Insight Editions · No. 78
Man's Search for Himself
Rollo May
Rollo May examines anxiety, loneliness, and conformity, and considers how self-awareness supports freedom, conscience, courage, love, and a meaningful relation to time.
A study guide to Man's Search for Himself by Rollo May. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book in Brief
The argument in brief
- The symptoms (Ch 1). Hollow, radar-steered people who know what they should want but not what they feel; loneliness and the fear of being alone; anxiety as a threat to the core of the self.
- The causes (Ch 2). Two modern beliefs, competition and technical reason, have turned against us; we have lost a centre of values, a sense of self, a language for intimacy, a relation to nature and a sense of tragedy.
- The self (Ch 3). Self-consciousness is the unique mark of man; it is rebuilt through feelings, wants, the body and the unconscious.
- The struggle (Ch 4). Cutting the psychological umbilical cord, read through Orestes; four stages of consciousness up to creative ecstasy.
- Freedom (Ch 5). The caged man; hatred as the price of lost freedom; freedom as shaping oneself within limits, begun by choosing one's self.
- Conscience (Ch 6). Healthy versus dependent religion; the creative use of tradition; the power to value.
- Courage and love (Ch 7). Courage meets the anxiety of freedom; love is possible only in proportion to independence.
The argument map: a cultural loss produces three symptoms; self-awareness is the hinge from which the four "goals of integration" grow.
| Ch | Title | Gist |
|---|---|---|
| Pre | Preface (editor-authored) | Context: May, 1953, plan of the book |
| 1 | Loneliness and Anxiety of Modern Man | Hollow people; fear vs anxiety |
| 2 | The Roots of Our Malady | Five losses; Nietzsche's prophecy |
| 3 | Becoming a Person | Self-consciousness; feel, want, body |
| 4 | The Struggle to Be | Orestes; four stages of consciousness |
| 5 | Freedom and Inner Strength | The caged man; choosing one's self |
| 6 | The Creative Conscience | Healthy religion; power to value |
| 7 | Courage | Against conformity; love; truth |
| 8 | Transcender of Time | The pregnant moment; any age |
Chapter map. Part 1 is Chapters 1-2, Part 2 Chapters 3-4, Part 3 Chapters 5-8.
Eight-chapter spine from predicament to integration.
Editor-Authored Preface (not by Rollo May)
The author and his moment
May trained first in theology at New York's Union Theological Seminary, where he came under the lasting influence of Paul Tillich, and then in clinical psychology, receiving Columbia's first PhD in the field in 1949. Between the two, in the early 1940s, he spent long months in a tuberculosis sanatorium at Saranac Lake, an ordeal that taught him the gap between passively waiting to be cured and actively confronting one's illness. That experience runs through this book: the tuberculosis patient who writes "You must become your whole self" (Chapter 3) and the two kinds of sanatorium patient (Chapter 5) are, in all likelihood, drawn from it.
The book belongs to the early Cold War. Its first readers had lived through two world wars in thirty-five years, the Depression, fascism and Hiroshima; they faced the draft, the H-bomb, McCarthy's "character assassination" (Chapter 1) and the Korean War. May's examples come from that world: Life and Fortune on executives' wives, Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, Death of a Salesman, Rashomon, New York harbour strikes. He speaks of "man" and uses "he" throughout, as almost every writer of 1953 did.
What the book claims
The argument can be stated in a sentence: modern people have lost their centre, and the way back is through consciousness of self, which makes possible freedom, conscience, courage and love. May is not offering a technique. He describes himself, in effect, as a guide to an inward journey that each reader must make alone, drawing on case material from psychotherapy, on myth and literature (Adam, Prometheus, Orestes, Oedipus, Faust) and on the existential tradition of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Spinoza and Tillich, whom he treats as more useful to his age than Freud.
- Part 1, Our Predicament (Ch 1-2). The diagnosis: emptiness, loneliness, anxiety, and their historical roots in the collapse of the modern centre of values.
- Part 2, Rediscovering Selfhood (Ch 3-4). What a self is, how it is born, and the struggle to be, cutting the psychological umbilical cord.
- Part 3, The Goals of Integration (Ch 5-8). Freedom, conscience, courage and love, and a new relation to time.
How to read it now
Three cautions help a modern reader. First, the clinical cases are composites from May's practice, chosen to illustrate rather than to prove, and the diagnosis of a whole culture rests on them and on a few popular sources. Second, some assumptions are of their time, above all the treatment of homosexuality as a symptom of family pathology and the era's suspicion of dominating mothers; both are flagged where they occur.
What has not dated is the central diagnosis: people who know what they should want but not what they do want, who fear solitude yet feel alone in company, and who can recover themselves only by becoming more aware, not less. Later research on loneliness and conformity, and May's own later books (Love and Will, The Courage to Create), carried the argument forward. This book remains its clearest and most personal statement.
May's method: consulting room to culture to myth and back.
The Loneliness and Anxiety of Modern Man
Decade map into May's triad: emptiness, loneliness, anxiety.
Each decade's typical trouble
- c.1900, Freud. Trouble accepting the instinctual, sexual side of life against social taboos.
- 1920s, Otto Rank. Feelings of inferiority, inadequacy and guilt.
- 1930s, Karen Horney. Hostility between individuals and groups, rooted in competition over who gets ahead.
- 1950s, May. Emptiness: people do not know what they want, and often not even what they feel.
Surface complaints in any age sound alike: unhappiness, inability to decide about marriage or vocation, despair, meaninglessness. What changes is the conflict underneath. May's claim, from his own practice and that of colleagues, is that the chief mid-century problem is emptiness: not only not knowing what one wants, but often having no clear idea of what one feels. Patients speak of lack of autonomy and inability to decide; underneath they have no definite experience of their own desires. They feel swayed, powerless, vacuous. A love relationship breaks up, or marriage plans stall, or the partner disappoints, and soon it is clear they expected the partner to fill a vacancy within themselves, and are anxious and angry when that fails.
