Concept
The last freedom
The last freedom is Frankl's conclusion from the camps: everything can be taken from a person but one thing, the last of the human freedoms, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances. Between stimulus and response there is a space, and the space is yours.
Frankl observed, as a prisoner and a doctor in Auschwitz, that in conditions designed to remove every choice, prisoners still differed in how they met them, and the difference was not strength or luck; some gave away their last bread. From this he drew the claim that organises his psychology: circumstances can be total and the attitude toward them still free. For a reader who has learned how automatic the mind is, the fast system, the hijack, the elephant, the last freedom is the necessary other half. The automatic processes are real and they do not have the last word, because there is a gap between what happens and what you do, and every practice on the road, naming the feeling, catching the fast answer, asking what you would need to know, widens it. Frankl found the space in the worst place a person can be; the practice is to find it at a dinner table and in traffic, where the stakes are smaller and the reflex just as fast.
A real-life example
A father in Bursa meets his teenager's silence at dinner with the same sharp question every evening. He locates the space between the silence and the question, names his hurt to himself, and asks about the day instead. Two evenings later the boy talks for ten minutes.
How to use it
- 1Find your most automatic reaction and put a pause before it: a breath, a named feeling, a chosen reply.
- 2When circumstances cannot be changed, remember the one thing that can: the stance you take toward them.
- 3Practise the space where the stakes are small, so it is there when they are large.