Man's Search for Himself

by Rollo May

The human being cannot live in a condition of emptiness for very long: if he is not growing toward something, he does not merely stagnate; the pent-up potentialities turn into morbidity and despair, and eventually into destructive activities.

The experience of emptiness, rather, generally comes from people’s feeling that they are powerless to do anything effective about their lives or the world they live in.

Apathy and lack of feeling are also defenses against anxiety. When a person continually faces dangers he is powerless to overcome, his final line of defense is at last to avoid even feeling the dangers.

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

neurotic anxiety,—that is, anxiety disproportionate to the real danger, and arising from an unconscious conflict within himself.

Neurotic anxiety is nature’s way, as it were, of indicating to us that we need to solve a problem.

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.

Some readers may be thinking that many of the above questions are stated wrongly—why does economic striving need to be against one’s fellow men, and why reason against emotion?

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.

As Eliot has his “hollow men” phrase it, Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats’ feet over broken glass In our dry cellar.*

Actually what we did in getting rid of the fairies and the elves and their ilk was to impoverish our lives; and impoverishment is not the lasting way to clear men’s minds of superstition.

For it is the empty and vacant people who seize on the new and more destructive forms of our latter-day superstitions, such as beliefs in the totalitarian mythologies, engrams, miracles like the day the sun stood still, and so on.

Our world has become disenchanted; and it leaves us not only out of tune with nature but with ourselves as well.

William James once remarked that those who are concerned with making the world more healthy had best start with themselves. We could go farther and point out that finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellow men.

Walt Whitman, echoing this thought, envies the animals: I think I could turn and live with animals. . . . They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins . . .

The healthy child, who is loved and supported but not coddled by his parents, will proceed in his development despite this anxiety and the crises that face him.

But when his parents consciously or unconsciously exploit him for their own ends or pleasure, or hate or reject him, so that he cannot be sure of minimal support when he tries out his new independence, the child will cling to the parents and will use his capacity for independence only in the forms of negativity and stubbornness.

Or if, as in the majority of cases in the present day, the parents themselves are anxious and bewildered in the tumultuous seas of the changing times, unsure of themselves and beset by self-doubts, their anxiety will carry over and lead the child to feel that he lives in a world in which it is dangerous to venture into becoming one’s self.

bottom

Hence the law is: “You shall love yourself as you love your neighbor when you love him as yourself.”*

to show that 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.

the less self-awareness a person has, the more he is unfree. That is to say, the more he is controlled by inhibitions, repressions, childhood conditionings which he has consciously “forgotten” but which still drive him unconsciously, the more he is pushed by forces over which he has no control.

As the person gains more consciousness of self, his range of choice and his freedom proportionately increase.

But no matter how much one argues for the deterministic viewpoint, he still must grant that there is a margin in which the alive human being can be aware of what is determining him. And even if only in a very minute way to begin with, he can have some say in how he will react to the deterministic factors.

Thus freedom is not just the matter of saying “Yes” or “No” to a specific decision: it is the power to mold and create ourselves. Freedom is the capacity, to use Nietzsche’s phrase, “to become what we truly are.”

Didst thou forget that man prefers peace and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil?”

Parents who have inner, often unconscious, doubts about their own strength tend to demand that their children be especially courageous, independent and aggressive; they may buy the son boxing gloves, push him into competitive groups at an early age, and in other ways insist that the child be the “man” they inwardly feel they are not.

The vain and narcissistic person seems on the surface to overprotect himself, not to take any risks and in other ways to act as a coward because he thinks too highly of himself. Actually, however, just the opposite is the case. He has to preserve himself as a commodity by which he can buy the praise and favor he needs, precisely because without mother’s or father’s praise he would feel himself to be worthless.

The persons who require that others continually say, “He is so nice,” or so intelligent or good, or “She is so beautiful,” are persons who take care of themselves not for the reason that they love themselves, but because the beautiful face or the clever mind or the gentlemanly behavior is a means of purchasing the parental pat on the head.

The more a person lacks self-awareness, the more he is prey to anxiety and irrational anger and resentment: and while anger generally blocks us from using our more subtle intuitive means of sensing truth, anxiety always blocks us.

I think it was C. G. Jung who said, accurately enough, that a person is afraid of growing old to the extent that he is not really living now.

whatever is significant in a person’s past—such as in early childhood relations—will be brought into his present relationships.

But the more awareness one has—that is, the more he experiences himself as the acting, directing agent in what he is doing—the more alive he will be and the more responsive to the present moment.

The most effective way to ensure the value of the future, as we have mentioned, is to confront the present courageously and constructively. For the future is born out of and made by the present.