The hollow people
They talk fluently about what they should want: finish the degree, get a job, fall in love, marry, raise a family. Even they notice they are describing what parents, professors and employers expect. Two decades earlier such external goals could be taken seriously; now the person knows that parents claim to give freedom, and that chasing external goals will not help. That only deepens the problem, because conviction about one's own goals is so thin. One person: "I'm just a collection of mirrors, reflecting what everyone else expects of me."
In Freud's day an unknown want usually concealed a definite, forbidden desire; clear the repressions and the desire could meet reality. Now sexual taboos are much weaker; the Kinsey report made that plain. Opportunities for gratification exist for those without other heavy problems. Sexual problems in therapy are less often struggles against social prohibition than deficiencies within: lack of potency, lack of capacity for strong feeling with a partner. Sex for many is an empty, mechanical, vacuous experience.
Hollow person: mirrors reflect the group; the centre that wants is thin.
T. S. Eliot's lines from 1925 name the mood: "We are the hollow men / We are the stuffed men / Leaning together / Headpiece filled with straw... Shape without form, shade without colour, / Paralyzed force, gesture without motion."
May heads off two objections. First, war, the draft and economic insecurity are not the deep cause; they are themselves symptoms of the same underlying social condition. Second, consulting-room patients are not a cross-section, but they are often the more sensitive and gifted, for whom customary pretenses have stopped working. They are a barometer. Freud's Victorian sexual patients were not representative either; after World War I those conflicts became epidemic. The few who seek help now foreshadow what may break out more widely.
Riesman's types as May uses them: from gyroscope to radar.
- Inner-directed (pre-1914). Steered by internalised rules like a gyroscope: moralistic late-Victorian, strong motives and ambitions taken over from outside, compartmentalised will, repressed feeling. Suited to railroad tycoons who handled people like coal cars. Not to be admired as true integrity.
- Outer-directed (now). Steered by a radar set on the head reporting what others expect; seeks to "fit in," able "to respond but not to choose," passive, apathetic, apologetic about ambition left over from fathers.
- May's verdict. He sheds no tears for the gyroscope man. Epitaph: "Like the dinosaur, he had power without the ability to change, strength without the capacity to learn." Their pseudo inner strength was moralistic substitute for integrity. Understanding them keeps us from being seduced by that false model while we seek a new centre.
From boredom to despair
A decade or two earlier, middle-class emptiness could be laughed at as the sickness of the suburbs. The clearest sketch is the suburban man: same weekday hour, same train, same office task, same lunch place, same tip, home on the same train, 2.3 children, a little garden, a two-week shore vacation he does not enjoy, church at Christmas and Easter, retirement at sixty-five, then death of heart failure, "possibly brought on by repressed hostility." May's secret suspicion: he dies of boredom.
Indications now say emptiness has moved from boredom toward futility and despair. A Bronx bus driver drove off in his empty bus and was picked up days later in Florida; he was tired of the same route. The company struggled over punishment; by return he was a cause célèbre, welcomed by strangers. When the company gave him his job back if he would promise no more jaunts, there was cheering. Why make a hero of an auto thief who failed to appear for work? Because his gesture, ineffectual as it was, named a repressed need in conventional Bronx citizens. On a small scale it recalls how upper-middle bourgeois France endured mechanical commercial routine only by the presence of Bohemian centres at their elbows. Hollow men endure monotony by an occasional blowoff, or by identifying with someone else's.
From comic suburban sketch to Fortune's frightening conformity.
In some circles emptiness is even sought as a goal under the guise of being "adaptable." Nowhere more arrestingly than in Life Magazine's "The Wife Problem" (7 January 1952), summarising Fortune research on corporation executives' wives. Promotion depends greatly on whether the wife fits the "pattern." Once only the minister's wife was screened; now the executive's wife is screened like steel or wool. She must be gregarious, not intellectual or conspicuous, with "sensitive antennae" (radar again), forever adapting. The good wife is good by not doing things: not complaining when he works late, not fussing at a transfer, not engaging in controversial activity. Success is knowing when and how to be passive. The rule above all: "Don't be too good." Keeping up with the Joneses now means keeping up, not going substantially ahead; one may move ahead slightly, with exquisite timing. The company conditions companions, car, drink, reading. In return: security, insurance, planned vacations. Life remarks that the Company has become like "Big Brother" in Orwell's 1984.
The editors of Fortune found the results "a little frightening. Conformity... elevated into something akin to a religion... Perhaps Americans will arrive at an ant society, not through fiat of a dictator, but through unbridled desire to get along with one another."
Emptiness for many has moved from boredom to futility that holds danger. Widespread drug addiction among New York high-school students May relates to having little to look forward to except the army and unsettled economics, without constructive goals. The human being cannot live long in emptiness: if not growing toward something, pent-up potentialities turn into morbidity, despair and destructive activities.
Origin of emptiness: powerlessness, then apathy, then political danger.
- Want or should? List three goals; for each, ask whether a parent, employer or peer group would recognise it as theirs. May's hollow patients found most of their list borrowed.
- Radar check. Notice how often a decision waits on how others will take it; that delay is the radar set at work.
- Solitude test. Can you spend an evening alone without filler (radio, talk, screens) and feel more yourself, not less? May treats the answer as a measure of self-strength.
Loneliness
Another mark of modern people is loneliness: feeling "on the outside," isolated, alienated. Invitations matter not because they want to go (though they generally do) nor because they will find warmth (often they are bored), but because being asked proves they are not alone. Loneliness is so omnipotent a threat that many have little conception of the positive values of solitude, and are frightened at the prospect of being alone. André Gide: many suffer from "the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don't find themselves at all."
