Man's Search for Himself

by Rollo May

One must be able to affirm his person despite the impersonality of nature, and to fill the silences of nature with his own inner aliveness.

It takes a strong self—that is, a strong sense of personal identity—to relate fully to nature without being swallowed up.

But to flee from one’s anxiety, or to rationalize one’s way out of it, only makes one weaker in the long run.

to affirm one’s own identity over against the inorganic being of nature in turn produces greater strength of self.

the loss of the relation to nature goes hand in hand with the loss of the sense of one’s own self.

Only the passive, only those who accept their lot without active retaliation, are ‘flawless.’

when men at last accept the fact that they cannot successfully lie to themselves, and at last learn to take themselves seriously, they discover previously unknown and often remarkable recuperative powers within themselves.

finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellow men.

In our particular world in which conformity is the great destroyer of selfhood—

we are to some extent created by each other but also our capacity to experience, and create, ourselves.

The French philosopher Descartes,

“I think, therefore I am.”

The self is thus not merely the sum of the various “roles” one plays—it is the capacity by which one knows he plays these roles; it is the center from which one sees and is aware of these so-called different “sides” of himself.

As everyone knows, a little child will react indignantly and strongly if you, in teasing, call him by the wrong name. It is as though you take away his identity—a most precious thing to him. In the Old Testament the phrase “I will blot out their names”—to erase their identity and it will be as though they never had existed—is a more powerful threat even than physical death.

The acorn becomes an oak, the puppy becomes a dog and makes the fond and loyal relations with its human masters which befit the dog; and this is all that is required of the oak tree and the dog. But the human being’s task in fulfilling his nature is much more difficult, for he must do it in self-consciousness.

That is, his development is never automatic but must be to some extent chosen and affirmed by himself. “Among the works of man,” John Stuart Mill has written, “which human life is rightly employed in perfecting and in beautifying, the first importance surely is man himself. . . . Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.”

He is able to acquire some knowledge and inner strength so that as he must begin to choose and decide, he has some capability for it.

consciousness of one’s self is always a unique act—I can never know exactly how you see yourself and you never can know exactly how I relate to myself. This is the inner sanctum where each man must stand alone.

This fact makes for much of the tragedy and inescapable isolation in human life, but it also indicates again that we must find the strength in ourselves to stand in our own inner sanctum as individuals. And this fact means that, since we are not automatically merged with our fellows, we must through our own affirmation learn to love each other.

If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick, just as your legs would...

if man does not fulfill his potentialities as a person, he becomes to that extent constricted and ill.

This is the essence of neurosis—the person’s unused potentialities, blocked by hostile conditions in the environment (past or present) and by his own internalized conflicts, turn inward and cause morbidity. “Energy is Eternal Delight,” said William Blake; “He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.”

Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings.

It is based on the experience of one’s identity as a being of worth and dignity, who is able to affirm his being, if need be, against all other beings and the whole inorganic world.

one ought not to think too highly of one’s self, and a courageous humility is the mark of the realistic and mature person.

“For all of us, the most intolerably dreary and deadening life is that which we live with ourselves.”

“One who despises himself is the nearest to a proud man.”

“You shall love yourself as you love your neighbor when you love him as yourself.”

The less aware you are of how to drive a car, for example, or of the traffic conditions you are driving through, the more tense you are and the firmer hold you have to keep on yourself. But on the other hand the more experienced you are as a driver and the more conscious you are of the traffic problems and what to do in emergencies, the more you can relax at the wheel with a sense of power. You have the awareness that it is you who are doing the driving, you in control. Consciousness of self actually expands our control of our lives, and with that expanded power comes the capacity to let ourselves go. This is the truth behind the seeming paradox, that the more consciousness of one’s self one has, the more spontaneous and creative one can be at the same time.

The disease comes as a demand and an opportunity to rediscover the lost functions of myself. It is as though the disease were nature’s way of saying, ‘You must become your whole self. To the extent that you do not, you will be ill; and you will become well only to the extent that you do become yourself.’ ” We may add that it is an actual clinical fact that some persons, viewing their illnesses as an opportunity for re-education, become more healthy both psychologically and physically, more fulfilled as persons, after a serious illness than before.

it is precisely the emotions and desires which have been repressed which later return to drive the person compulsively.

