p 8 Berg und Sinn Selected Passages Supporting Frankl’s Zen-Like Thinking and Behavior 68 – 125
p 13 »You don’t have to take everything from yourself. You can also be stronger than fear.« - Viktor Frankl
p 16 Who is on the road between the world wars and in the years after was here, at the latest, on the short forest path, the yelling and joking of friends, the noises when leather soles rub against the rock, and heard the rope commands. It was a colourful bustle around the rock wall, which runs like a grey shaded band over the meadow and as a dragon’s back to the sky.
p 16 . Frankl accompanied one of his friends only because he would have no one else to abseil him. Viktor didn’t have the vision to climb himself at first. It probably did not occur when he reached the edge of one of the vertically sloping walls while securing his luggage – this was done from above – and for the first time in his life from such a height into the depth looked. Because in the anxiety of the moment he became aware that he obviously suffered from fear of heights.
p 17 This look into the abyss of the Mizzi-Langer wall, the confrontation with his own fears, brought the seventeen-year-old high school student for the first time in contact with a higher spiritual essence that makes us humans human. With the freedom to choose our inner position in relation to the external conditions of life in every situation, with the freedom of will itself: it became Franklin’s maxim of life, the determining basic tone. Human image, to the central postulate of his logotherapy and existential analysis, as its founder he would later go down in history. This freedom of will enables us to activate the mental reflex in us, which Viktor Frankl called «The Spirit’s Defiance».» You don’t have to take everything from yourself. One can also be stronger than fear, «So he reflected his own»… Yet say yes to climbing as a symbol of the inherent ability of all of us to face internal resistance and external difficulties.
p 19 The defiance of the spirit in the sense of Frank has a different quality than the defiance, which we mean colloquially. It is a higher, centered force within us that we can communicate to ourselves, providing the necessary mental resources. As persistence, strength and will it commands our body in the vertical not to bow to gravity, not to be paralyzed by doubts or fears, but to refer to the next grip ,the next kick, the way up.
p 25 The 1974 photo shows Viktor Frankl, then 69, climbing the Lutterplat and looking up. At that time he had long ago conquered the world with his high-altitude psychology, which focuses on the freedom of man to make decisions. Moving through the rock, mentally overcoming inner barriers and the difficulties of a wall in order to grow beyond oneself has given him lifelong strength – because the»defiance power of the spirit«is a timeless gift of life.
p 27 The most exciting for me is the roulette game, a brain operation and a first « Viktor Frankl
p 29 An initial climb is much more than a purely physical peak. It is a genesis, a process that does not only include the actual event. First, it takes fan-tasia, a creative look at a wall and the gift of the foreword to see what is possible while we are still standing at the bottom of the wall. Then the courage to actually walk this way comes into play. We make our decision in the balance between reality and ideality, between being and should, between what a new tour will require of us, a pioneering act in the vertical, and what we consider to be our personal ability. We are testing our own vision. First ascents to the rock are not pure buildings of thought – the tour is already undertaken with all senses, with every cell anticipated before it even begins. Only then does the plan come into action, only then everything becomes an immediate experience – the devotion as well as the inner willingness to risk – and failure. First ascents, which is their fascination, have a price: success is also and especially on the mountain an affirmation of risk, and the risk is the confrontation with the possibilities outside the community, with injury to death. This is true for first climbers in a very special way, but no less so for every climber who follows – the uniqueness of the person and the unique The situation make every climbing tour a first task in its own right. And that makes climbing a parable for life.
p 29 His debut on the rock was for him much more than just a new hobby: With climbing he gave himself a self-empowerment, which all his further life, his work, his work and his strength»in the white-hot of suffering«should influence and favor large scale skincare tests.
p 34 Every first-mover has the right to name his creation. As much as Frankl would have been happy to do this, he probably wouldn’t have used his own name.» Its edge was dedicated to Viktor Frankl, and indeed in 1955 by Rudolf Reif – who wrote about it: »Named after the famous philosopher, neurologist, university professor and what else I know. He is my occasional companion and the name gave me 4 bottles originally from Grinzinger. I am now looking for other routes that I can call after him, because the wine was good and I could still drink some bottles.
p 37 How liberating and enriching it must have been for Viktor Frankl to open up this new dimension of life through the vertical, finally having found a balance to spiritualization and a distraction to the stressful through physical activity, and finally meet with other male reference persons than those he met in his student-scientific circles every day. During climbing adventures with equal purpose on the bearing stone, he was pierced by the vitality of Adventurers, the Viennese schmäh groaned him, he found the answer to the Nestroy’s question »Now I am really curious who is stronger: me or me? ‘ by overcoming his fears step by step and thus growing more and more beyond himself as a man and a person who strove for greatness.