Emptiness and loneliness go together. After a break-up people often do not say sorrow or humiliation; they say they feel "emptied," a "yawning void." When a person does not know what he wants or feels, when conventional goals no longer give security or direction, when he stands with an inner void amid outer upheaval, he senses danger and looks around for other people to give direction or at least the comfort of not being alone in fright. Emptiness and loneliness are two phases of the same basic experience of anxiety.
When the atom bomb fell on Hiroshima, the reaction of great numbers was, strangely, sudden deep loneliness. Norman Cousins, in Modern Man Is Obsolete, trying to express the deepest feelings of intelligent people at that staggering moment, wrote not about radiation or politics but a meditation on loneliness: "All man's history is an endeavor to shatter his loneliness."
Fear of loneliness is fear of losing the sense of existing as a self.
The human being gets original experiences of being a self from relatedness to others; alone, he fears losing that experience. He is a biosocial mammal dependent on parents for long childhood security and for consciousness of himself. Society also lays great emphasis on being socially accepted as the chief way of allaying anxiety and the chief mark of prestige. One must prove social success by being forever sought after. Prestige once meant financial success; now the belief is that if one is well liked, money and prestige will follow. Willy Loman: "Be well-liked, and you will never want."
It is permissible to say you are lonely (romantic songs: "Me and my shadow... All alone and feeling blue"), and to want temporary solitude to "get away from it all." But to say you like being alone for its own joys marks you as vaguely wrong. If alone much of the time, people tend to think of you as a failure; it is inconceivable you would choose it. Behind the need to get invited, and to have others accept one's invitations, lies the cold fear of being shut out entirely. Pleasure, enrichment and relaxation have little to do with the compulsion. Sophisticated people would like to say "No," but turning down invitations means sooner or later one will not get them.
Pascal in the seventeenth century saw diversions as ways to avoid thoughts of oneself. Kierkegaard a century before May wrote that one does everything possible by diversions and "Janizary music of loud-voiced enterprises" to keep lonely thoughts away, as in American forests they keep beasts away by torches, yells and cymbals. The difference now: the fear is more extensive, the defences more rigid and compulsive.
Even when the fear crops up only as subtle self-reassuring thoughts after a snub, or only in occasional dreams of fright, the central issue remains. Look honestly below pretenses and the fear of isolation is an almost constant companion in many masquerades.
The fear of being alone derives much terror from anxiety about losing awareness of ourselves. Contemplating long solitude without talk or radio noise, people fear they would be at "loose ends," lose boundaries, have nothing to bump up against for orientation. They sometimes say they would not be able to work or play to get tired, hence not sleep, and would lose the distinction between wakefulness and sleep as they lose the distinction between subjective self and objective world.
Every human being gets much sense of reality from what others say and think. Many modern people have gone so far in that dependence that without it they fear losing the sense of their own existence, feeling "dispersed" like water on sand, like blind men feeling their way only by touching a succession of others. In extreme form this is the fear of psychosis; seeking contact then is sound as a bridge to reality. But the broader origin is historical: trained through four centuries of rationality, uniformity and mechanics, modern man has repressed what does not fit those standards. Sensing inner hollowness, he fears that without regular associates, the talisman of the daily program and the clock, he would feel, inarticulately, something like the brink of psychosis. Thrown back on inner resources he has neglected, loneliness is a real threat.
Anxiety and the threat to the self
Anxiety is even more basic than emptiness and loneliness. Being hollow and lonely would not bother us except that it makes us prey to that peculiar psychological pain called anxiety.
No one who reads the morning paper needs persuading that we live in an age of anxiety. Two world wars in thirty-five years, depressions, fascist barbarism, communist totalitarianism, interminable half-wars and cold-war prospects while skating on the edge of a Third World War with atom bombs: foundations shaken. Bertrand Russell: the painful thing about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.
In The Meaning of Anxiety May argued the mid-twentieth century is more anxiety-ridden than any period since the breakdown of the Middle Ages. Then: fears of death, agonies of doubt about meaning, superstition, fears of devils and sorcerers. Now: atomic destruction for death-fear, loss of faith and ethical values for doubt, flying-saucer superstition, demonic totalitarian mythologies for sorcerers. Rising emotional disturbance, divorce, suicide, political and economic upheaval supply further evidence.
"Age of anxiety" is almost a platitude. The real danger is hiding eyes ostrich-fashion. We shall live amid upheavals for decades; the challenge to imagination and understanding is to face them openly and use anxiety constructively.
Anxiety and catastrophe as mutual symptoms, not one-way cause.
It is a mistake to think wars and depressions are the total cause of our anxiety; our anxiety also causes these catastrophes. Both are symptoms of traumatic changes in Western society. Fascist and Nazi totalitarianism do not occur because a Hitler or Mussolini decides to seize power. When a nation is prey to insupportable economic want and is psychologically and spiritually empty, totalitarianism fills the vacuum; people sell freedom as a necessity for getting rid of anxiety too great to bear.
National confusion shows the same pattern. We know what we are against: totalitarian encroachment on freedom and dignity. We are confident of military strength but fight defensively, like a strong animal at bay, unsure which flank, whether to wait or attack. Difficulty deciding how far to go in Korea, where to draw lines. Attacked, we would unite. We are confused about constructive goals: what are we working for except defence? Even gestures like the Marshall Plan are questioned by some groups.
A person with continuous anxiety lays the body open to psychosomatic illness. A group with continuous anxiety and no agreed constructive steps sooner or later turns members against each other. So a confused nation opens itself to character assassinations of McCarthyism, witch hunts, ubiquitous pressure to make every man suspicious of his neighbour.
