R' DR. Sacks
Niiice......
Maimonides called his ideal type of human being – the sage – a rofe nefashot, a “healer of
souls”. Today we call such a person a psychotherapist, a word coined relatively recently from the
Greek word psyche, meaning “soul”, and therapeia, “healing”. It is astonishing how many of the
pioneering soul-healers in modern times have been Jewish.
Almost all the early psychoanalysts were, among them Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Otto
Rank and Melanie Klein. So overwhelming was this, that psychoanalysis was known in Nazi
Germany as the “Jewish science”. More recent Jewish contributions include Solomon Asch on
conformity, Lawrence Kohlberg on developmental psychology and Bruno Bettelheim on child
psychology. From Leon Festinger came the concept of cognitive dissonance, from Howard
Gardner the idea of multiple intelligences and from Peter Salovey and Daniel Goleman, emotional
intelligence. Abraham Maslow gave us new insight into motivation, as did Walter Mischel into
self-control via the famous “marshmallow test”. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky gave us
prospect theory and behavioural economics. Most recently, Jonathan Haidt and Joshua Green
have pioneered empirical study of the moral emotions. The list goes on and on.
To my mind, though, one of the most important Jewish contributions came from three
outstanding figures: Viktor Frankl, Aaron T. Beck and Martin Seligman. Frankl created the
method known as Logotherapy, based on the search for meaning. Beck was the joint creator of
the most successful form of treatment, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Seligman gave us Positive
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Psychology, that is, psychology not just as a cure for depression but as a means of achieving
happiness or flourishing through acquired optimism.
These are very different approaches but they have one thing in common. They are based
on the belief – set out much earlier in Habad Hassidim in R. Schneur Zalman of Liadi’s Tanya –
that if we change the way we think, we will change the way we feel. This was, at the outset, a
revolutionary proposition in sharp contrast to other theories of the human psyche. There were
those who believed that our characters are determined by genetic factors. Others thought our
emotional life was governed by early childhood experiences and unconscious drives. Others
again, most famously Ivan Pavlov, believed that human behaviour is determined by conditioning.
On all of these theories our inner freedom is severely circumscribed. Who we are, and how we
feel, are largely dictated by factors other than the conscious mind.
It was Viktor Frankl who showed there is another way – and he did so under some of the
worst conditions ever endured by human beings: in Auschwitz. As a prisoner there Frankl
discovered that the Nazis took away almost everything that made people human: their
possessions, their clothes, their hair, their very names. Before being sent to Auschwitz, Frankl
had been a therapist specialising in curing people who had suicidal tendencies. In the camp, he
devoted himself as far as he could to giving his fellow prisoners the will to live, knowing that if
they lost it, they would soon die.
There he made the fundamental discovery for which he later became famous:
“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the
huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in
number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one
thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one's attitude in any given set of
circumstances, to choose one's own way.”
What made the difference, what gave people the will to live, was the belief that there was a
task for them to perform, a mission for them to accomplish, that they had not yet completed and
that was waiting for them to do in the future. Frankl discovered that “it did not really matter
what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.” There were people in the
camp who had so lost hope that they had nothing more
to expect from life. Frankl was able to get them to see
that “life was still expecting something from them.” One,
for example, had a child still alive, in a foreign country,
who was waiting for him. Another came to see that he
had books to produce that no one else could write.
“What made the difference, what
gave people the will to live, was
the belief that there was a mission
for them to accomplish that was
waiting for them to do in the
future.”
Through this sense of a future calling to them, Frankl was able to help them to discover their
purpose in life, even in the valley of the shadow of death.
The mental shift this involved came to be known, especially in Cognitive Behavioural
Therapy, as reframing. Just as a painting can look different when placed in a different frame, so
can a life. The facts don’t change, but the way we perceive them does. Frankl writes that he was
able to survive Auschwitz by daily seeing himself as if he were in a university, giving a lecture on
the psychology of the concentration camp. Everything that was
happening to him was transformed, by this one act of the mind,
into a series of illustrations of the points he was making in the
lecture. “By this method, I succeeded somehow in rising above
the situation, above the sufferings of the moment, and I observed them as if they were already of
the past.” Reframing tells us that though we cannot always change the circumstances in which we
find ourselves, we can change the way we see them, and this itself changes the way we feel.
Yet this modern discovery is really a re-discovery, because the first great re-framer in
history was Joseph, as described in this week’s and next’s parshiyot. Recall the facts. He had been
sold into slavery by his brothers. He had lost his freedom for thirteen years, and been separated
from his family for twenty-two years. It would be understandable if he felt toward his brothers
resentment and a desire for revenge. Yet he rose above such feelings, and did so precisely by
shifting his experiences into a different frame. Here is what he says to his brothers when he first
discloses his identity to them:
“I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. And now do not be distressed, or
angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve
life … God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for
you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here, but God.” (Gen. 45:4-8)
And this is what he says years later, after their father Jacob has died and the brothers fear
that he may now take revenge:
“Do not be afraid! Am I in the place of God? Though you intended to do harm to me, God
intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as He is doing today. So
have no fear; I myself will provide for you and your little ones.” (Gen. 50:19-21)
Joseph had reframed his entire past. He no longer saw himself as a man wronged by his
brothers. He had come to see himself as a man charged with a life-saving mission by God.
Everything that had happened to him was necessary so that he could achieve his purpose in life:
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“Just as a painting can look
different when placed in a
different frame, so can a life.
to save an entire region from starvation during a famine, and to provide a safe haven for his
family.
This single act of reframing allowed
Joseph to live without a burning sense of anger
and injustice. It enabled him to forgive his
brothers and be reconciled with them. It
transformed the negative energies of feelings
about the past into focused attention to the future. Joseph, without knowing it, had become the
precursor of one of the great movements in psychotherapy in the modern world. He showed the
power of reframing. We cannot change the past. But by changing the way we think about the past,
we can change the future.
Whatever situation we are in, by reframing it we can change our entire response, giving us
the strength to survive, the courage to persist, and the resilience to emerge, on the far side of
darkness, into the light of a new and better day.
