Yousuf Raza – Relevance of Logotherapy for Us
AI: Summary ©
The speakers discuss the concept of "Logotherapy" and its relation to philosophy and personality, as well as "achar therapy." They also discuss the concept of "immaterial manifestiveness" and how it can be discovered through creative gifts and experiences. They also touch upon the importance of finding meaning and happiness in one's life, finding the right way to discover it, and finding the right way to discover happiness. They also mention Frankel's theory of existential vacuum and the use of "frastic intention" andutive techniques to discover meaning and happiness. Finally, they discuss Frankel's belief in a Jewish belief and how it affects their mental health. They also mention Frankel's history and his difficulty in practicing a Jewish mentality.
AI: Summary ©
I forgot to ask.
Okay, we're live now.
So we're going to go for another 45
minutes.
All right.
Hello, everybody.
This is Yusuf and Azam, and we have
been joined on PsychBedTech by my mentor in
Logotherapy, Dr. Anne-Marie Neal.
We're very happy and excited to have you
on the show.
Welcome on PsychBedTech, Dr. Neal.
Wow, thank you so much, Yusuf.
It's so I'm so glad to be here,
and it's so great to see you almost
in person and to join your radio.
I don't know what you call this.
Is it a podcast or a Facebook podcast?
Yeah, it's a Facebook live.
All of the above, right?
All of the above.
So anyway, you asked me to, and I
guess I'll just share what comes to my
mind, right?
Yeah, yeah.
That sounds good because that's what I usually
love to do.
Well, I was asked by Yusuf, who, yes,
is my former student, but now colleague.
I keep telling him he's a colleague.
He doesn't have to keep addressing me as
Dr. Neal, although he continues to do that.
He is stubborn.
He is stubborn.
I have kept telling him.
I keep writing emails, putting Ann Marie.
I get back Dr. Neal.
So anyway, and I used to live in
the South, and some of my students, and
even some of my students from Europe will
call me or South America call me Dr.
Ann Marie, which is kind of like a
hybrid of my first name and the fact
that I do have a psychology.
So anyway, yes, I am honored to be
here to talk about one of my most
favorite topics in the world, which is Viktor
Frankl's Logotherapy, and to tell you a little
bit about why I find it meaningful and
what the theory is all about.
I'm going to assume that some of the
people who might listen to this later, because
I understand this is being recorded and people
can click on it another time, might have
read Man's Search for Meaning or maybe hadn't
read Man's Search for Meaning, maybe just heard
of this man and know that he was
a psychiatrist who survived three, at least three,
four, possibly four concentration camps during World War
II.
So I'm going to assume that you know
nothing about logotherapy and share with you what
I know and what I understand about his
amazing philosophy of life.
I call it a philosophy of life, a
theory of therapy, and somewhat of a theory
of personality.
I think that's a wonderful beginning.
Most of our audience, most of the people
who'll be listening, they've heard me or Azam
refer to Frankl now and then.
They know that we take to logotherapy, that
I've been, I talk about logotherapy and Viktor
Frankl every now and then.
So they've, some of the people have heard
the name, and you're right in assuming may
have read the book, but this is the
first time that we're going to be dedicating
an entire podcast slash Facebook live slash YouTube,
whatever it is that we're doing, to just
talking about him.
And so that's, it's a good place to
start.
Well, no pressure there.
So Dr. Neal, I think the question would
be what the heck is logotherapy?
What the heck is logotherapy?
Well, that's a great place to start.
I probably, however, and I will tell you,
just like I said, it is a theory
of therapy, a theory of personality, and a
theory of a philosophy of life.
And what logotherapy is, and is from Viktor
Frankl's perspective, he as a very young kid,
even when he was 13, 14, challenged teachers
who would say, well, life has no meaning.
And he would say, well, if it has
no meaning, why are we here?
And so he was always fascinated by philosophical
theories as a young kid, as a teenager.
And then when he went on to college,
university, got his, he was a physician, an
MD with a degree in psychiatry and neurology.
And then when he was released from the
concentration camps in 1946, he went back to
University of Vienna, which is where he's from.
He's from Vienna and got his PhD in
philosophy.
So what is logotherapy?
He chose that name.
He played a lot with different names of
what his theory was.
