Man's Search for Himself

by Rollo May

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the most common cause of such problems was what Sigmund Freud so well described—the person’s difficulty in accepting the instinctual, sexual side of life and the resulting conflict between sexual impulses and social taboos. Then in the 1920’s Otto Rank wrote that the underlying roots of people’s psychological problems at that time were feelings of inferiority, inadequacy and guilt.

It may sound surprising when I say, on the basis of my own clinical practice as well as that of my psychological and psychiatric colleagues, that the chief problem of people in the middle decade of the twentieth century is emptiness.

By that I mean not only that many people do not know what they want;

In other words, the most common problem now is not social taboos on sexual activity or guilt feeling about sex in itself, but the fact that sex for so many people is an empty, mechanical and vacuous experience.

Before World War I, says Riesman, the typical American individual was “inner-directed.”

He had taken over the standards he was taught, was moralistic in the late Victorian sense, and had strong motives and ambitions, derived from the outside though they were. He lived as though he were given stability by an inner gyroscope. This was the type which fits the early psychoanalytic description of the emotionally repressed person who is directed by a strong superego.

But the present typical American character, Riesman goes on to say, is “outer-directed.” He seeks not to be outstanding but to “fit in”; he lives as though he were directed by a radar set fastened to his head ...

This radar type gets his motives and directio...

The gyroscope is an excellent symbol for them since it stands for a completely mechanical center of stability.

Riesman points out that the “outer-directed” people in our time generally are characterized by attitudes of passivity and apathy.

A bus driver in the Bronx simply drove away in his empty bus one day and was picked up by the police several days later in Florida. He explained that, having gotten tired of driving the same route every day, he had decided to go away on a trip. While he was being brought back it was clear from the papers that the bus company was having a hard time deciding whether or how he should be punished. By the time he arrived in the Bronx, he was a “cause célèbre,” and a crowd of people who apparently had never personally known the errant bus driver were on hand to welcome him. When it was announced that the company had decided not to turn him over for legal punishment but to give him his job back again if he would promise to make no more jaunts, there was literal as well as figurative cheering in the Bronx.

A human being is not empty in a static sense, as though he were a storage battery which needs charging.

Many people suffer from “the fear of finding oneself alone,” remarks André Gide, “and so they don’t find themselves at all.”

“All man’s history,” he proclaimed, “is an endeavor to shatter his loneliness.”

“Be well-liked,” Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman advises his sons, “and you will never want.”

When one’s customary ways of orienting oneself are threatened, and one is without other selves around one, one is thrown back on inner resources and inner strength, and this is what modern people have neglected to develop. Hence loneliness is a real, not imaginary, threat to many of them.

The “stuffed men” are bound to become more lonely no matter how much they “lean together”; for hollow people do not have a base from which to learn to love.

“about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.”

We shall live amid upheavals, clashes, wars and rumors of wars for two or three decades to come, and the challenge to the person of “imagination and understanding” is that he face these upheavals openly, and see if, by courage and insight, he can use his anxiety constructively.

Anxiety, in fine, is our modern form of the great white plague—the greatest destroyer of human health and well-being.

Shall a man strive competitively to become economically successful and wealthy, as we used to be taught, or a good fellow who is liked by everyone? He cannot be both.

In fear we know what threatens us, we are energized by the situation, our perceptions are sharper, and we take steps to run or in the other appropriate ways to overcome the danger. In anxiety, however, we are threatened without knowing what steps to take to meet the danger. Anxiety is the feeling of being “caught,” “overwhelmed”; and instead of becoming sharper, our perceptions generally become blurred or vague.

“Present dangers are less than future imaginings,” as Shakespeare puts it;

Since the dominant values for most people in our society are being liked, accepted and approved of, much anxiety in our day comes from the threat of not being liked, being isolated, lonely or cast off.

Normal anxiety cannot be avoided; it should be frankly admitted to one’s self.

This is what anxiety does to the human being: it disorients him, wiping out temporarily his clear knowledge of what and who he is, and blurring his view of reality around him.

This bewilderment—this confusion as to who we are and what we should do—is the most painful thing about anxiety. But the positive and hopeful side is that just as anxiety destroys our self-awareness, so awareness of ourselves can destroy anxiety.

That is to say, the stronger our consciousness of ourselves, the more we can take a stand against and overcome anxiety. Anxiety, like fever, is a sign that an inner struggle is in progress. As fever is a symptom that the body is mobilizing its physical powers and giving battle to the infection, let us say the tuberculosis bacilli in...

We have noted above that neurotic anxiety is the sign of an unresolved conflict within us, and so long as the conflict is present, there is an open possibility that we can become aware of the causes of the conflict, and find a solution on a higher level of health. Neurotic anxiety is na...