But the more integrated a person is, the less compulsive become his emotions.

an act of a mature human being is an integral part of the self in relation to the world around it.

The third step, along with rediscovering our feelings and wants, is to recover our relation with the subconscious aspects of ourselves.

As modern man has given up sovereignty over his body, so also he has surrendered the unconscious side of his personality, and it has become almost alien to him.

The sooner we recover sovereignty in that portion of the kingdom the better.

dreams, like myths and fairy tales, are not at all a foreign language,

the more self-awareness a person has, the more alive he is. “The more consciousness,” remarked Kierkegaard, “the more self.” Becoming a person means this heightened awareness, this heightened experience of “I-ness,” this experience that it is I, the acting one, who is the subject of what is occurring.

By activism we mean the tendency, so common in this country, to assume that the more one is acting, the more one is alive.

Many people keep busy all the time as a way of covering up anxiety; their activism is a way of running from themselves.

Aliveness often means the capacity not to act, to be creatively idle—which may be more difficult for most modern people than to do something. “To be idle,” Robert Louis Stevenson accurately wrote, “requires a strong sense of personal identity.” Self-awareness, as we have proposed it, brings back into the picture the quieter kinds of aliveness—the arts of contemplation and meditation for example, which the Western world, to its peril, has all but lost. It brings a new appreciation for being something rather than merely doing something. With such a relation to one’s self, work for us modern men—who are the great toilers and producers—will not be an escape from ourselves or a way of trying to prove our worth, but a creative expression of the spontaneous powers of the person who has consciously affirmed his relatedness to his world and his fellow men. *

“I have come not to bring peace but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.”* Obviously Jesus is not preaching hatred and division as such, but he means to state in the most radical form that spiritual development is away from incest and toward the capacity to love the neighbor and stranger. The members of “a man’s own household will be his foes” in truth if he is still bound to them.

the continuum of differentiation which is the life pilgrimage of the human being requires developing away from incest and toward the capacity to “love outwardly.”

the crucial psychological battle we must wage is that against our own dependent needs, and our anxiety and guilt feelings which will arise as we move toward freedom.

there is a fourth stage of consciousness which is extraordinary in the sense that most individuals experience it only rarely. This stage is most clearly illustrated when one gets a sudden insight into a problem—abruptly, seemingly from nowhere, pops up an answer for which one has struggled in vain for days. Sometimes such insights come in dreams, or at moments of reverie when one is thinking about something else: in any case, we know that the answer emerges from what are called subconscious levels in the personality. Such consciousness may occur in scientific, religious or artistic activity alike; it is sometimes popularly called “dawning” of ideas or “inspiration.” As all students of creative activity make clear, this level of consciousness is present in all creative work.

creative consciousness of self. The classical psychological term for this awareness is ecstasy. The word literally means “to stand outside one’s self,”

This fourth level of consciousness cuts below the split between objectivity and subjectivity. Temporarily we can transcend the usual limits of conscious personality. Through what is called insight, or intuition, or the other only vaguely understood processes which are involved in creativity, we may get glimpses of objective truth as it exists in reality, or sense some new ethical possibility in, let us say, an experience of unselfish love.

“turned outward” means to pierce in imagination beyond what one knows at the moment. It is not unscientific sentimentality to point out, as Nietzsche and almost every other writer on ethics has done, that man in fulfilling himself goes through a process of “transcending” himself. This is simply one side of the basic characteristics of the growing, healthy human being, that from moment to moment he is enlarging his awareness of himself and his world. “Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself,” Simone de Beauvoir points out in her book on ethics; “if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying, and human existence is indistinguishable from an absurd vegetation. . . .” This creative self-consciousness is a stage that most of us achieve only at rare intervals; and none of us, except the saints, religious or secular, and the great creative figures, live very much of our lives on this level. But it is the level which gives meaning to our actions and experiences on the lesser levels.

Nietzsche described the person who has creative self-consciousness when he said about Goethe: “He disciplined himself into wholeness, he created himself. . . . Such a spirit who has become free stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism, in the faith that . . . in the whole all is redeemed and affirmed—he does not negate any more.”

Hatred and resentment are destructive emotions, and the mark of maturity is to transform them into constructive emotions, as we shall see below. But the fact that the human being will destroy something—generally in the long run himself—rather than surrender his freedom proves how important freedom is to him.