And he finally came back to logotherapy because
he wanted to separate the fact that he
was not just another, he didn't want to
use the term existential analysis in English because
it was being used by others, such as
Rollo May and Vince Wanger and others.
So he decided to go back to the
term logotherapy.
And the word logos can mean the word,
but it can also mean meaning.
And so he wanted to, he was looking
at why are we here?
Why are we born?
What is our, the reason that we are
here on this earth?
And he believed that there is meaning to
be discovered in our universe, that we have
the will to discover meaning for ourselves.
And very importantly, we have the free will
to do so.
So that's in a nutshell, what most people
think of when they think of logotherapy is
the philosophy of life and the psychotherapy therefore
follows that philosophy, that there's meaning to be
discovered, to be discovered by the way, not
created.
He did not believe that we create meaning.
He believed that we discover it and it's
external to us and it is individual for
each of us.
So for example, right now on this broadcast,
this is a meaningful moment for me and
for Yusef and for Dr. Asim, for all
of the people who will be listening, each
of us to discover what the meaning is
in this moment for them.
And so it's meaning of the moment and
ultimate meaning.
So meaning of the moment is basically what
we do every single day of our lives.
Every day we get up, there's something that's
going to happen that day or something we're
going to discover that will be meaningful.
But he also believed that there is this
concept that he called ultimate meaning, which most
people would call God, but some people might
consider it the universe.
A scientist might say it's scientific principles.
You know, it's something greater than us that
we are, he believes, striving to reach through
all of the acts and the behaviors and
the decisions we make in our life and
that we'll never know how close we come
to ultimate meaning to the point of death
or beyond.
So basically, we're looking at meaning of the
moment.
He isn't even so much as looking at
what's the meaning of my life because that's
such a huge concept and frankly that changes
over time.
So for me, you mother, that was my
primary meaning.
I was discovering meaning through being a parent
and that creative gift.
When I was a nurse, I went to
nursing school first out of high school.
Then I discovered meaning through working in the
operating room, through working in cardiopulmonary nursing, orthopedic
nursing.
And then of course, as I gradually moved
into other phases of my life, now I
discover meaning in the moment through being a
grandmother, through the work I do for the
Viktor Frankl Institute of Logotherapy, teaching the courses
that Yusef took.
And I also teach for another institute called
the Graduate Theological Foundation and I supervise doctoral
theses and I teach e-courses and I
work for a forensic neuropsychology team in Miami
and I write up reports and interpret testing
to discover hopefully mitigating factors that will affect
the judge and the jury when they're making
important decisions such as sentencing and even the
death penalty.
And frankly, Frankl says life has meaning to
the last breath.
So every single moment of our life has
meaning.
And if you can't possibly see it too
well, if you look behind me, there's a
painting on my wall and it says life
has meaning to the last breath.
And I wanted to record this in front
of that because that's my favorite Viktor Frankl
quote.
And one of my students, whose name is
Dr. Lou Story, who's a social worker is
also an artist and for his diplomate in
logotherapy, he didn't want to use his social
work.
He wanted to use his artistic work.
And so he created 12 amazing pictures like
this that depict logotherapy and turned it into
a calendar, which was pretty awesome that year.
And without my telling him, this was my
favorite one because I just love that quote,
life has meaning to the last breath.
I thought this was an absolutely beautiful depiction
of that, but I didn't want to influence
him to choose that one of the 30
that he made.
So I never told him.
And about a few months after he received
his diplomate, I had this knock on my
door.
I was living in Florida at the time
and I went out to the front porch
and there was this gigantic package and I
opened it up and here was this beautiful
framed original drawing of a painting, an artistic
representation of my most favorite one.
And when I thanked Lou for it and
told him that I had never shared with
him that this was my favorite, he told
me that the entire time he was creating
it, he was thinking this is for Ann
Marie.
So there is such a thing as synchronicity
in this world, which is, I think, really
powerful.
So this is when I moved to Boise,
Idaho, that went in the back of my
car.
There was no way I was going to
ship it and worry that it might get
lost or damaged.
So life has meaning to the last breath.
That's one of the philosophies of Viktor Frankl
in his ways of looking at meaning.
He also says that we can discover meaning
three ways.