p 39 Unlike Viktor Frankl with his appreciated sense of duty and his deep emotional depth, Rudi Reif was a go-getter and a free spirit. Nothing and no one was spared from his sharp humor. Their witty wit, love of storytelling and ardent enthusiasm for climbing connected the two. A description of Frankls illus-triert, that it is very funny the two despite difficult times together: »When the club went on a short tour with him and me, he used to call me – the psychiatrist – always the doctor of lies . I was then a hospital doctor in the Am Steinhof asylum. At least he never called me a doctor, but only a fool. Until one day I was at the end of my patience and I told him in front of all the club members: “Watch out, Mr Riif, if you continue to call me Narr-doctor – know how I will then call you Steinhof-Reif”! «
p 40 Yhe experienced alpinist Rudolf Reif was Frandl’s mentor and taught him as his climbing instructor the basic knowledge of mountaineering. This included the complete set of mental skills required by mountaineering. And not only mountaineering, but synonymously the art to live his life enthusiastically: willingness to take risks, courage, concentration, centeredness, goal-focusing, perseverance, frustration tolerance, therefore essential static elements in the psychological foundation of Viktor Frankls, which in the future should prove to be a valuable resource for his life – in the truest sense of the word also for his survival.
Male group: Rudi Reif and Viktor Frankl are travelling together for the first time after the war.
The Tour of the Passion: The rope companions Viktor Frankl and Rudi Reif on the Three Gentian Trail.
p 44 Shanghai became an end-station for the Chinese and Europeans awaiting emegraion to the United States. The European emigrants were placed in a ghetto. Hongkou district, the food drastically ratio-niert. Whenever Reif was plagued by the longing for his Austrian-Czech mountains, he climbed in spirit the «Neustädter Wie-ner Steig» on the Rax, one of his favorite routes.» Brain-climbing, he called these visualizations which remind us of Stefan Zweigs «Chess Novelle». He lived this journey so deeply that every step, every grip seemed real. At the key-place, the Büchlriss (above the Steigbuch), a long, consuming passage, he always held on to a small depression, which he considered only as a product of his imagination. After his happy return in 1949, he actually found this place. In his book»A piece of the Him-mel«, noted the Viennese mountaineer Karl Lukan to this amazing episode: »The memory has forgotten the grip – the subconscious does not. «
p 44 Climbing only in the imagination – also in this point the rope companions Reif and Frankl had something in common. Like his climbing teacher in exile in Shanghai, this mental technique should also keep Viktor Frankl mentally upright and ultimately physically alive in hopeless situations during his time in a total of four concentration camps.» His memory images were so strong that they helped him to survive the worst«, Reinhold Messner, the most famous mountaineer in the world, once said in an interview about Viktor Frankl. In fact, he owed his survival to this self-application of a central technique of his Thera-pie concept, which is based on the exclusively human ability to distance oneself from oneself and external conditions and thus be able to take up positions freely. A program of protection of the soul against the adversities of life.
p 48 The Horde, that’s a big word. So large that it has been alienated from the alpinistic into political language as a sy-nonym for a mutually promoting connection. Yet the depth of the term can only be understood and experienced in the highest measure and in the original, mountaineering sense: as one of the most binding connections that people can enter into at all in the transition area between earth and heaven.
p 48 As soon as we have left the secure ground of the solid ground under our feet, as soon as our paths lead into the vertical, we go over exposed ridges, through large walls, the rope becomes the only and last reassurance. In the face of beauty and danger, of wonder and fear, we experience in intimate community a radical reduction to our existential foundation, the simultaneity of being turned back on ourselves and feeling deep bond with others. So a metaphorical consolidation of being human, in which abstract values such as freedom, responsibility and trust become very concrete: When one falls into the wall, one partner holds the other, slows down his fall by picking up without a hook, thus preventing serious injuries or even death. The obligation arises from the fact that one’s life depends on the attention of the other at any moment. Every tour is a challenge that climbers take on consciously and voluntarily. Once you are on the road as a group, there is no room for daydreams in the wall. Climbing means to go into self-overcoming and self-empowerment, as well as to trust the rope partner unconditionally. Between the abyss and the summit, the mountains take us away in an intensity that is not common.
p 51 While heading out on a tour or hiking in the mountains, Viktor Frankl was able to give his mind plenty of room for new ideas. In the wall, climbing demanded his undivided attention. The omnipresence of danger broke the loops of his analytical thinking and forced him into the moment. This feeling of freedom and the binding nature of his group gave Frankl – literally – mountains. And of all the climbing tours he has undertaken in his life, the Kanzelgrat on the Hohe Wand is probably the most emotionally important.
