Man's Search for Himself
Rollo May
Language: English
Pages: 240
ISBN: 0393333159
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"Analyzes life as we are living it, and the analysis is truthful and profound."--New York Times
Loneliness, boredom, emptiness: These are the complaints that Rollo May encountered over and over from his patients. In response, he probes the hidden layers of personality to reveal the core of man's integration--a basic and inborn sense of value. Man's Search for Himself is an illuminating view of our predicament in an age of overwhelming anxieties and gives guidance on how to choose, judge, and act during such times.
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dichotomy between body and mind—which will dog our tracks throughout this book—but the full consequences of this dichotomy did not emerge till last century. For the late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century man, 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. Lo and behold, we then find reason (now transformed into intellectualistic rationalization) used in the
“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. To “be yourself” was then an excuse for relaxing into the lowest common denominator of inclination. To “know one’s self” wasn’t thought to be especially difficult, and the problems
remote as if over a long-distance telephone. 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. Like Eliot’s “Hollow Men,” they experience themselves as Shape without form, shade without colour, Paralyzed force, gesture without motion. In psychotherapy when such persons are unable to experience their feelings, they often have to learn to feel by answering the question day after day, Just how do I feel
see only projections of themselves in the sky, “men striding and feasting” whom they call gods. Their gods are expressions not of new and higher levels of aspiration and integration, but of their own need to turn back to infantile dependencies. Religiously and psychologically this is, of course, the exact opposite to what Jesus proclaims, “I have come not to bring peace but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the
sensitivity, the myth goes on to indicate, the person falls heir to the particular burdens of self-consciousness, anxiety and guilt feeling. He likewise has an awareness—though it may not appear till later—that he is “of dust.” That is to say, he realizes that he will some time die; he becomes conscious of his own finiteness. On the positive side, this eating of the tree of knowledge and the learning of right and wrong represent the birth of the psychological and spiritual person. Indeed, Hegel