We can discover it through our creative gifts,
which I've just already mentioned, some of the
things that I do.
And the reason, by the way, I'm feeling
so happy about doing all those is that
I have a big birthday coming up Thursday.
You can all wish half Friday a happy
75th birthday.
And I don't know how in the world
I got to be three quarters of a
century old, but I am.
And I am still, I am so grateful
to what I call God, but we can
call it whatever, that I have my cognitive
abilities and that I can still share my
creative gifts with others.
And I know all of you are going
to be doing the same thing and are
doing the same thing.
So we discover meaning through our creative gifts.
It could be the work we do.
It could be our career.
It could be volunteer work.
It could be raising children.
We discover meaning through our experiences in the
world, our love for and from each other.
It could be our love for one particular
person or the love we experienced from one
particular person.
Frankl was blessed to have two wives in
his lifetime.
His first wife, Tilly, who sadly died in
the concentration camps.
And I could go on and on about
the amazing relationship they had.
And then when he met his second wife,
Ellie, when he had not been out of
the camps very long, he met her.
And that's an amazing, beautiful story in and
of itself.
And they were married 50 years before he
died in 1997.
So our love for and from others is
another way we discover meaning.
We also discover meaning through our appreciation and
love for art, such as this, beauty, nature.
We discover meaning through our experiences.
So through our creative gifts, through our experiences,
and last but not least, through our attitude
in the face of unavoidable suffering, inescapable guilt,
and death.
And he doesn't mean just our physical mortality,
though, of course, that is always with us.
He's talking about death in a perhaps a
metaphorical sense, such as death of a relationship,
death of our physical health, death of a
loved one, death of a lifestyle through this
entire pandemic.
We as all over the world have had
to adjust and realize that the life as
we knew it is gone.
And even as we are moving into another
phase, everything's different.
So we just got he believes we're here
to discover meaning.
And we discover meaning through these three ways.
And I'll just keep repeating creative gifts, experiences
in the world, through love and for and
from others, love of art, beauty, nature, and
attitude in the face of unavoidable pain, or
suffering guilt or death.
Now, one of his famous quotes is, because
he calls these acts of fate, if I
can't change the situation, I can always change
my attitude.
And so one of his famous quotes is
suffering ceases to be suffering once it discovers
a meaning.
And I always want to qualify that by
saying he is not suggesting that we don't
suffer.
He there is real grief and sorrow that
we experience in life.
Life isn't good or bad.
It's good and bad.
There's dark, there's light, there's sorrow, and sadness
that happens, things we can't control.
A hurricane, I used to live in Florida.
So I know about hurricanes, hurricane comes through,
and you've lost your house.
And you've lost every single thing in it.
But luckily, your family's alive, or perhaps you've
lost a loved one, you know, through a
natural disaster.
He was in a concentration camp.
He could not prevent what was happening there.
But he did have the freedom to change
his attitude and to do what he could
for his fellow prisoners, which is what he
did.
And also guilt, unavoidable, inescapable guilt.
There are things I've done or haven't done
that I might feel guilty about.
Now I can't change the past.
I can't change what I did or didn't
do.
But I do have the freedom to change
my attitude and perhaps do something different.
And of course, as I've already said, death
is inevitable in many, many ways.
So he is not suggesting we don't suffer.
He's not suggesting we don't grieve when we've
lost a loved one.
But how do we discover meaning in that?
And I'll give you an example that he
uses in his book, The Will to Meaning,
which is the only book that was originally
published in English.
It's based on a series of lectures he
gave here in the U.S. And at
the very end of the book, he talks
about the fact that people always say to
him, would say to him, how could you
find meaning in suffering?
How could there be meaning in suffering?
And he relates the story of an Israeli
artist who, I don't know if he's even
still living today, but his name was Yehuda
Bacon.
And he, as a young man, was in
concentration camps in World War II.
And when he got out of the camps,
he started telling everyone he knew about his
experience and what had happened.
And he was very discouraged and very frustrated
and even angry at times because nobody seemed
to care and nobody seemed to change.
And he was just distraught over this.
And then years later, he looks back on
his life and he says that he finally
realized what it was.
Suffering has meaning if it changes you for
the better.
Does it change me?
My suffering, has it changed me for the
better?
You know, how does suffering change us for
the better?
