Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose

Victor Frankl, a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, discovered that the last human freedom that cannot be taken away is the freedom to choose how one responds.

One day, naked and alone in a small room, he began to become aware of what he later called “the last of the human freedoms”—the freedom his Nazi captors could not take away. They could control his entire environment, they could do what they wanted to his body, but Victor Frankl himself was a self-aware being who could look as an observer at his very involvement. His basic identity was intact. He could decide within himself how all of this was going to affect him. Between what happened to him, or the stimulus, and his response to it, was his freedom or power to choose that response.
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In the midst of the most degrading circumstances imaginable, Frankl used the human endowment of self-awareness to discover a fundamental principle about the nature of man: Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose.^[1]

#psychology #maturity

See also:

• What others do is the stimulus, not the cause, of feelings