Man's Search for Himself

by Rollo May

individual competitiveness is as obsolete as though each man were to deliver his own letters by his own pony express.

why does economic striving need to be against one’s fellow men, and why reason against emotion?

The old goals, criteria, principles are still there in our minds and “habits,” but they do not fit,

This compartmentalization of values and goals leads very quickly to an undermining of the unity of the personality,

splitting up of personality which was occurring.

Each of these men proclaimed that we must find a new unity for our lives.

showed that 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.

helping the person to become a thinking-feeling-willing unity.

Each one of these men foresaw the destruction of values which would occur in our time, the loneliness, emptiness and anxiety which would engulf us in the twentieth century. Each saw that we cannot ride on the goals of the past.

he is pointing out what happens when a society loses its center of values.

barbarism did descend on us when the humanistic and Hebrew-Christian values of our period were so flouted.

“Revaluation of all values,”

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.

Those of us who lived in the 1920’s can recall the evidences of the growing tendency to think of the self in superficial and oversimplified terms. In those days “self-expression” was supposed to be simply doing whatever popped into one’s head, as though the self were synonymous with any random impulse, and as though one’s decisions were to be made on the basis of a whim which might be a product of indigestion from a hurried lunch just as often as of one’s philosophy of life.

“be yourself”

“know one’...

This kind of push-button psychology was due for the satire which Aldous Huxley gave it in his Brave New World.

Though the 1920’s seemed to be a time when men had great confidence in the power of the person, it was actually the opposite: they had confidence in techniques and gadgets, not in the human being.

The oversimplified, mechanical view of the self really betokened an underlying lack of belief in the dignity, comp...

In the two decades since the 1920’s, the disbelief in the power and dignity of the person became more openly accepted, for there appeared a good deal of concrete “evidence” that the individual self was insi...

Authoritarianism in religion and science, let alone politics, is becoming increasingly accepted, not particularly because so many people explicitly believe in it but because they feel themselves individually powerless and anxious.

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.

A sick toss’d vessel, dashing on each thing . . . My God, I mean myself.

modern man who is truly a “stranger” to himself.

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.

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.

The essence of the gigolo, court-jester attitude is that power and value are correlated not with action but with passivity.

Humor normally should have the function of preserving the sense of self. It is an expression of our uniquely human capacity to experience ourselves as subjects who are not swallowed up in the objective situation. It is the healthy way of feeling a “distance” between one’s self and the problem, a way of standing off and looking at one’s problem with perspective.

One cannot laugh when in an anxiety panic, for then one is swallowed up, one has lost the distinction between himself as subject and the objective world around him.

hence the accepted belief in folklore that to be able to laugh in times of danger is a sign of courage.

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.

What are the prevalent attitudes toward humor and laughter in our society? The most striking fact is that laughter is made a commodity.

“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.

but, again like sex or drinking when engaged in for escapist reasons, this kind of laughter leaves one as lonely and unrelated to himself afterwards as before.

Many persons, sophisticated as often as unsophisticated ones, have lost their conviction of how crucially important the problem of rediscovering the sense of self is.

“being one’s self” means only what “self-expression” meant in the 1920’s, and they may then ask (with some justification on the basis of their assumptions), “Would not being one’s self be both unethical and boring?” and “Does one have to express one’s self in playing Chopin?”

Such questions themselves are evidence of how far the profound meaning of being o...

Along with the loss of the sense of self has gone a loss of our language for communicating deeply personal meanings to each other.

“love” for example,

Hollywood love, or the sentimental emotion of the popular songs, “I love my baby, my baby loves me,” or religious charity, or friendliness, or sexual impulse, or whatnot.

The same is true about almost any other important word in the nontechnical areas—“truth,” “integrity,” “courage,” “spirit,” “freedom,” and even the word “self.”

But when it comes to meaningful interpersonal relations, our language is lost:

When you explore the rise and fall of historical eras, you will note how the language is powerful and compelling at certain times, like the Greek language of the fifth century B.C. in which Aeschylus and Sophocles wrote their classics, or like the Elizabethan English of Shakespeare and the King James translation of the Bible.

that 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.

But does it not imply something very significant about our society that talented artists can communicate only in such limited language?

In the Renaissance a common man could look at the paintings of Raphael or Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo and feel that the picture was telling him something which he could understand about life in general and his own inner life in particular. But if an untutored man walked through the galleries on 57th Street in New York City today and saw, let us say, exhibits by Picasso, Dali and Marin, he might well agree that something important was being communicated but he would no doubt aver that only God and the artist knew what it was.

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.

But beyond this desperate search for honesty, which is much like that of Freud and Ibsen in their respective fields, there is only a potpourri of styles.