So it's suffering has meaning if it changes
me for the better in some way.
Have I grown through that suffering?
Have I become a better person?
Frankel believes that the reason we're here is
for self-transcendence.
We're not here for self-actualization.
Although I would suggest that when I do
practice self-transcendence, meaning I give of myself
to others in the world, life is asking
of me, what are you going to give
to the world of your gifts?
You are unique.
If you don't provide, if you don't fulfill
that meaning that you're here for, no one
else will do it.
Someone else will get on this recording and
they will share their idea of logotherapy.
Someone else would have taught Yusef the courses
that he took with me, but it wouldn't
be me.
So what is life asking of me?
And am I answering the call?
That's and it's all about giving of myself
to others in the world, which he calls
self-transcendence.
There was a famous inaugural address by one
of the presidents of the United States, John
F.
Kennedy, and one of the famous lines of
that speech was, ask not what your country
can do for you, ask what you can
do for your country.
And if you change that quote and insert
the word life, this is what Frankel would
say, ask not what life can do for
you, ask what you can do for life,
because life is asking us to answer that
call.
And I would say when I'm self-transcendent,
when I'm doing the things that I, discovering
meaning in the moment, and then being a
good grandmother, being a good teacher, doing the
best I can with my friends, answering a
call to be on this, what I consider
early morning here in Boise, you know, part
of my discovering meaning, then I feel self
-actualized.
You know, I think self-actualization comes through
self-transcendence, but that's not Frankel, that's Dr.
Neal saying that, because Frankel disagreed with Abraham
Maslow, that we're here for self-actualization.
He believed we're here for self-transcendence.
He also, by the way, and this is
a part I almost forgot to mention, he
says we have, well, I'm going to put
this way, he says we have three dimensions.
We have a spiritual dimension, we have a
soma, which is a body, and we have
a psyche or a mind.
And he was talking about the spiritual, what
makes us spiritual beings different from, say, animals.
So he was not talking about a religious
concept when he was talking about the spirit,
excuse me, this human spirituality.
He was talking about what makes us distinctly
human.
And in German, there are two words for
spirit, a religious word and a secular word.
And he deliberately chose Geist, because he wanted
to talk about the fact that we have
this spiritual dimension.
He then tried to, but it was not
a religious concept, so that if you had
a religious crisis, you would go to an
imam or a priest or a rabbi or
a minister.
But if you wanted to get some help
with your psychological problems or your mental health
problems, you would go to a psychiatrist, you
would go to a therapist.
As he said, he was a healer of
people's mental health.
He was not a savior of souls.
So when he talks about spirituality, he's talking
about, in a secular term, in a human
sense.
And I happen to be blessed to be
friends with now and colleagues of his grandson,
Alexander Vesely, who learned a lot from his
grandfather about logotherapy and is a logotherapist himself.
And one time I said to Alex, we
have a spirit, a soma, and a psyche,
a spiritual aspect, which is in Greek the
nuos.
And we have a soma, which is my
body, and my mind, which is my psyche.
And Alex stopped me, and he said, no,
Ann Marie, that's not what my grandfather said.
He said, we have a soma and a
psyche, but we are spiritual beings.
So we are spiritual beings on a human
journey.
That's what he was talking about when he
was talking about this nuos.
But what does this nuos or this spiritual
dimension contain?
Because to me, this is the most awesome
part of his theory, perhaps for me even
more so than I'm here to discover meaning.
And he said, in this spiritual aspect of
who we are, we have amazing gifts.
For example, the defiant power of the human
spirit.
I will overcome when a hurricane has come
and destroyed my home and all.
I will somehow get past that.
I will find the strength to overcome the
death of a loved one, the death of
a child, some physical illness that I might
have discovered, such as I just discovered, this
is not true about me, but suppose I
just discovered I have had multiple sclerosis.
Or suppose I've struggled with addiction, and I
finally realized I don't drink, I can't drink
normally like other people, which by the way,
was part of my experience in life.
How do I overcome that?
Well, he believed we have this defiant power
of the human spirit.
We also, he said, in this amazing human
spirit, we have our creativity, we have our
intuition, we have our personal conscience, which was
not what Freud talked about, our superego.