p 58 In general, he had – despite all appreciation for Freud’s merit – great reservations against his conclusion that man was essentially no more than a subject controlled by unconscious sexual drives. This kind of simplification could not be won by the young Viktor Frankl, even if it came from a Genie like Sigmund Freud. So the student drew the consequences for himself – and just went on. In 1924, the year of his graduation, when he also discovered his fascination with climbing, he learned to be a member of Alfred Adler, whom he considered less dogmatic, and was invited into his inner circle of the Society for Individual Psychology. Adler must have recognized the rising talent in Frankl and seen a potentially obedient disciple of his teaching in him. For three years the individual psychologist personally strove for the young man, who was so interested in the depths of the human soul. Of course only as long as he did not articulate any thoughts of his own that deviated from Adler’s principles. But this is exactly what Frankl did. When Frankl in 1927 encouraged the development of individual psychology in a more humanistic direction, and also supported two colleagues who had fallen out of favor with Adler, his mentor promptly broke the staff above him: In retrospect, the reward of this turning point was higher for Frankl than its price. Although he was uprooted and deeply disappointed by the ungentle expulsion, at the same time he had learned two essential lessons for his later advancement: a sense of responsibility over his own conscience and the healthy inner distance to the establishment. of the psychotherapeutic profession. The fact that the most renowned human connoisseurs of their time cooked on a personal level only with water, proved their interaction with each other. The two prominent school founders had not been able to resolve differences of opinion in a more collegial way than they had been able to escalate into bitter enmity with the result of the successful rupture
p 59 What he had experienced with the great names of his field, encouraged the student to do in his further orientation what he practiced in every free minute climbing – to find his own line , to trust her and to choose his own route courageously. The own sense doubts, which had thrown him through the years of maturity on the narrow ridge between the nihilistic and optimistic representatives of existentialism again and again, They were all powerful.
After completing his specialist training as a neurologist and psychiatrist, he was entrusted with the management of the »suicide women’s pavilion «in the PsyChiatrische Hospital at Vienna’s Steinhof, where he treated around 12,000 patients between 1933 and 1937. The huge number of case studies was of great value to the junior doctor and the further development of his logotherapy. In contrast to the then common cliché of the»gods in white«, Frankl psychically met patients not only at eye level but always saw what had remained intact in their souls behind or under all disturbances. That was revolutionary: a neurologist who focused on the healthy. He did not create a gap between himself and the psychiatric patients, on the contrary, he built a bridge and experimented with intervention techniques that proved to be extremely effective. For example, he worked with the paradox intention, one of the well-known methods from logotherapy.
P 61 The few hours of free time that remained to him besides his profession and vocation, Frankl, who completed his training as a mountain guide at the Alpine Association Donaul and during this period, spent on the Peil-Langer-Wand climbing with friends stone, the Hohe Wand, the Rax and on the Schneeberg.
p 62 Frankl pursued his work as a doctor at the Rothschild hospital – and again and again took the considerable risk of falsifying diagnoses for psychotic patients so that these escaped Hitler’s euthanasia program. Frankl and his young wife Tilly met the ideology of that time soon after their marriage with their whole hardship: Tilly had to have their child aborted, they would have liked to call it Marion or Harald. The only alternative to an abortion would have been deportation to a concentration camp.
p 64 In 1941 he had already had to let more than a full year pass without feeling the rock under his fingertips. For he did not dare to violate the relevant racial laws. His longing made him dream of the mountains again and again, until the day when his best friend Hubert Gsur said to him:»Look, Vikerl, you will tear off the Jewish star from the wall and we will climb the high wall tomorrow. To avoid suspicion, Gsur wore his Wehrmacht uniform on the illegal tour. To even do it was much riskier for both climbers than the route itself.
The exact date is not known or important. Decisive was how this climbing tour on the Hohe Wand deepened the friendship of the two men and gave Frankl strength. Because the memories of these three, four hours at the pulpit made him survive the life -threatening fever in the concentration camp by climbing the route again dimmer in mind and imagining how he would climb through rock walls again in the future. This prevented him from falling asleep at night and thus succumbing to the disease. What Frankl used in this life-threatening phase was the «self-distancing», a method he developed from logotherapy that equates to the ability to or physical suffering to mental opposition or also to evoke a positive vision of the future.
p 65 His whole life he was touched by the civil courage of Hubert Gurs and this special moment, when he stood at the foot of the Hohe Wand without a Jewish star, deeply. When I felt like that rock in my heels, I kissed him«, he described the significance of this experience of happiness in the midst of collective madness. It was one of the most emotional moments of his life.
p 66 The meeting place for the deportation was the Sperlgymnasium, his former school. On this journey into the unknown, Vik-tor Frankl took only his beloved. Mountain guide badge with. The original of his book manuscript of» Medical Pastoral Care«, in which he had written down the basic elements of logotherapy with an old typewriter, was sewn into the hem of his coat.
p 70 What is man? He is the being who always decides what it . Viktor Frankl