In the individual, neurosis and emotional disturbance have their root in anxiety (Freud onward). Anxiety is the common denominator of psychosomatic disturbances such as ulcers and many heart troubles: "our modern form of the great white plague."
Below the surface, individual anxiety also comes from something deeper than war and economic uncertainty. We do not know what roles to pursue or what principles for action to believe in. Strive competitively for wealth as once taught, or be the good fellow liked by everyone? One cannot be both. May's difference now: the confusion has gone deeper, to feelings and desires. Auden's young man in The Age of Anxiety: "It is getting late. / Shall we ever be asked for? Are we simply / Not wanted at all?" Hermann Hesse: a whole generation caught between two ages, two modes of life, losing power to understand itself, with no standards, no security, no simple acquiescence.
Anxiety signifies conflict; while conflict goes on, constructive solution is possible. Present upsets prove new possibilities as much as catastrophe. First step: frankly admit and face the perilous state.
What is anxiety?
May's highway example: one speeding car produces fear; being caught mid-road by traffic from both directions produces anxiety. The difference is quality, not quantity.
If you walk across a highway and see a car speeding toward you, heart faster, eyes on distances, you hurry across: that is fear, and it energises safety. If, hurrying, you are surprised by cars from the opposite lane and caught mid-road not knowing which way to turn, heart pounds, vision may blur, impulse to run blindly: that is anxiety. Afterward, faintness and hollowness in the stomach.
In fear we know what threatens; perceptions sharpen; we run or overcome. In anxiety we are threatened without knowing what steps to take. We feel "caught," "overwhelmed"; perceptions blur or go vague.
Anxiety ranges from mild tension before meeting someone important, to apprehension before a career-deciding exam, to stark terror waiting to hear if a loved one is lost. Forms: "gnawing" within, chest constriction, bewilderment, world gone dark gray, heavy weight, the terror of a lost child. It is the basic reaction to danger to existence, or to a value identified with existence. Fear threatens one side of the self (a fight, a midterm). When the threat involves the total self, one has anxiety. Anxiety strikes at the very "core."
Quality, not quantity, makes the experience anxiety. A slight gnawing when a supposed friend passes without speaking can be anxiety if it continues and one searches for explanations: the threat touches something basic. At full intensity it is the most painful emotion to which the human animal is heir. Shakespeare: "Present dangers are less than future imaginings." People have leaped from lifeboats rather than face the greater agony of continuous doubt whether rescue will come.
Death is the common symbol, but most "civilised" anxiety comes when a value essential to existence as a self is threatened. Tom, the New York Hospital patient with a gastric fistula through which doctors observed psychosomatic reactions, exclaimed when anxious about keeping his job or going on relief: "If I could not support my family, I'd as soon jump off the dock." Like Willy Loman and countless men, if the value of being a self-respecting wage-earner were destroyed, he might as well be dead. Success, someone's love, Socrates' freedom to speak, Joan of Arc's "inner voices," "Give me liberty or give me death": if such a core value is destroyed, existence as a self feels destroyed. Because dominant values now are being liked, accepted and approved, much anxiety comes from the threat of not being liked, isolation, loneliness or being cast off.
| Normal anxiety | Neurotic anxiety | |
|---|---|---|
| Proportion | Fits the real threat (fire, battle, exam) | Out of proportion |
| Source | Life's crises: weaning, school, leaving home, vocation, marriage | Old conflict, repressed and returning as a ghost |
| Example | Anyone in a fire or facing a real exam | Musician who vowed to cut girls out after a miserable first date; years later blushes before secretary and women chairmen, scared though they have little power |
| Work-through | Facing builds strength; cannot be avoided | Bring out original real experience; work through as normal anxiety; severe cases need professional help |
May's two kinds of anxiety. This book is chiefly concerned with using normal anxiety constructively.
Anxiety destroys self-awareness; self-awareness can destroy anxiety.
Anxiety knocks props from awareness of ourselves ("I felt as though I were in a daze"). Like a torpedo it strikes the deepest level, the "core" where we experience ourselves as subjects who act. In greater or lesser degree it tends to destroy consciousness of ourselves. Battle image: so long as the enemy attacks the front lines, soldiers fight despite fear. If the centre of communications behind the lines is blown, the army loses direction, troops move helter-skelter, panic. That is what anxiety does: disorients, temporarily wipes clear knowledge of what and who one is, blurs the view of reality.
The positive side: just as anxiety destroys our self-awareness, so awareness of ourselves can destroy anxiety. The stronger our consciousness of ourselves, the more we can take a stand against and overcome anxiety. Like fever, anxiety signals a battle in progress. Neurotic anxiety marks unresolved conflict with open possibility of becoming aware of causes and solving on a higher level of health. Normal anxiety is a signal to call up reserves and do battle against a threat.
As fever is symptom of bodily battle with infection, anxiety is evidence of battle between strength as a self and a danger that threatens to wipe out existence as a self. The more the threat wins, the more awareness is surrendered. The greater self-strength, the capacity to preserve awareness of self and objective world, the less one is overcome. Hope remains for a tuberculous patient while fever lasts; when the body has "given up" and fever leaves, death follows. The only hopeless sign, individually or as a nation, would be resigning into apathy and failing to feel and face anxiety constructively.
The book's task is set: strengthen consciousness of ourselves and find centres of strength within that enable us to stand despite confusion around us. First, however, Chapter 2 asks how the present predicament came upon us.
The Roots of Our Malady
Five losses of Chapter 2, then the refusal of nostalgia.
Chapter 2's five losses feeding the emptiness of Chapter 1.
