Man's Search for Himself

by Rollo May

The pictures that are discordant and empty, as are so many in modern art, are thus honest portrayals of the condition of our time.

People who have lost the sense of their identity as selves also tend to lose their sense of relatedness to nature.

they also lose some of their capacity to feel empathy for animate nature, that is animals.

Modern man, so afraid of the bombs he has built, must cower from the sky and hide in caves—must cower from the sky which is classically the symbol of vastness, imagination, release.

when a person feels himself inwardly empty, as is the case with so many modern people, he experiences nature around him also as empty, dried up, dead.

enthusiasm for the human body.

It was shown, furthermore, in the new enthusiasm for the scientific study of nature.

Renaissance—those “universal men”—was their strong feeling for nature.

But by the nineteenth century the interest in nature had become increasingly technical; man’s concern now was chiefly...

when Descartes taught that the body and mind were to be separated, that the objective world of physical nature and the body (which could be measured and weighed) was radically different from the subjective world of man’s mind and “inner” experience.

The practical result of this dichotomy was that subjective, “inner” experience—the “mind” side of the dichotomy—tended to be put on the shelf,

to point out the historical fact that in this development nature became separated from the individual’s subjective, emotional life.

loss of the feeling for nature, and he saw the overemphasis on commercialism which was partly its cause and the emptiness which would be its result.

It is generally assumed that this, too, was a gain since it helped sweep man’s mind clean of “superstition” and “magic.”

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.

In this sense, when we relate to nature we are but putting our roots back into their native soil.

But in another respect man is very different from the rest of nature. He possesses consciousness of himself; his sense of personal identity distinguishes him from the rest of the living or nonliving things. And nature cares not a fig for man’s personal identity. That crucial point in our relatedness to nature brings into the center of the picture the basic theme of this book, man’s need for awareness of himself.

One must be able to affirm his person despite the impersonality of nature, and to fill the silences of natur...

if one is fully and realistically aware that the sea never “has a tear for others’ woes nor cares what any other thinks,” that one’s life could be swallowed up with scarcely an infinitesimal difference being made to the tremendous, ongoing, chemical movement of creation, one is threatened.

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

We wish here only to emphasize that the loss of the relation to nature goes hand in hand with the loss of the sense of one’s own self. “Little we see in Nature that is ours,” as a description of many modern people, is a mark of the weakened and impoverished person.

A final consequence and evidence of the loss of our conviction of the worth and dignity of the person is that we have lost the sense of the tragic significance of human life. For the sense of tragedy is simply the other side of one’s belief in the importance of the human individual. Tragedy implies a profound respect for the human being and a devotion to his rights and destiny—otherwise it just doesn’t matter whether Orestes or Lear or you or I fall or stand in our struggles.

The tragic character, he writes, is one “who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing—his sense of personal dignity.” And “the tragic right is a condition of life, a condition in which the human personality is able to flower and realize itself.”

It is this echo of human dignity in a great void of emptiness that gives this drama the power to elicit the emotions of pity and terror of classical tragedy.

It is easy enough from our later perspective to see through Willie’s illusions, and to poke fun at his unsound go-getter values. But that is not the point. The one thing that matters is that Willie believed; he took seriously his own existence and what he had been taught he could rightly expect from life. “I don’t say he is a great man,” says his wife in describing Willie’s disintegration to their sons, “but he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.”

But it is the tragedy of a historical period—

“The flaw, or crack in the tragic character,” Miller writes, “is really nothing—and need be nothing—but his inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity, his image of his rightful status. Only the passive, only those who accept their lot without active retaliation, are ‘flawless.’ Most of us are in that category.” Miller goes on to point out that the quality in a tragedy which shakes us “derives from the underlying fear of being displaced, the disaster inherent in being torn away from our chosen image of what and who we are in this world. Among us today this fear is as strong, and perhaps stronger, than it ever was.”*

“Tragedy implies more optimism in its author than does comedy, and . . . its final result ought to be the reinforcement of the onlooker’s brightest opinions of the human animal.”

The psychotherapist, privileged to be an intimate witness to some persons’ inner wrestling and their often grave and bitter struggles with themselves and with external forces which challenge their dignity, gains a new respect for these persons and a new realization of the potential dignity of the human being.

Countless times a week, furthermore, he receives proof in his consulting work that 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.

THE PICTURE of the roots of the malady of our time given in this chapter adds up to a bleak diagnosis. But it does not ne...

we have no choice but to ...

We are like people part way through psychoanalysis whose defenses and illusions are broken through, and their only choice...

But we are, rather, the generation which cannot turn back. We in the middle of the twentieth century are like pilots in the transatlantic flight who have passed the point of no return, who do not have fuel enough to go back but must push on regardless of storms or other dangers.

we must rediscover the sources of strength and integrity within ourselves.

But no values are effective, in a person or a society, except as there exists in the person the prior capacity to do the valuing, that is, the capacity actively to choose and affirm the values by which he lives.

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.

Just so, one person with indigenous inner strength exercises a great calming effect on panic among people around him. This is what our society needs—not new ideas and inventions, important as these are, and not geniuses and supermen, but persons who can be, that is, persons who have a center of strength within themselves.

He senses his freedom, as Gregory Bateson puts it, within the context of the relationship with his father and mother.

He experiences himself as an identity who is separated from his parents and can stand against them if need be.

This consciousness of self, this capacity to see one’s self as though from the outside, is the distinctive characteristic of man.

But actually man’s consciousness of himself is the source of his highest qualities.

Thus human beings can learn from the past and plan for the future.

man’s ability to use symbols, which is a way of disengaging something from what it is, such as the two sounds which make up the word “table,” and agreeing that these sounds will stand for a whole class of things.

This capacity for consciousness of ourselves gives us the ability to see ourselves as others see us and to have empathy with others.

No matter how poorly we use or fail to use or even abuse these capacities, they are the rudiments of our ability to begin to love our neighbor, to have ethical sensitivity, to see truth, to create beauty, to devote ourselves to ideals, and to die for them if need be.

But these gifts come only at a high price, the price of anxiety and inward crises. The birth of the self is no simple and easy matter. For the child now faces the frightful prospect of being out on his own, alone, and without the full protection of the decisions of his parents. It is no wonder that when he begins to feel himself an identity in his own right, he may feel terribly powerless in comparison with the great and strong adults around him.

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. And there may be no particular external signs of trauma or special rebelliousness. 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.

If, when he first begins tentatively to say “No,” his parents beat him down rather than love and encourage him, he thereafter will say “No” not as a form of true independent strength but as a mere rebellion.