Our task, then, is to strengthen our consciousness of ourselves, to find centers of strength within ourselves which will enable us to stand despite the confusion and bewilderment around us.

We have been taught to strive to get ahead of the next man, but actually today one’s success depends much more on how well one learns to work with one’s fellow workers.

One could well have argued that science and competitive industry were bringing mankind ever closer to its ethical ideals of universal brotherhood. But in the last few decades it has become clear that this marriage is full of conflict, and is headed for drastic overhauling or for divorce. For now the great emphasis on one person getting ahead of the other, whether it be getting higher grades in school, or more stars after one’s name in Sunday school, or gaining proof of salvation by being economically successful, greatly blocks the possibilities of loving one’s neighbor.

art must deal with the honest realities of life, and that beauty has more to do with integrity than with prettiness.

Freud pointed out that if people repress their emotions and try to act as if sex and anger did not exist, they end up neurotic.

The way out, says Nietzsche, is a finding of a center of values anew—what he terms “revaluation” or “transvaluation” of all values. “Revaluation of all values,” he proclaims, “that is my formula for an act of ultimate self-examination by mankind.”

The upshot is that the values and goals which provided a unifying center for previous centuries in the modern period no longer are cogent.

We have not yet found the new center which will enable us to choose our goals constructively, and thus to overcome the painful bewilderment and anxiety of not knowing which way to move.

Another root of our malady is our loss of the sense of the worth and dignity of the human being.

Nietzsche predicted this when he pointed out that the individual was being swallowed up in the herd, and that we were living by a “slave-morality.

Marx also predicted it when he proclaimed that modern man was being “de-humanized,” and Kafka showed in his amazing stories how people litera...

We need, therefore, to fight on both flanks—to oppose totalitarianism and the other tendencies toward dehumanization of the person on one flank, and to recover our experience and belief in the worth and dignity of the person on the other.

so many people judge the value of their actions not on the basis of the action itself, but on the basis of how the action is accepted. It is as though one had always to postpone his judgment until he looked at his audience. The person who is passive, to whom or for whom the act is done, has the power to make the act effective or ineffective, rather than the one who is doing it. Thus we tend to be performers in life rather than persons who live and act as selves.

To use an illustration from the sphere of sex, it is as though a man were to perform intercourse in the attitude of imploring the woman to “please be satisfied”—an attitude which actually exists, though often unconsciously, among men in our society more widely than is generally realized. And, to illustrate how this attitude backfires in personal relations, we may add that if the man is mainly concerned with satisfying the woman, his full abandon and active strength do not come into the relationship, and in many cases this is precisely the reason the woman does not receive full gratification. No matter how skillful the gigolo’s technique, what woman would choose it as a substitute for the reality of passion? The essence of the gigolo, court-jester attitude is that power and value are correlated not with action but with passivity.

So long as one can laugh, furthermore, he is not completely under the domination of anxiety or fear—hence the accepted belief in folklore that to be able to laugh in times of danger is a sign of courage. In cases of borderline psychotics, so long as the person has genuine humor—so long, that is, as he can laugh, or look at himself with the thought, as one person put it, “What a crazy person I’ve been!”—he is preserving his identity as a self. When any of us, neurotic or not, get insights into our psychological problems, our spontaneous reaction is normally a little laugh—the “aha” of insight, as it is called. The humor occurs because of a new appreciation of one’s self as a subject acting in an objective world.

humor can deepen the reader’s feeling of worth and dignity as a person, and remove blinds from his eyes as he confronts the issues facing him. But in general humor and laughter in our day mean “laughs” in quantitative form, produced by mail-order, push-button techniques, as is the case, let us say, of the productions of the gag writers for the radio. Indeed, the term “gag” is a fitting one: the “laughs” serve as “laughing gas,” in Thorstein Veblen’s vivid phrase, to furnish a dulling of sensitivities and awareness just as gas does in actuality. Laughter is then an escape from anxiety and emptiness in ostrich-fashion rather than a way of gaining new and more courageous perspective in facing one’s perplexities.

when a culture is in its historical phase of growing toward unity, its language reflects the unity and power; whereas when a culture is in the process of change, dispersal and disintegration, the language likewise loses its power.

Nietzsche said a person is to be known by his “style,” that is, by the unique “pattern” which gives underlying unity and distinctiveness to his activities. The same is partly true about a culture. But when we ask what is the “style” of our day, we find that there is no style which can be called modern.

One aspect, thus, of the strength of these towering individuals of the Renaissance—those “universal men”—was their strong feeling for nature.

Proteus and Triton are examples of precisely what we have lost—namely the capacity to see ourselves and our moods in nature, to relate to nature as a broad and rich dimension of our own experience.

As human beings we have our roots in nature, not simply because of the fact that the chemistry of our bodies is of essentially the same elements as the air or dirt or grass.