The loss of the centre of values
| Loss | Symptom | May's emblem |
|---|---|---|
| Centre of values | Wrong questions; divorce of ideals and habits | Willy Loman / death of God |
| Sense of self | Powerlessness; thanks for listening | Camus's Stranger |
| Language | Engine parts yes; love no | Eliot's dried voices |
| Nature | Disenchanted; "no sky" | Wordsworth / Proteus |
| Tragedy | Only emptiness left to mourn | Iceman Cometh / Salesman |
The five losses at a glance, with May's emblematic figures.
The first step in overcoming problems, May says, is to understand their causes. What has been happening in the Western world that individuals and nations should be buffeted by so much confusion? The central fact: we live when one way of living is dying and another is being born. The values and goals of Western society are in transition. What, specifically, have we lost?
Since the Renaissance, modern Western life has run on two working beliefs, alongside the ideal values of the Hebrew-Christian and humanist tradition ("love thy neighbour", serve the community).
- Individual competition. Laissez-faire held that private gain adds up to public good, and for centuries it did: the frontier farmer or small capitalist helped the community by helping himself. In an interdependent twentieth century it makes every man "the potential enemy of his neighbour", breeding hostility and resentment. Success for me can mean failure for you in the scramble up the ladder.
- Individual reason. Magnificently fruitful from the Enlightenment onwards for science and education, but in the nineteenth century reason split from emotion and will, a fracture prepared by Descartes' body-mind dichotomy, which "will dog our tracks throughout this book". Reason shrank into technical reason: calculation without the whole person.
Both turned thin: rivalry without welfare; technique without feeling.
May does not attack initiative. The book's chief argument is that the unique powers of each individual must be rediscovered and used for the community, not melted in the collectivist pot of conformity. But "each man for himself and the devil take the hindmost" no longer fits a world of mutual dependence. The individual's striving for gain without equal emphasis on social welfare no longer automatically brings good.
May describes the working beliefs and the ideals as a marriage that held for centuries, since industry raised material welfare and seemed to serve the brotherhood of man. Factories and science can now produce enough for everyone's material needs for the first time in history. Yet in recent decades the marriage is "headed for drastic overhauling or for divorce": getting ahead blocks loving one's neighbour, and calculating reason blocks feeling. People ask the wrong questions (why must striving be against others, reason against emotion?) because the old habits remain in mind but no longer fit. Wrong questions yield permanent frustration.
Ideals and working beliefs: the marriage May says is breaking.
Prophets of the split and of the new age
Several great figures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century saw the splitting of personality. Henrik Ibsen in literature, Paul Cezanne in art, and Sigmund Freud in the science of human nature each demanded a new unity. Ibsen's A Doll's House shows what happens when a husband keeps work and family in sealed compartments. Cezanne put integrity of vision before prettiness. Freud showed that repressed sex and anger return as illness. Yet May asks: were they not, in one respect, the last great men of the old period rather than the first of the new? They presupposed the values of the past three centuries; their new techniques coasted on old goals.
- Ibsen, Cezanne, Freud. New techniques, old goals. They coasted on the centre of values they inherited.
- Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Kafka. They foresaw the destruction of values and the loneliness, emptiness and anxiety to come. "Unfortunately", May says, these are our true prophets, because the task is harder.
From last giants of the old period to prophets of emptiness.
Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed that science in the late nineteenth century was becoming a factory, and feared that great advances in technique without a parallel advance in ethics and self-understanding would lead to nihilism. His parable of the madman with a lantern in the village square announces the death of God: "Where is God? ... We have killed him, you and I! ... Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? ... Is there yet any up and down? Do we not feel the breath of empty space?"
May reads this not as a call back to conventional faith but as a picture of a society losing its centre, fulfilled in the massacres, pogroms and tyranny of the mid-century. The way out is Nietzsche's "revaluation of all values", "an act of ultimate self-examination by mankind." The upshot: the values that unified previous centuries are no longer cogent, and we have not yet found the new centre that would let us choose goals constructively and overcome bewilderment.
The loss of the sense of self
Another root is the loss of the worth and dignity of the human being. Nietzsche predicted the individual swallowed in the herd and living by a "slave-morality." Marx predicted modern man being "dehumanized." Kafka showed people literally losing identity.
The loss did not occur overnight. Those who lived in the 1920s recall "self-expression" as doing whatever popped into one's head, as if the self were any random impulse, a whim from indigestion after a hurried lunch. Though the 1920s seemed confident in the person, confidence really lay in techniques and gadgets. The oversimplified mechanical view of the self betokened disbelief in dignity, complexity and freedom.
In the next two decades, totalitarian movements and the Depression supplied "evidence" that the individual is insignificant, "as ineffectual as the proverbial grain of sand." Authoritarianism in religion, science and politics grew acceptable not because people believed in it but because they felt powerless. What is forgotten: loss of belief in the person is partly the cause of mass movements; both stem from the same historical changes. We must fight on both flanks: against totalitarianism and against the inner dehumanization that feeds it.
How the sense of self eroded from jazz-age whim to mid-century powerlessness.
- Camus's The Stranger. An "average" Frenchman buries his mother, works, has an affair, kills a man and goes to execution without clear decision or feeling. Not even "My God, I mean myself" breaks through. He is a stranger to himself.
- "Thanks for listening." Radio sign-offs thank the passive listener, as if the worth of an act depended on its reception. The one acted upon holds the power to make the act real.
- Sex as plea. A man performing intercourse as if begging "please be satisfied" loses abandon and strength; the attitude backfires.
- Laughter as commodity. Humour should preserve the self by letting us experience ourselves as subjects not swallowed by the situation. Instead we count "laughs" measured by machines. E. B. White is a rare exception who deepens dignity. The term "gag" fits: the laugh stifles rather than frees.
