Man's Search for Himself

by Rollo May

If anyone, therefore, will not learn from Christianity to love himself in the right way, then neither can he love his neighbor.

“You shall love yourself as you love your neighbor when you love him as yourself.”*

Does not consciousness of one’s self make one self-conscious in the sense of being shy, embarrassed and socially inhibited?”

Naturally, the last thing in the world anyone would want, then, to be is self-conscious.

the word for self-consciousness also means “self-confident,” which is as it should be.

Thus his standing off and continually looking at himself as an adult was like continuing to cut clippings from the paper, judging and measuring himself, trying to prove to himself that the Nazis were not right, and trying to get genuine affirmation of himself as a person from his parents.

The less aware you are of how to drive a car, for example, or of the traffic conditions you are driving through, the more tense you are and the firmer hold you have to keep on yourself.

You have the awareness that it is you who are doing the driving, you in control.

Consciousness of self actually expands our control of our lives, and with that expanded power comes the capacity to let ourselves go.

seeming paradox, that the more consciousness of one’s self one has, the more spontaneous and creative...

They do not feel directly but only give ideas about their feelings; they are not affected by their affects; their emotions give them no motion.

one experiences the affect on all levels of one’s self.

Then instead of one’s feelings being limited like notes in a bugle call, the mature person becomes able to differentiate feelings into as many nuances, strong and passionate experiences, or delicate and sensitive ones, as in the different passages of music in a symphony.

recover our awareness of ...

When sexual areas are stimulated

Since such feelings are a part of his way of identifying himself, the taboo would clearly imply, “Your image of yourself is dirty.” This undoubtedly is one important part of the origin of the tendency to despise the self in our society.

Most people act on the principle, “Let hands or feet feel as they may, I must get off to work.”

people are proud of paying no attention to the body. They treat it as an object for manipulation, as though it were a truck to be driven till it runs out of gas.

They speak in the passive voice—“I got sick,” picturing their body as an object just as they would say “I got hit by a car.”

The attitude toward disease is not that of the self-aware person who experiences his body as part of himself, but of the compartmentalized person who might express his passive attitude in a sentence like, “The pneumococcus made me sick, but penicillin made me well again.”

It is amazing how many hints and guides and intuitions for living come to the sensitive person who has ears to hear what his body is saying. To be tuned to the responses throughout one’s body, as well as to be tuned to one’s feelings in emotional relations with the world and people around him, is to be on the way to a health which will not break down periodically.

Not only do people separate the body from the self in using it as an instrument for work, but they likewise separate it from the self in their pursuit of pleasure.

The detached attitude toward sex, which we already noted in a previous chapter, is connected with this tendency to separate the body from the rest of the self.

“my sexual needs require some outlet,” rather than “I want and choose sexual relations with this particular person.”

But it is not so widely realized that libertinism, the opposite to Puritanism, commits exactly the same error of separating sex from the self.

It is not the attitude of “My body feels” but “I feel.”

We propose, furthermore, placing the self in the center of the picture of bodily health: it is “I” who grow sick or achieve health. We propose the active rather than passive voice in illness; the old expression “I sicken” is accurate.

When one looks at the different illnesses from the perspective of the self, he sees that physical, psychological and spiritual (using the last term to refer to despair and the sense of meaninglessness in life) diseases are all aspects of the same difficulty of the self in finding itself in its world.

It is well known, for example, that the different kinds of illness may serve interchangeable purposes for the individual.

Thus so long as scientific progress takes away diphtheria, tuberculosis and other diseases—a consummation devoutly to be wished—without helping people to get over their anxiety, guilt, emptiness and purposelessness, sickness is only forced into a new channel.

who does not know what he wants? But as we pointed out in the first chapter, the amazing thing is how few people actually do.

If one looks honestly into himself, does he not find that most of what he thinks he wants is just routine—like fish on Friday; or that what he wants is what he thinks he should want—like being a success in his work; or wants to want—like loving his neighbor?

One can often see clearly the expression of direct and honest wants in children before they have been ta...

Such directness of desire often comes like a breath of fresh air in a murky land.

But let the parents not teach the child to falsify his emotions by trying to persuade him that he does not want the cone!

To be aware of one’s feelings and desires does not at all imply expressing them indiscriminately wherever one happens to be. Judgment and decision, as we shall see later, are part of any mature consciousness of self.

But suppose he never lets these impulses reach the threshold of awareness because they are not socially acceptable? How is he then to know years later, when he is married, whether he engages in sexual relations with his wife because he really wants to, or whether because this is then the acceptable and “expected” act, the routine thing to do?

People who voice with alarm the caution that unless desires and emotions are suppressed they will pop out every which way, and everyone, for example, will be overcome by sexual desire for his mother or his best friend’s wife, are talking about neurotic emotions.

As a matter of fact, we know that it is precisely the emotions and desires which have been repressed which later return...

But the more integrated a person is, the less compulsive become his emotions. In the mature person feelings and wants occur in a configuration.

one is not consumed with desire for food; one came to see a drama and not to eat. Or when listening to a concert singer, one is not consumed with sexual desire even though she may be very attractive; the configuration is set by the fact that one chose in coming to hear music.

none of us escape conflicts from time to time. But these are different from being compul...

so an act of a mature human being is an integral part of the self in relation to the world around it.

Spontaneity, thus, is very different from effervescence or egocentricity, or letting out one’s feelings regardless of the environment. Spontaneity, rather, is the acting “I” responding to a particular environment at a given moment.

The originality and uniqueness which is always part of a spontaneous feeling can be ...

For just as there never was exactly that situation before and never will be again, so the feeling one has at that time is new and never to be exactly repeated. It is only...

The third step, along with rediscovering our feelings and wants, is to recover our relation with the subc...

As modern man has given up sovereignty over his body, so also he has surrendered the unconscious side of his personality, and...

“irrational,” subjective and unconscious aspects of experience went hand in hand with modern man’s need to emphasize regular, rational work...

people have regarded their dreams, for example, as sources of wisdom, guidance and insight.