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The more objective truth increases, the more our inner certitude decreases.
and the hunt for happiness will never be greater than when it must be caught between today and tomorrow; because the day after tomorrow all hunting time may have come to an end altogether.
it is by discovering and affirming the being in ourselves that some inner certainty will become possible.
In covering up being we lose just those things we most cherish in life.
For the sense of being is bound up with the questions that are deepest and most fundamental—questions of love, death, anxiety, caring.
Without values there would be only barren despair.
The individual human is still the creature who can wonder, who can be enchanted by a sonata, who can place symbols together to make poetry to gladden our hearts, who can view a sunrise with a sense of majesty and awe.
anxiety is the re-emergence of repressed libido, and his second, that anxiety is the ego’s reaction to the threat of the loss of the loved object.
anxiety as the struggle of the living being against nonbeing which I could immediately experience in my struggle with death or the prospect of being a lifelong invalid.
Karl Jaspers, psychiatrist and existentialist philosopher, held that we in the Western world are actually in process of losing self-consciousness and that we may be in the last age of historical man.
My thesis here is that we can understand repression, for example, only on the deeper level of the meaning of the human being’s potentialities. In this respect, “being” is to be defined as the individual’s “pattern of potentialities.”
Transference, like other concepts of Freud’s, vastly enlarges the sphere and influence of personality; we live in others and they in us.
Note Freud’s idea that in every act of sexual intercourse four persons are present—one’s self and one’s lover, plus one’s two parents.
Transference is to be understood as the distortion of encounter.
Agape is not a sublimation of eros but a transcending of it in enduring tenderness, lasting concern for the other. And it is precisely this transcendence which gives eros itself fuller and more enduring meaning.
Inhibition is the relation to the world of the being who has the possibility to go out but is too threatened to do so; and his fear that he will lose too much may, of course, be the case.
That is, if one’s love is something that does not belong there of its own right, then obviously it will be emptied.
castration is no longer the dominant fear of men or women in our day, but ostracism.
The real threat is not to be accepted, to be thrown out of the group, to be left solitary and alone. In this overparticipation, one’s own consistency becomes inconsistent because it fits someone else. One’s own meaning becomes meaningless because it is borrowed from somebody else’s meaning.
If you pluck a violin string, the corresponding strings in another violin in the room will resonate with corresponding movement of their own. This is an analogy, of course: what goes on in human beings includes that, but is much more complex. Encounter in human beings is always to a greater or lesser extent anxiety-creating as well as joy-creating.
In genuine encounter both persons are changed, however minutely.
Frieda Fromm-Reichman often said that her best instrument for telling what the patient feels—e.g., anxiety or fear or love or anger that he, the patient, dare not express—is what she feels at that moment within herself.
I never cease to marvel how, whenever we cut the top off a pine tree on our farm in New Hampshire, the tree sends up a new branch from heaven knows where to become a new center. But this principle has a particular relevance to human beings and gives a basis for the understanding of sickness and health, neurosis and mental health. Neurosis is not to be seen as a deviation from our particular theories of what a person should be. Is not neurosis, rather, precisely the method the individual uses to preserve his own center, his own existence? His symptoms are ways of shrinking the range of his
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every existing person has the character of self-affirmation, the need to preserve his centeredness.
the wish can never come out in its real power except with will.
all existing persons have the need and possibility of going out from their centeredness to participate in other beings.
involves risk. If the organism goes out too far, it loses its own centeredness—its identity—a phenomenon which can easily be seen in the biological world. The gypsy moth, for example, increases phenomenally for several years, eating the leaves off trees at a fantastic rate, eventually eating itself out of its own food and dying out. But if the neurotic is so afraid of loss of his own center, conflicted though it be, that he refuses to go out but holds back in rigidity and lives in narrowed reactions and shrunken world space, his growth and development are blocked,
that the human being cannot be understood as a self if participation with other selves is omitted.
Howard Liddell has pointed out how the seal in its natural habitat lifts its head every ten seconds even during sleep to survey the horizon lest an Eskimo hunter with poised bow and arrow sneak up on it. This awareness of threats to being in animals Liddell calls vigilance, and he identifies it as the primitive, simple counterpart in animals of what in human beings becomes anxiety.
The uniquely human form of awareness is self-consciousness.
We associate awareness, as Liddell indicates above, with vigilance.
Consciousness, as Kurt Goldstein puts it, is man’s capacity to transcend the immediate concrete situation, to live in terms of the possible; and it underlies the human capacity to use abstractions and universals, to have language and symbols.
when a new function emerges the whole previous pattern, the total Gestalt of the organism, changes.
Thereafter the organism can be understood only in terms of the new function.
the simple can be understood only in terms of the more complex.
the neurotic pattern is characterized by repression and blocking off of consciousness.
Awareness is his knowing that something is threatening from outside in his world—a condition which may, as in paranoids and their neurotic equivalents, be correlated with a good deal of acting-out behavior. But self-consciousness puts this awareness on a quite different level; it is the patient’s seeing that he is the one who is threatened, that he is the being who stands in this world which threatens, he is the subject who has a world.
And this gives him the possibility of in-sight, of “inward sight,” of seeing the world and its problems in relation to himself. And thus it gives him the possibility of doing something about the problems.
consciousness of one’s own desires and affirming them involves accepting one’s originality and uniqueness, and it implies that one must be prepared to be isolated not only from those parental figures upon whom one has been dependent, but at that instant to stand alone in the entire psychic universe as well.
Anxiety is the state of the human being in the struggle against what would destroy his being.
the state of a being in conflict with nonbeing, a
that consciousness itself implies always the possibility of turning against oneself, denying oneself.
Existentialism, rather, is an expression of profound dimensions of the modern emotional and spiritual temper and is shown in almost all aspects of our culture.
Existentialism is an attitude which accepts man as always becoming, which means potentially in crisis. But this does not mean it will be despairing.
Freud describes the neurotic personality of the late nineteenth century as one suffering from fragmentation—that is, from repression of instinctual drives, blocking off of awareness, loss of autonomy, weakness and passivity of the ego,
Nietzsche proclaims, ten years before Freud’s first book, that the disease of contemporary man is that “his soul had gone stale,” he is “fed up,” and that all about there is “a bad smell . . . the smell of failure. . . . The leveling and diminution of European man is our greatest danger.”
The chief characteristic of the last half of the nineteenth century was the breaking up of personality into fragments. These fragmentations, as we shall see, were symptoms of the emotional, psychological, and spiritual disintegration occurring in the culture and in the individual. One can see this splitting up of the individual personality not only in the psychology and the science of the period but in almost every aspect of late-nineteenth-century culture.
As Marx and Nietzsche pointed out, the corollary is likewise true: the very success of the industrial system, with its accumulation of money as a validation of personal worth entirely separate from the actual product of a man’s hands, had a reciprocal depersonalizing and dehumanizing effect upon man in his relation to others and himself. It was against these dehumanizing tendencies
This nineteenth century was the era of the “autonomous sciences,” as Ernest Cassirer phrases
“In no other period of human knowledge has man ever become more problematic to himself than in our own days. We have a scientific, a philosophical, and a theological anthropology that know nothing of each other. Therefore we no longer possess any clear and consistent idea of man. The ever-growing multiplicity of the particular sciences that are engaged in the study of men has much more confused and obscured than elucidated our concept of man.” 4