Many readers, sophisticated as often as not, will stumble here because they still hear "being one's self" as 1920s self-expression. May insists the opposite: rediscovering the self is the opposite of whim.
The loss of our language for personal communication
With the loss of self goes a loss of language for deeply personal meanings. This is one side of Western loneliness. The word "love" may mean Hollywood romance, sentimental pop, sexual appetite or Christian charity; speaker and hearer may not share a meaning. We have an excellent vocabulary for technical subjects: almost every man, Erich Fromm noted, can name the parts of an automobile engine. For meaningful interpersonal relations we stumble, "practically as isolated as deaf and dumb people" using only signs.
Eliot's hollow men speak with "dried voices, when / We whisper together / Are quiet and meaningless / As wind in dry grass / Or rats' feet over broken glass / In our dry cellar."
Language rises and falls with the coherence of a culture's centre.
Strong eras have strong languages. Goethe said "When I was eighteen, Germany was eighteen," meaning both national ideals and the language that was his power as a writer. That we need semantics so badly is itself a symptom: once we have learned each other's language we have little time or energy left for what we meant to say.
Art and music fail similarly. At New York's Art Students League, perhaps the largest group of outstanding American artist-teachers and students, every studio paints in a different style; you "shift emotional gears every twenty steps." In the Renaissance a common man could look at Raphael, Leonardo or Michelangelo and feel addressed. Nietzsche said a person is known by his "style," the unique pattern giving unity to his activities; a culture too. Our day has no modern style. From Cezanne and Van Gogh onward, movements try to break hypocrisy and find a living language; Picasso shifts style to style "like a man dialing a ship's radio," hunting a wavelength on which he can speak.
"Little we see in Nature that is ours"
People who lose identity as selves also lose relatedness to nature: not only trees and mountains but empathy for animals. In psychotherapy, empty persons often know enough of what a full response to nature would be to regret its absence. Anxiety intensifies the loss. A little girl, home from a lecture on defending against the atom bomb, asked: "Mother, can't we move someplace where there isn't any sky?" The question is allegory as much as anecdote: anxiety makes us withdraw from nature. Inner emptiness and outer deadness are two sides of one impoverished relation to life.
History of nature-relation: from Renaissance joy to technical disenchantment.
One chief mark of the European Renaissance was enthusiasm for nature in all forms. It appears in Giotto, in the sensuality of Boccaccio, in Michelangelo's powerful bodies, in Shakespeare's organic world, and in the new scientific study of nature. By the nineteenth century interest had become increasingly technical: master and manipulate. The world became "disenchanted" in Paul Tillich's phrase. The process began in the seventeenth century with Descartes: the objective world of physical nature and the body (measurable, weighable) radically different from the subjective. Industrialism and bourgeois commerce went hand in hand with separating nature from subjective emotional life. May is not attacking machines; he is naming the historical cost.
William Wordsworth, near the start of the nineteenth century, saw the loss and the commercialism that partly caused it:
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours... , Wordsworth, longing for Proteus and Triton as personifications of living nature.
It is no poetic accident that Wordsworth yearns for Proteus and Triton. Proteus, shape-changing, stands for the eternally transforming sea; Triton, with his shell-horn, for the hum in a large shell on the shore. They are what we have lost: the capacity to personify and feel nature's moods.
Descartes' dichotomy helped end belief in witches, a real gain that contributed to overcoming witchcraft in the eighteenth century. We also lost fairies, elves, trolls and demicreatures of woods and earth. Sweeping out "superstition" also swept out symbols through which people related to nature's life. As human beings we have roots in nature not only chemically but rhythmically: seasons, night and day, hunger and fulfillment, sleep and wakefulness, sexual desire and gratification. Yet man is also different: he has consciousness of himself, and "nature cares not a fig" for personal identity. That fact brings the book's theme to the centre: one must affirm one's person despite nature's impersonality.
Relating to nature needs courage; courage in turn strengthens the self.
Standing on a rocky promontory before a sea that never "has a tear for others' woes," a strong self feels the threat of non-being and is strengthened by affirming itself. Most people flee into thoughts of lunch or take refuge in a belief that angels will bear them up. Relating to nature creatively requires a strong sense of self; affirming identity over against inorganic being in turn produces greater strength. Loss of nature and loss of self go hand in hand. "Little we see in Nature that is ours" is not only Wordsworth's complaint; it is a clinical fact.
The loss of the sense of tragedy
Tragedy, for May, is not gloom. It is the sense that human dignity and human limit meet in a single act: Oedipus seeing, Faust speaking to the moment, the person choosing under anxiety. A culture that has lost tragedy has only success stories and clinical case notes. Failure becomes shame rather than revelation; death becomes a technical problem; the hollow man cannot bear a plot in which the hero is broken and still human. Restoring a sense of tragedy is part of restoring a centre of values: it says that meaning is possible even when the outcome is loss.
A final consequence of losing conviction in the person's worth is losing the sense of tragedy. Tragedy is the other side of belief in the importance of the individual. Without that belief it does not matter whether Orestes or Lear or you or I fall or stand.
Arthur Miller, in the preface to Death of a Salesman, writes that the tragic character is one "who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing, his sense of personal dignity." The "tragic right" is a condition in which the human personality can flower. In an age of emptiness, tragedies are rare. Or if written, as in Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, the tragic aspect is the emptiness itself: alcoholics and a man sliding into psychosis who can only dimly recall when they believed in something.
Miller's Willy is one of the few real tragedies about common people. (The film version, May notes, made Willy look merely pathetic; readers of the play must restore the broader tragic import.) Willy took seriously the creed he was taught; his destruction matters because a person's dignity mattered to him.