It is, yes, the things I've learned as
a child from my caregivers or parents, perhaps
my religion, perhaps my culture, but it's also
my understanding now of what my values are,
and that's part of my personal conscience, which
is in our noetic spiritual dimension.
What else is in there?
My ability to forgive others and myself, and
also sense of humor.
He believed that the sense of humor is
extremely important.
What I love about this idea that in
our spiritual dimension, as spiritual beings, we have
all these gifts that Frankl says the spirit
is incapable of getting sick.
So I could be physically ill, I could
be struggling with anxiety or depression or bipolar
disorder or a myriad of psychological conditions.
I could be in intense grief.
I could have all of those things that
I'm struggling with through my body and my
mind, but my human spirit, all these gifts
that are in there are still there.
It's just that I can't always reach them.
I like to think of it like, because
I used to live in Michigan also, and
there's a lot of fog in Michigan, and
if you're driving in the fog, if you've
ever found yourself suddenly in the middle of
driving in the fog like I have, you
can't see anything in front of you.
I couldn't see the road.
I couldn't see the side of the road.
I was driving just because I knew what
was there.
So when I'm struggling with depression, when I'm
struggling with grief, when I am in physical
pain perhaps, when I can't figure out what
the meaning of life is right now, and
I'm going through what he calls existential frustration,
all these gifts are still there.
I just can't access them right now, but
when the fog lifts, suddenly there they are,
and I can access them again.
And to me, that is the most, one
of the hopeful aspects of logotherapy, that our
spirit is incapable of getting sick, that we
have all these gifts there, and that we
will be able to access them once perhaps
we get the help we might need from,
say, a physician to cure my migraine headaches,
perhaps from a recovery program on alcohol or
drug addiction or gambling addiction or all the
addictions that we suffer in this world.
When I am able to finally come to
terms with my grief over the loss of
someone, perhaps through a counselor's help or a
life coach's help, when I go to a
psychiatrist for help with my bipolar disorder, and
I agree to take the medication perhaps that
will help with that, or I go to
a psychiatrist, psychologist, social worker to get help
with struggling with the different aspects of perhaps
intense anxiety and depression, that once I can
get that taken care of, all these gifts
in the noetic dimension are there again for
me to see and grasp and hold.
And I don't know about you, but I
used to get migraine headaches, and I can
tell you I had no sense of humor.
I did not feel like forgiving anybody.
My creative gifts were out the door because
the headache was just all-consuming, but once
the headache was relieved, I was able to
reach these gifts again.
So I honest, and again, in service to
others, not about me, always in service to
others, and I can't think of any other
personality theorist that talks so much about self
-transcendence and makes such a big deal about
it.
To some extent, Alfred Adler did, who was
another Viennese psychiatrist.
He believed that the mark of a mature
adult is a person who has what he
called social interest, caring about their community and
the world around them.
And Frankel was a colleague of Adler's for
years, and there's a lot of similarities in
his theory.
So anyway, when I talk about the fact
that logotherapy is about discovering meaning and accessing
these gifts, and then I talk about all
these other conditions that need help, it reminds
me that Frankel always said that logotherapy is
usually an adjunct to other therapies.
That means that sometimes someone might need to
see a psychiatrist for medication.
Someone might need to use other techniques like
CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy techniques.
He wasn't saying that logotherapy was the only
solution, and sometimes people aren't ready to talk
about discovering meaning.
They're struggling with very real issues, and they
need some other kind of help as well.
So I don't know.
I've been talking an awful lot, and I
could just go on and on, and maybe
I should stop there and just see if
there's any other questions or things that you
might want to ask me that I could
clarify.
Thank you, Dr. Neal.
That was a very wonderful introduction, I would
say.
Dr. Neal, we in Pakistan, we live in
very tight-knit families, and a lot of
the time we hear, people hear from their
parents or from their uncles and aunts that
you have a good job, you have a
good wife, you have a good family, you
are doing everything good financially and with your
family, and yet you say that you feel
that your life is meaningless.
What is the problem with you?
So people are being ridiculed if they say
that I feel my life is meaningless if
they have a good job and a good
family, but somehow they have a void in
themselves that I'm not feeling myself.
So how do we respond to that?
Well, thank you for the question.
