dementia, because if someone can return whole and then die with their brain measurably unchanged, then what we call losing a person may actually be that person losing access to themselves, still there, just unable to get out.

You just go along with the moment.

But I must say that at the moment, I was merely grateful.

And I already back then was a student of Viktor Frankl, you know, the famous psychiatrist.

Yeah.

Yet he saw suffering not as a curse, but as an opportunity to exercise virtue.

Viktor Frankl, surviving the concentration camps, wrote that those who found meaning in their suffering could endure almost anything.

These are not romanticized tales of hardship.

They are testaments to a truth you can't learn in theory.

I didn't just do.

Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl.

That's a famous book, isn't it?

Yeah, that's very highbrow, yeah.

An idol worshiper who is a decent human being goes to heaven sooner than a Jew who is not decent.

Judaism, the Torah, divide the world between the decent and the indecent, to use Victor Frankl's great terminology, not between Jew and Gentile, not between pagan and monotheist, but between the decent and the indecent.

Okay, Dennis, this is one of my favorite questions yet.

This is from Douglas, uh, from Jacksonville, Florida.

Of course it is.

Now Covey links it to Viktor Frankl's freedom of choice.

Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist and a Holocaust survivor, wrote Man's Search for Meaning in 1946, and he argued that humans have the freedom to choose our attitude in a given situation.

And for Covey, that meant we have the choice to focus on what can be influenced rather than what can't be, or we can make things happen rather than waiting for them to happen.

Be proactive.

If you're inactive, like you're being in some type of abuse or like extreme, like horrific pain, there's a different frequency.

And I do want to bring forward Viktor Frankl.

Man searched for meaning.

He lived in a concentration camp.

And the warden was nice enough to say, well, yeah, Dr. Patty went around.

The other thing I would tell you, Steve, it's like when we talked about Viktor Frankl, in a previous podcast and the idea of finding meaning in one's life.

So when I did this, I was like 64 and I really did have the feeling and it was a very tranquil feeling.

I mean, like I really didn't think I was going to get COVID and die from it, but I also very much had the feeling of like, this is why I became a psychologist.

That's the title of a collection of thoughts and emotions rolled into a country song by Alan Jackson.

Where were you when the world stopped turning? So where were you 25 years ago today? Do you, like so many others, remember every single moment of that day? How did your life change after that day? What does it mean to you today? How much thought have you given to freedom since 9-11? What is freedom to you, to others? As the Stoics talk about and Viktor Frankl personified along with many others, our freedom lies within our skull, in our mind.

You're free to dwell on the horrors of that day, and you're free to celebrate the changes that came about.

It seems all we do, though, is complain about those changes.

So, I mean, I think you're right.

I think, you know, there's that old trope about, and I think it was Viktor Frankl who said, you know, if you have the why, you can endure just about anything, right? Right.

If

you know why, then you can endure any what, essentially, is what he said.