Psychotherapy, which witnesses persons' bitter inner wrestling for dignity, gives new grounds for the tragic view and a new respect for potential human dignity.
Bleak diagnosis, open prognosis
From bleak diagnosis to the only available prognosis: forward.
The picture is bleak as diagnosis but not necessarily as prognosis. We are like people partway through psychoanalysis whose defences and illusions are broken: the only choice is to push on to something better. We are not the "lost generation" of the 1920s, who could go home when frightened of being on their own. We in the mid-twentieth century are the generation that cannot turn back.
The task: rediscover the sources of strength and integrity within ourselves. This goes with affirming values in ourselves and society that can serve as a core of unity. But no values are effective without the prior capacity to do the valuing, that is, actively to choose and affirm them. William James: those concerned with making the world more healthy had best start with themselves. Finding the centre of strength within is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellows.
May's closing image: a Norwegian fisherman heading into a maelstrom throws an oar into the whirlpool; if he can, the maelstrom quiets and he passes through. Just so, one person with inner strength calms panic around him.
The Experience of Becoming a Person
Chapter arc: from Darwinian continuity to heightened I-ness.
Consciousness of self: the unique mark of man
A psychologist procured a baby chimpanzee the same age as his infant son and raised them together. For the first months they developed alike; after about a dozen months the human baby pulled ahead. May's point: from foetal unity through birth and early protected months, mammal and human infants differ little. Around age two, more or less, the human animal undergoes the most radical emergence in evolution so far: awareness of himself as an "I". From the original we with the mother, through the psychological we of early infancy, the child begins to sense freedom within the parent relationship (Gregory Bateson). He can stand against them if need be. That emergence is the birth of the human animal into a person.
A friend's dog waits at the studio door, barks, wants to play. The friend half-jokes that the dog is announcing: "Here is a dog who has waited all morning." May's correction: that is exactly what the dog cannot say. He can entice you to throw the ball, but he cannot stand outside himself and see himself as a dog doing these things. He is free of neurotic anxiety and guilt, Whitman's envied animals who "do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins." Yet consciousness of self is the source of man's highest qualities.
Same capacity seen from two sides: gift and cost.
- I and world. Distinguishing oneself from the environment.
- Time. Standing outside the present to imagine yesterday and the day after tomorrow; learning from the past, planning the future; becoming the historical mammal who can influence his own development and, slightly, history.
- Symbols. Disengaging two sounds ("table") to stand for a class; thinking in abstractions: beauty, reason, goodness.
- Empathy. Seeing ourselves as others see us; transporting ourselves into next week's parlour; imagining another person's place.
- Ethical life. Rudiments of loving the neighbour, ethical sensitivity, seeking truth and beauty, dying for ideals if need be.
The healthy child, loved and supported but not coddled, proceeds despite anxiety; there may be no particular external trauma. If parents exploit, hate or reject him, he clings and uses independence only as negativity and stubbornness. Beaten down for a first tentative "No," he thereafter says "No" as mere rebellion, not true strength. Or if, as in the majority of cases now, parents themselves are anxious and bewildered in changing times, their anxiety carries over: the child learns that becoming a self is dangerous.
The sketch is schematic, drawn from adults still struggling in dreams, memories and present relations to finish being born as persons. Selfhood is always born in a social context. Auden: "the ego is a dream / Till a neighbor's need by name create it." But no ego moves into responsible selfhood if it remains chiefly a reflection of the social context. In a world where conformity destroys selfhood, where fitting the pattern is the norm and being "well liked" the alleged ticket to salvation, what needs emphasis is not only that we create each other but our capacity to experience and create ourselves.
Self-relatedness
Identity as a self is the basic conviction we start with as psychological beings. It cannot be proven logically: consciousness of self is the presupposition of any discussion of it. There will always be mystery here, meaning a problem whose data encroach on the problem.
Some psychologists and philosophers distrust the self: they dislike separating man from the animal continuum, and believe the concept blocks experimentation. Rejecting it as "unscientific" because it will not reduce to equations is like the earlier rejection of Freud's unconscious. It is defensive, Procrustean science. Continuum with animals yes; unwarranted identity with animals no.
We need not prove the self as an "object." Show that people have the capacity for self-relatedness. The self is "the organizing function within the individual" and the function by which one human being relates to another. It is prior to science, not its object; presupposed in the fact that one can be a scientist.
Imagine a psychologist writing a paper denying consciousness of self. For weeks he pictures himself at the desk; he fantasises colleagues praising or dismissing the paper. In every thought he sees himself as an identity. His every argument against self-consciousness proves it in himself.
Descartes, legend says, spent a day meditating in a stove (a stove-heated room) and emerged with "I think, therefore I am." Not enough. We never experience ourselves as an idea; we picture ourselves acting and feeling, a thinking-intuiting-feeling and acting unity. The self is not the sum of roles; it is the capacity by which one knows one plays them, the centre from which one sees so-called different "sides."
A child protests indignantly if teased with the wrong name: identity taken away. In the Old Testament, "I will blot out their names" is a more powerful threat than physical death.
Developmental arc May sketches for selfhood.
Every organism has one central need: to fulfil its own potentialities. The acorn becomes an oak; the puppy a dog. Man's task is harder: he must do it in self-consciousness, by choice and affirmation. John Stuart Mill: human nature is not a machine built after a model, but a tree that must develop on all sides according to inward forces. Mill omits the decisive force: man does not grow automatically; he fulfils potentialities only as he plans and chooses in consciousness. Long childhood prepares some knowledge and inner strength for that choosing.
Choices must be individual: individuality is one side of self-consciousness. I can never know exactly how you see yourself. That inner sanctum makes for tragedy and isolation, and also means we must find strength to stand there, and through our own affirmation learn to love each other.