Frankl talks about, I mentioned this briefly earlier,
he talks about existential vacuum, and he talks
about existential frustration, which comes before existential vacuum,
and existential frustration is kind of exactly what
you were just describing.
You know, I have all these wonderful things
in my life, you know, I have my
health, I have my grandchildren, I have, like
you said, you have this family, this great
job, why are you not satisfied?
Why are you not happy?
What's going on?
And this existential frustration, this inability to somehow
discover meaning, even when everything else seems so
great, is not something new.
This has been going on for probably as
long as we have been alive on this
planet.
For example, when Frankl first discovered his theory,
came up with his theory, it was not
in the concentration camps, as many people think.
He lived his theory in the concentration camps.
He developed logotherapy in the 1920s when he
was working with suicidal young men who had
been soldiers in the World War I.
He also was working with a lot of
suicidal women in a mental health ward that
he was in charge of, and what he
discovered was that they were having this great
difficulty discovering that meaning in the moment and
meaning in life, and that's when he came
up with his theory.
So what he would, if I were a
logotherapist and you came to me with that
problem, this is what Frankl would suggest I
do.
He would suggest, first of all, there's two
techniques, two or three basic techniques of logotherapy.
One is paradoxical intention, which wouldn't really fit
this example.
One is dereflection, and the other is Socratic
dialogue.
So dereflection is a technique that Frankl discovered
when someone is hyper-reflecting on something, like
I can't figure out why I'm not happy.
I can't figure out why nothing's going right.
I know I have all these wonderful things
in my life.
What is wrong with me?
He would say, he would not say try
to think about something else, because I don't
know about you, but if I try to
think about something else when I'm obsessing about
something, all I'm now thinking about is the
fact that I'm trying to stop thinking about
what I'm obsessing about.
So he would suggest you perhaps go out
and do something, like maybe go volunteer at
a food bank, or take a jog around
the block, or take a walk, exercise.
This sounds minute, but it is true that
stop a muscle, stop a thought.
You move a muscle, excuse me, stop a
thought.
It is almost impossible to still be depressed
and anxious if we're active in some way,
or we get out of ourselves and go
do something for someone else.
So that's one thing he would talk about,
but the other thing is that he would
use, it's called Socratic dialogue, because Socrates, of
course, most people have heard of the ancient
Greek philosopher Socrates.
Socrates came up with this kind of dialogue
in which you ask open-ended questions in
order to help someone discover the answer that
they're seeking inside themselves.
But the truth is, Socrates didn't really use
this dialogue for that reason.
Socrates was a teacher, and he wanted his
students or his political dissenters, those who didn't
agree with him politically, to come up with
his, to agree with him on something.
So he would come up with questions that
he would hope would force you to almost
be put into a corner where you had
no other choice but to agree with him.
So interestingly, the way we use Socratic dialogue
isn't the way Socrates was using it.
He had a, he was a very, very
big plan in his head.
I would like you to see that the
earth is really round.
You know, I would like you to see
that this political position is the best of
the two options.
So what is Socratic dialogue today, and how
is it used in logotherapy?
Another term that you'll often hear Socratic dialogue
called by logotherapists such as myself and Dr.
Raza is meiudic dialogue.
M-I-E-U-T-I-C comes
from the Greek, and it, and it, in
the Greek, it, it means midwife.
Well, what is the role of a midwife?
The midwife is responsible to help the mother
bring forth the baby that's already in her.
So the role of the logotherapist is to
be a facilitator, to truly believe that the
answer to your dilemma is inside of you.
It's inside your noetic dimension, but you can't
see it right now.
You're in that fog that I was talking
about, where you can't come up with it.
Nothing's working.
You can't figure out how to discover meaning
right now in this moment of your life.
And so my role would be to ask
certain questions, open-ended questions that would perhaps
help you come up with the answer, bring
forth that baby that's inside of you, that,
that solution that's inside of you by active
listening on my part, and by not giving
advice or not trying to direct you in
a particular way.
So let me give a concrete example.
Suppose your family, they're all physicians and everybody
thinks that that's what you need to do,
but you don't want to be a doctor.
You don't want to be a physician.
And so you're struggling with that because you've
got all this pressure, you know, from family
members to be that physician.
So my role would be to help you
come up with what you really want to
do.
