Man's Search for Himself

by Rollo May

When our society, in its time of upheaval in standards and values, can give us no clear picture of “what we are and what we ought to be,” as Matthew Arnold puts it, we are thrown back on the search for ourselves.

“The pupils teach the teachers.” It is always thus in psychotherapy.

Our aim is to discover ways in which we can stand against the insecurity of our time, to find a center of strength within ourselves, and as far as we can, to point the way toward achieving values and goals which can be depended upon in a day when very little is secure.

chief problem of people in the middle decade of the twentieth century is emptiness.

they have no definite experience of their own desires or wants.

before they make it clear that they expect the marriage partner, real or hoped-for, to fill some lack, some vacancy within themselves; and they are anxious and angry because he or she doesn’t.

They generally can talk fluently about what they should want—

Two decades ago such external goals could be taken seriously; but now the person realizes, even as he talks, that actually his parents and society do not make all these requirements of him.

And furthermore the person realizes himself that it will not help him to pursue such external goals. But that only makes his problem the more difficult, since he has so little conviction or sense of the reality of his own goals.

“I’m just a collection of mirrors, reflecting what everyone else expects of me.”

The sexual problems people bring today for therapy, furthermore, are rarely struggles against social prohibitions as such, but much more often are deficiencies within themselves, such as the lack of potency or the lack of capacity to have strong feelings in responding to the sexual partner.

By and large they are the ones for whom the conventional pretenses and defenses of the society no longer work.

Certainly the patients who came to Freud in the 1890’s and the first decade of this century with the sexual symptoms he described were not representative of their Victorian culture:

Thus a relatively small number of people—those who come for psychotherapeutic help in the process of their struggle for inner integration—provide a very revealing and significant barometer of the conflicts and tensions under the psychological surface of the society.

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 perpetually telling him what other people expect of him.

We do not mean—nor does Riesman—to imply an admiration for the inner-directed individuals of the late Victorian period. Such persons gained their strength by internalizing external rules, by compartmentalizing will power and intellect and by repressing their feelings.

It is easy to see how a period of emptiness would have to follow the breakdown of the period of the “iron men”; take out the gyroscope, and they are hollow.

these last representatives of the nineteenth century is that we shall then be less likely to be seduced by their pseudo “inner strength.”

Actually, our society has not yet found something to take the place of the gyroscope man’s rigid rules.

heart failure, possibly brought on by repressed hostility. I have always had the secret suspicion, however, that he dies of boredom.

Not long ago, a very curious incident was reported in the New York papers. 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.

bourgeois France

endure the stultifying and mechanical routine of their commercial and industrial activities only by virtue of the presence of centers of Bohemianism at their elbows. People who live as “hollow men” can endure the monotony only by an occasional blowoff—or at least by identifying with someone else’s blowoff.

emptiness is even ma...

“adapt...

Conformity, it would appear, is being elevated into something akin to a religion.

Perhaps Americans will arrive at an ant society, not through fiat of a dictator, but through unbridled desire to get along with one another.

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.

Inner vacuousness is the long-term, accumulated result of a person’s particular conviction toward himself, namely his conviction that he cannot act as an entity in directing his own life, or change other people’s attitudes toward him, or effectually influence the world around him.

And soon, since what he wants and what he feels can make no real difference, he give...

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 i...

“anonymous authorities” like public opinion.

The authority is the public itself, but this public is merely a collection of many individuals each with his radar set adjusted to finding out what the others expect of him.

authority is a composite of ourselves, but ourselves without any individual centers.

situation of conformity and individual emptiness.

ethical and emotional emptiness in European society two and three decades ago was an open invitation to fascist dictatorships to step in and fill the vacuum.

vacuity and powerlessness is that it leads sooner or later to painful anxiety and despair, and ultimately, if it is not corrected, to futility and the blocking off of t...

as one of being “on the outside,”

Rather, being invited is crucial because it is a proof that they are not alone.

The feelings of emptiness and loneliness go together. When persons, for example, are telling of a break-up in a love relationship, they will often not say they feel sorrow or humiliation over a lost conquest; but rather that they feel “emptied.”

For when a person does not know with any inner conviction what he wants or what he feels; when, in a period of traumatic change, he becomes aware of the fact that the conventional desires and goals he has been taught to follow no longer bring him any security or give him any sense of direction, when, that is, he feels an inner void while he stands amid the outer confusion of upheaval in his society, he senses danger; and his natural reaction is to look around for other people.

Emptiness and loneliness are thus two phases of the same basic experience of anxiety.

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

The more basic reason is that the human being gets his original experiences of being a self out of his relatedness to other persons, and when he is alone, without other persons, he is afraid he will lose this experience of being a self.

part of the feeling of loneliness is that man needs relations with other people in order to orient himself.

society lays such a great emphasis on being socially accepted.

Thus we always have to prove we are a “social success” by being forever sought after and by never being alone.

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

In our culture it is permissible to say you are lonely, for that is a way of admitting that it is not good to be alone.

“keeping lonely thoughts away,” and our anxiety may appear only in occasional dreams of fright which we try to forget as soon as possible in the morning.