THE CAPTAIN'S METHOD™
Viktor E. Frankl
Where this shows up in the Captain’s Method
Frankl supports The Choice, the closing lesson of the Focus section, and its synthesis line, My focus transforms stimuli. The curriculum keeps his tested claim, the freedom to choose an attitude, and drops the popular line about a space between stimulus and response, which traces to Stephen Covey. In the Equanimity chapter he is the hardest case for the Options principle, Victim to Resilience, where members rate how they hold a situation they cannot change. The Adventure Personality's State layer, challenge versus threat appraisal, is where his lecture-hall practice becomes a trainable skill.
- Focus
His claim that the attitude toward any circumstance remains a choice sits under The Choice, the lesson that closes the Focus section.
- Personality
He placed the will to meaning at the center of a person, the stance the Adventure Personality trains for when reality refuses to cooperate.
Viktor Frankl was a Vienna psychiatrist and neurologist who ran youth counseling centers around report-card season from 1928 to 1930; in 1931 not one Vienna student died by suicide. Deported in 1942 with his wife Tilly, he spent about three years in four camps, including Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, and his parents, his brother and Tilly all died. The manuscript of his first book, hidden in his jacket, was taken from him at Auschwitz, and he rebuilt it from memory. He founded logotherapy, often called the third Viennese school of psychotherapy after Freud and Adler, and wrote 39 books.