And I'll give you an actual real life
example.
When I was living in Florida, I used
to, we used to get paper newspapers, right?
That came to the front door and we're
sitting on your step.
Now we just click the computer and we've
got the, the version of the, of the
paper.
But back then we used to get these
paper editions.
So I pulled the paper out that morning
and on the front page of the paper
in Plant City, Florida from Tampa, which is
where the paper originated, was a picture of
a woman leaning against a big semi-tractor
trailer.
And the headline read, former family physician becomes
long distance trucker.
Now that definitely caught my eye.
Whoever wrote that headline knew you were going
to read that article, right?
So I read the article and it was
about a woman in her late thirties who
had been a family physician in a small
town.
She was the only doctor there.
She was struggling with Medicare and all these
insurance company things and overloaded with patients because
she was the only doctor and she was
not happy.
She was extremely depressed and overwhelmed and decided
that she didn't really want to be a
physician.
She all, at least not at that moment
in her life, that she wanted, she'd always
wanted to be a long distance trucker.
So she closed up her practice and she
went to long distance trucker driving school.
You have to get a license to drive
those big things.
And she became a long distance trucker and
she was driving long distance trucks back and
forth across the country for delivering goods and
so on.
And she was very happy.
So she discovered a way to discover meaning
in her life at that moment by closing
her medical practice and becoming a long distance
trucker.
So I am sure you can imagine the
reaction of people who read this article or
people who knew her.
One of the reactions was, what a waste.
You went and got your doc, your MD,
and now you're driving a long distance truck.
You don't even need an education to do
that.
The other was very judgmental.
How can you be so selfish?
You have this gift that you can be
a physician and help others and you're not
going to do that.
You're going to do a long distance truck
driving instead.
But the answer for her at that moment
was that this was the way she was
going to give to others in the world.
So if I were working with someone who
was struggling with I've got everything, I'm not
happy, I would trust that the answer is
inside of you and I would hopefully help
you figure it out.
Even if the answer might not be what
your family or your friends agree with.
I mean, it might come up to be
something that you want to do that nobody
else thinks makes any sense.
And it's okay once in a while to
not feel completely content with things.
Frankel says we are not here to discover
happiness.
We're here to discover meaning and happiness is
the byproduct of doing the next right thing.
So if I oftentimes drugs and alcohol are
a shortcut to happiness, we often find many
ways to shortcut because we're so sure we
just want to be happy.
Whereas if we just let that go and
discover what is the meaning today in my
life and how can I use this day
to give to others.
Every Sunday for two hours my seven-year
-old grandson comes over because his mother and
father have things to do and his older
sisters don't want to have to watch him
all the time.
And this has become one of the most
meaningful aspects of my life.
When he runs in the door and we
watch Octonauts together and now and I learn
all these things about snakes and polar bears
and alligators and things I don't really want
to know about.
Thank you very much.
But he is so excited and so thrilled
to be here.
And one day my daughter asked me if
I could have him come over for about
three hours.
She had something she had to do and
I had all these things on my plate.
I had to finish a report.
I had to read a student's paper, tutorial
paper, logotherapy paper.
And she said it's okay mom you don't
have to.
And I almost said no but I finally
said yes.
And he came over for those three hours
and we had the best time.
I couldn't get my password to work on
my Netflix and I called the computer people
and they're trying to help me figure it
out.
Now at this time he's about five and
he's telling me what to do and he's
correct.
I said my grandson's helping me with this.
So anyway at the end of the three
hours he looked at me and spontaneously said
oh I've had such a wonderful day and
I thought you almost missed it.
You almost said no because you thought you
were too busy.
So sometimes the meaning of the moment is
just doing something as simple as that.
Sometimes it's just saying to myself I don't
know why I'm unhappy.
I don't know why I'm frustrated.
I don't know why nothing seems to be
great.
But I'm going to trust that there is
a meaning for me to discover in my
life right now.
And I'm going to take a step back
and try to figure it out when I'm
ready and not let all this pressure from
others influence me.
I don't know who that helps.
Thank you so much Dr. Neal for that
response and pretty much giving us logotherapy in
a nutshell.
You took over the last half of the
second half of Frankl's.
