SURVIVAL is usually defined as the individual facing extreme circumstances and somehow overcoming them alone.
Victorian Water Minister Tim Holding is a case in point.
- The Third Man Factor: The secret to survival in extreme environments, by John Geiger. Text, rrp $40
But think again.
What if there was a presence, a kind of guardian angel-like figure that gave you the strength and inner means to hold on? For Geiger, he calls these phenomena The Third Man Factor.
This is a controversial book.
Even though Geiger points to such significant figures in history as Ernest Shackleton and Charles Lindbergh as having had a "third man moment", for some readers scepticism will understandably exist over whether there is a third man at all.
Geiger's "proof" is that the presence of a third man at times of extreme difficulty and life threatening instances in severe environments is repeated in testimony.
He points to the recent experiences of this from a September 11 survivor from the World Trade Centre attack to American rock climber, James Sevigny in 1983.
While the evidence he presents is plausible that there was a "helper" and that his selected subjects attest to the third man factor, the research he provides does not deal with the power of plain guts and determination.
One has only to think of Sir Douglas Mawson on his solitary trek back to Commonwealth Bay after the disastrous 1912 expedition.
What drove Mawson was his trust in providence. Even so Mawson was not above hallucination.
Could this be what Geiger's selected survivors experienced as an expression of their stress and trauma?
There is room for this interpretation from the book but also the existence of a third man factor as well. You decide.
