The Discovery of Being

by Rollo May

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 world (so graphically shown in Mrs. Hutchens’s inability to let herself talk) in order that the centeredness of his existence may be protected from threat; a way of blocking off aspects of the environment that he may then be adequate to the remainder.