Before we have to close I'm sorry we
couldn't manage more time but one thing I
would want to ask a lot of people
in Pakistan especially given the current global scenario
or the political situation as it has developed
would be very skeptical of a Jewish psychiatrist
and how his conceptions are relevant for people
in Pakistan predominantly culturally and by practice Muslims.
So they would feel that this is you
know it doesn't fit.
How does and there may even be some
question marks as to there being an agenda
some you know something something being attempted some
sort of indoctrination or whatnot.
So does that how would how would we
look at logotherapy in that context that it
you know that Frankl wouldn't in any way
look to do anything or proselytize neither a
Western nor a Jewish agenda through logotherapy.
Wow that's a huge question to ask at
the end.
Thank you so much.
I know you're one of my students for
sure my former student.
Well first of all he always said yes
I practice Jewish religion but that's my personal
life.
That has nothing to do with me as
a physician as a professional.
That is my personal decision and the truth
is yes he did practice Judaism his entire
life and when he was in his 80s
he had second bar mitzvah which is something
that men often do to rededicate themselves to
God and every morning at 10 a.m.
he said his Jewish prayers.
However he married a Catholic girl the second
time and they raised their daughter their daughter
they had one daughter Gabrielle Catholic.
So he was very ecumenical ecumenical when it
came to religion personally.
He wanted a rabbi and a priest to
marry them neither would agree to do a
joint ceremony 1946 not going to happen.
So they said forget it and they went
to the city hall and and had a
secular marriage.
So he would say I am not talking
as a Jewish person.
I am talking as a psychiatrist.
I don't have it with me but one
of my former students Dr. Kenneth Ayubi is
a practicing Muslim and he did his diplomate
paper and his doctoral site for his ID
as doctor in psychology looking at the relationship
between Islam and local therapy.
And when he asked me if he could
do this project I said I don't know
anything about Islam.
I don't know I can't be sure if
you're accurate or not on that.
So in the graduate theological foundation where he
got his ID I made sure that some
Muslim faculty read that part of this paper.
But I also said to him since I
don't know could you please recommend something for
me to read.
So he did.
But anyway what he finally came up with
looking at Islam and local therapy and this
is just him so I'm only quoting him
okay was that if you were a practicing
Muslim you could go to a local therapist
and you would not hear something contrary to
your religion.
If you were a Muslim practicing Muslim you
could be a local therapist because he didn't
see local therapy as in conflict in any
way with the Muslim religion.
But that's what he came up with through
his understanding of local therapy.
The only thing else I could say is
Frankl was never speaking in terms of a
religious.
This is not a religious theory and that's
the problem with the word spiritual in English
and other languages.
It often gets connected to religion but it's
about what makes us distinctly human.
Okay thank you so much Dr. Neal for
the shortage of time.
We will have to come to a close.
It was an absolute pleasure listening to you
talk about local therapy.
It was like time travel for me the
couple of years that we spent studying all
of those concepts together.
I got a nice refresher today as well
and I hope and other than Yusuf at
least we could now hear authentic local therapy.
And I forgot to mention and I would
really be in trouble we're having a virtual
world congress virtual world congress October 21st to
23rd.
If you go to www.victorfranklinstitute.org you
can find a way to register.
There's early bird registration.
It's a three-day conference.
There's student discount registration and if you cannot
actually attend during those three days it will
be recorded and if you've registered you can
download the recordings for up to 12 months.
So we're going to have amazing speakers, amazing
presentations, Saturday colloquium about people doing their diplomae
project like Dr. Raza did and so I
encourage you to check out our website and
to perhaps consider attending or registering for the
world congress.
It's every two years.
This is the first time we're doing it
virtually because we just know it's impossible for
people to travel today.
So that's it.
Okay thank you so much Dr. Neal for
being here with us and for sharing that
about the details about the colloquium.
We'll definitely check that out.
I'll try my level best to attend and
I'll pull them with me as well.
I expect to see you there.
I don't think I have a choice.
All right thank you so much.
Thank you and with that we close.
Thank you for watching but we hope this
was what you needed to know about logotherapy
as best as we could manage in an
hour and there's so much more that we
would love to hear your questions on and
with that we close.
Thank you all and good morning, good afternoon,
good night, wherever you are in the world.
It's my joy and my honor to be
here.
Thank you so much.