“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Dr Viktor Frankl.
Reading Ismail Lagardien’s recent bleak pessimistic foretelling of the future, called to mind an interview hosted by the well-known psychologist Carole Charlewood (who recently passed away) with the famous psychiatrist Dr Viktor Frankl thirty years ago. I was at the time a newly graduated young social worker starting out on my career in a country that was in deep trouble.
Viktor Frankl is the author of the all-time best seller book titled “Man’s Search for Meaning”, first published in 1946 which explains his psycho therapeutic approach, grounded in his own experience as a survivor of the Nazi holocaust. It racked up sales of over 12 million copies, and has become a standard text that I offer to clients feeling overwhelmed by adversity.
At the conclusion of the end of the half hour interview Charlewood asked “Dr Frankl, as you know this country is going through a very difficult time. We have an economic recession. People are losing their jobs. Businesses are going insolvent. The political situation is far from settled. Do you have a message that can give us hope and meaning?”
I hope that many students and young adults pause to listen to the half hour interview, at this
to see if his response makes as much sense today as it made to me thirty years ago. Journalists like Ismail Lagardien and Justice Malala, who have memory of the times that Charlewood was referring to, should watch it too. His message of hope was to explain that despite the objective material conditions that said he was extremely unlikely to survive the death camps, he nevertheless did. He knew the chances of surviving were extremely small – in the region of one in thirty - but he reasoned that nobody could tell him with 100 percent certainty that he would not be the one person in thirty who survived. He found some space for him to make a choice, in freedom. The choice he made was to strive to live each day with a sense of meaning and hope for the future. Yes, he was relatively advantaged because he had already specialised in treating suicidal patients as a psychiatrist in Vienna for some years before the Nazi’s invaded Austria. But in the interview he explains that he found a clear correlation between the probability of survival, and a sense of meaning and purpose. Fellow inmates who could not find meaning in the “existential vacuum, the tragic triad of death, suffering and guilt” were statistically more likely to succumb.
South Africa did, in the years that followed, turn away from the apocalyptic scenario that so many feared. Neuro-scientists have since demonstrated scientifically that “attitude does affect altitude” as the cliché goes. Recent research on patients with Alzheimer’s has now shown that the deficiencies in the neurotransmitter, dopamine, is closely associated with onset of the condition. Dopamine secretion influences mood and confidence. It can be administered in a pill or stimulated by induced expectation so that the brain produces the tonic chemical endogenously. In one study, a sample of patients with symptoms, were all given pills which they were all told contained dopamine, and then subjected to MRI scans of their brains. Without them knowing it, half the patients were given pills with dopamine, and half placebo pills without.
The very expectation of an improvement was enough to stimulate dopamine secretion to produce the improvement. One elderly man found the wheel chair that had transported him to the laboratory redundant after receiving the placebo and bounded up the stairs after his brain scan much happier and alert.
Dopamine works in the feel-good “reward centre” of the brain and in normal everyday life is stoked by the expectation and acquisition of more money, more sex as well as by more power. Flagging libido can be remedied by a pay-rise. A weak erection can be treated by a strong election. That explains Henry Kissinger’s famous line “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac”.
It is all about balance. The tonic dosage of dopamine that had an autogenic benefit to help keep Viktor Frankl alive, and send the Alzheimer patient bounding up the stairs, will become a toxic poison if one develops an unhealthy dependence on it. To remain motivated to meet the demands of leadership requires a constant flow of dopamine. People who become intoxicated by power suffer from an addiction to dopamine, which affects the leader’s psychological state of mind and risks losing touch with reality. Disequilibrium occurs between ones inner state and the circumstantial demands of the outer reality. If not remedied or treated the person will develop what is known as the Hubris Syndrome,
How does one prevent that from happening? The United States psychiatrist, Dr Dan Seigel, is making waves in the TED talk circuit with