Man's Search for Himself

by Rollo May

Our fear of loneliness may not be shown by anxiety as such,

do we not find this fear of isolation as an almost constant companion, despite its many masquerades?

Every human being gets much of his sense of his own reality out of what others say to him and think about him.

Many people are like blind men feeling their way along in life only by means of touching a succession of other people.

psychosis, they often have an urgent need to seek out some contact with other human beings. This is sound, for such relating gives them a bridge to reality.

Is it not too much to say that modern man, sensing his own inner hollowness, is afraid that if he should not have his regular associates around him, should not have the talisman of his daily program and his routine of work, if he should forget what time it is, that he would feel, though in an inarticulate way, some threat like that which one experiences on the brink of psychosis?

He temporarily loses his loneliness; but it is at the price of giving up his existence as an identity in his own right.

And he renounces the one thing which would get him constructively over the loneliness in the long run, namely the developing of his own inner resources, strength and sense of direction, and using this as a basis for meaningful relations with others.

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

For being “hollow” and lonely would not bother us except that it makes us prey to that peculiar psychological pain and turmoil called anxiety.

The anxiety prevalent in our day and the succession of economic and political catastrophes our world has been going through are both symptoms of the same underlying cause, namely the traumatic changes occurring in Western society.

the most obvious expressions of anxiety in the prevalence of neurosis and other emotional disturbances—which, as practically everyone from Freud onward has agreed, have their root cause in anxiety.

We are anxious because we do not know what roles to pursue, what principles for action to believe in. Our individual anxiety, somewhat like that of the nation, is a basic confusion and bewilderment about where we are going.

But it is well to remind ourselves that anxiety signifies a conflict, and so long as a conflict is going on, a constructive solution is possible.

you may be aware of a slight faintness and a feeling of hollowness in the pit of the stomach. This is anxiety.

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.

Indeed, anxiety may take all forms and intensities, for it is the human being’s basic reaction to a danger to his existence, or to some value he identifies with his existence.

But as soon as the threat becomes great enough to involve the total self, one then has the experience of anxiety. Anxiety strikes us at the very “core” of ourselves: it is what we feel when our existence as selves is threatened.

In its full-blown intensity, anxiety is the most painful emotion to which the human animal is heir. “Present dangers are less than future imaginings,” as Shakespeare puts it;

That is, if the value of being a self-respecting wage-earner were threatened, Tom, like the salesman Willie Loman and countless other men in our society, would feel he no longer existed as a self, and might as well be dead.

“Give me liberty or give me death” is not just rhetoric nor is it pathological.

The more he is able to face and move through these “normal crises”—

the less neurotic anxiety he will develop. Normal anxiety cannot be avoided; it should be frankly admitted to one’s self. This book will be chiefly concerned with the normal anxiety of the person living in our age of transition, and the constructive ways this anxiety can be met.

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

The person feels threatened, but it is as though by a ghost; he does not know where the enemy is, or how to fight it or flee from it.

The real problem is then repressed, and it returns later as an inner conflict bringing with it neurotic anxiety. The way to deal with neurotic anxiety is to bring out the original real experience one was afraid of, and then to work the apprehension through as normal anxiety or fear.

But our main concern in these chapters is to understand how to use normal anxiety constructively. And to do that we need to make clearer one very important point, the relation between a person’s anxiety and his self-awareness.

This is because anxiety knocks out the props, so to speak, from our awareness of ourselves.

on this level that we experience ourselves as persons, as subjects who can act in a world of objects.

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.

the stronger our consciousness of ourselves, the more we can take a stand against and overcome anxiety.

anxiety is evidence that a psychological or spiritual battle is going on.

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 nature’s way, as it were, of indicating to us that we n...

anxiety is evidence of a battle between our strength as a self on one side and a danger which threatens to wipe out our existence as a self on the other.

The more the threat wins, the more then our awareness of ourselves is surrendered, curtailed, hemmed in. But the greater our self-strength—that is, the greater our capacity to preserve our awareness of ourselves and the objective world around us—the less we will be overcome by the threat.

Just so, the only thing which would signify the loss of hope for getting through our present difficulties as individuals and as a nation, would be a resigning into apathy, and a failure to feel and face our anxiety constructively.

value of individual competition.

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.

The individual’s striving for his own gain, in fine, without an equal emphasis on social welfare, no longer automatically brings good to the community.

it generates much interpersonal hostility and resentment, and increases greatly our anxiety and isolation from each other.

by being good fellows, well liked by all, and so on.

the grave one son continues to insist, “He had a good dream, to come out number one.” But the other son accurately sees the contradiction which such an upheaval of values leads to, “He never knew who he was.”*

The second central belief in our modern age has been the faith in individual reason.

reason was supposed to give the answer to any problem, will power was supposed to put it into effect, and emotions—well, they generally got in the way, and could best be repressed.

When Spinoza in the seventeenth century used the word reason, he meant an attitude toward life in which the mind united the emotions with the ethical goals and other aspects of the “whole man.” When people today use the term they almost always imply a splitting of the personality. They ask in one form or another: “Should I follow reason or give way to sensual passions and needs or be faithful to my ethical duty?”

western development, and are not necessarily the ideal values.

Indeed, the two sets of values—the one running back many centuries to the sources of our ethical and religious traditions in ancient Palestine and Greece and the other born in the Renaissance—were to a considerable extent wedded.

One could well have argued that science and competitive industry were bringing mankind ever closer to its ethical ideals of universal brotherhood.

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.