How I found hope in the words and thoughts of a holocaust surviving psychologist

"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

Like most adventures that are worthwhile, Bank Job was born out of a crisis. It was after I had finished my first feature documentary – How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire.

The film had done really well but after a spell on the road across the US, I felt empty and totally unsure of what I was going to do next..

The film had been following the story of my grandmother – who was born into a wealthy Jewish family.. but after the Russian Revolution she had fled across Europe, ending up in London – and then Belfast – where she became a Republican sympathiser, and was eventually buried in Milltown Cemetery on the Falls Road.

Following the end of it - I was left in a state that seemed like grief..  I could put it like this: “why do I live?” “Why do I make films?” “What’s the purpose of my work? Or even what's the purpose of life?”

These questions went round and round– but they were not questions I wanted.

Rather they had entered my mind like thieves in the night –  and refused to vacate no matter how I asked them..

Why did they haunt me so much? I had at this time a 3 year old and a 1 year old.. I wanted to be a good father to them and a good husband.. but I felt that something important was missing.. some greater purpose or design and couldn’t put my finger on it or be effective at anything much until I could actually answer this basic question.

At first I thought one philosophy or other must be the answer.. or maybe a spiritual insight.. but I could find no answers there at all..

To make matters worse – like so many millions and billions across the world, every month I was juggling bills and having to find an answer to that fundamental dramatic question.. how the hell do I survive this month.. how do I pay those bills.. for me it was just filming whatever came along for clients.. and I felt stuck in a hamster wheel filling every waking hour with jobs that were at best boring – at worst effectively putting a gloss onto the activities of companies who were destroying the planet.

Meanwhile global events continually were getting worse. Climate change. Poverty. Inequality. Weapons of Mass Destruction. Out and out lies.. Demonstrations and marches that led nowhere...

The remaining shreds of my soul yearned to find a way to stand up for something and be counted but I didn’t really know where to start.

While I was in this mode, I came across a short book called “Man’s Search for Meaning” and in there – in the company of the author – Victor Frankl, I discovered words, ideas and knowledge which really helped me out of my fix.. and you could almost say, he whispered "Bank Job.."

Frankl had survived Auschwitz.. and developed a branch of psychiatry known as logotherapy – which focuses on meaning to be fulfilled in the future. His whole method was to confront his patient with and orient them towards meaning in his or her life to help them overcome much of the neurosis in their life.

"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."

The word Logotherapy came from the Greek “Logos”– meaning. Meaning – therapy.

Frankl’s focus as a psychologist was on the meaning of human existence – as well as man’s / woman’s search for meaning in his/ her life..

According to Frankl, this striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary force of all human existence – he speaks of ‘a will to meaning’.. this I could believe because I felt until I had actually uncovered it, I couldn’t do anything else at all.

Frankl spoke of uncovering both people and ideals you’d be willing to die for.

“There is nothing in the world, I venture to say that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is meaning in one’s life. There is much reason in the words of Neitzsche “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

In the concentration camps one could have witnessed that those who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfill were most apt to survive.

It was strange to say that in the days I read this book and the weeks and months after it, I felt a lightness descend. A feeling that perhaps I had not missed the boat.. and that meaning for each and every person on the planet is slightly different – just as all our destinies are different.

And that once we know what our meaning is – just in the here and now, that we must cherish and nurture it.

Whether successful or not in the past, it doesn’t matter.

It’s about practicising and holding the meaning in the here and now.

And really the text of this late psychologist helped me to overcome the sense of loss, failure and guilt that accompanied the end of the old project, the running into the ground of the vodka business..(the mafia had ended up taking over the distillery and the dream was shattered) and allowed me to look at the future again, as something that held the only purpose.

Around the same time – one of my neighbours mentioned a group from New York who were buying up and abolishing high interest debts.. and I began to take an active interest in their work… I felt Frankl was maybe whispering something like "Bank Job"...