Unused potentiality makes us sick, as legs wither if never walked; blood and heart weaken too. Neurosis: unused potentialities, blocked by hostile conditions and internalised conflicts, turn inward and cause morbidity. Blake: "Energy is Eternal Delight"; "He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence."
Kafka's heroes in The Trial and The Castle have only an initial: mute symbol of no identity. In Metamorphosis an empty young salesman, same Sunday roast, father asleep at table, wakes as a cockroach: parasite living on others' leavings, symbol of what happens when a human forfeits his nature as a person.
Conversely, the toddler who finally climbs the step laughs with joy. Adolescent joy in gaining a friend; adult joy in loving, planning, creating. Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life: the affect that accompanies fulfilling our natures as human beings. Based on experiencing oneself as a being of worth and dignity who can affirm his being against all others and the inorganic world. Socrates took condemnation as greater fulfilment than compromise. Qualitatively present in any honest, responsible expression of one's powers, however inconspicuous.
Self-contempt, a substitute for self-worth
Objection one: won't this breed pride? Conceit comes from too little self-worth, not too much. Self-inflation covers anxiety. The roaring 1920s showed tremendous pride over suppressed anxiety. The weak become bullies; fascism's strutting Mussolini and psychopathic Hitler grew from emptiness and despair seizing megalomaniac promises.
Many homilies on self-abnegation hide contempt for the self. Aldous Huxley's claim that "the most intolerably dreary and deadening life is that which we live with ourselves" is empirically false of Spinoza, Thoreau, Einstein, Jesus, and many unnamed people who ventured to become conscious of themselves. It is easy to get an audience against conceit because most people already feel empty and agree they deserve condemnation.
Self-condemnation buys temporary lift; hastens collapse of dignity.
The unloved child says "If I were not bad, they would love me," avoiding the terror of not being loved. Adults use the same dodge. In an age of hollow people, preaching self-contempt is "like whipping a sick horse": temporary lift, hastened collapse. It avoids facing isolation, provides rationalisation for self-hate, and, since attitudes to others parallel attitudes to self, reinforces hatred of others. From feeling worthless to self-hatred to hatred of others is a short walk.
Never explained: why force one's company on others if one finds it so dreary. Never explained: hate the "I," love all others who are expected to love the hateful creature; hate oneself more, love more the God who made the mistake of creating "I."
Fromm's Selfishness and Self-love: selfishness comes from self-hatred; self-love is the precondition for loving others. Calvin's contemptuous view of the self tracked individual insignificance in industrial development; twentieth-century self-contempt also rises from emptiness. Kierkegaard: "You shall love yourself as you love your neighbor when you love him as yourself." Loving oneself rightly and loving one's neighbour are absolutely analogous.
Consciousness of self is not introversion
Objection two: won't it make people shy? English confuses self-consciousness with embarrassment; German Selbstbewusstsein means self-confidence. The centipede who cannot walk once asked how is a rationalisation and a bad fable: the less aware a driver is of car and traffic, the more tense; the more conscious, the more he can relax with a sense of power. Consciousness expands control and the capacity to let go. Paradox: more self-consciousness, more spontaneity and creativity.
Advice to "forget the childish self" rarely helps. One does in one sense forget oneself in creative activity (next chapter). First: how does one achieve consciousness of self?
Three steps back to the self
May's sequence: feel, want, then listen deep. Judgment follows.
Feelings. Many know only "fine" or "lousy," as vaguely as "China is in the Orient," connection as remote as long-distance telephone. They give ideas about feelings; affects give no motion. Like Eliot's hollow men: shape without form, paralysed force. In therapy they learn by asking daily "Just how do I feel right now?" Aim: precision and the experience that "I" am feeling, not effervescence. Mature feeling differentiates like passages in a symphony, not bugle-call notes.
The body. Gardner Murphy: the infant's experienced body is "the first core of the self." Baby reaches for the leg: "Here is this leg; it belongs to me." Sexual feelings are early self-referable feelings; when tabooed along with toilet experiences as "naughty," the implication is "Your image of yourself is dirty," one origin of despising the self.
Most adults cannot say how their ankle or middle finger feels. Body awareness is often limited to borderline schizophrenics and people under yoga or Eastern exercises. Industrial centuries suppressed the body into an inanimate machine; people treat it as a truck driven until empty of gas, with a weekly perfunctory check. Nature knocks them down with colds, flu, severe illness: "When will you learn to listen?"
Ill, they say "I got sick" in the passive voice, as if hit by a car, and surrender to doctor and miracle drugs: "The pneumococcus made me sick, but penicillin made me well." Use science, but do not surrender sovereignty. Many disturbances (faulty walking, posture, breathing) come from never having felt feet and legs. Correcting often means learning to feel again. In overcoming psychosomatic ills or tuberculosis, listen to the body for when to work and rest.
Pleasure-seekers treat the body as a vehicle of sensation, tuning a television set. Kinsey speaks of the sexual "object"; people say "my sexual needs require outlet" rather than "I want and choose sexual relations with this person." Puritanism and libertinism commit the same error: separating sex from the self. Welcome the body back: not "My body feels" but "I feel." Separating sex is no more tenable than saying "my vocal cords want to talk with my friend."
Active voice in illness: "I sicken"; TB patients still say "I cured" at a sanatorium. Illnesses as nature's means of re-educating the whole person.
Some persons, viewing illness as re-education, become more fulfilled after serious illness than before. Physical, psychological and spiritual (despair, meaninglessness) diseases are aspects of the same difficulty of the self finding itself. Illnesses serve interchangeable purposes: focus for floating anxiety; respite from responsibility; unconstructive "relief" of guilt. Take away diphtheria and TB without helping people past anxiety, guilt and emptiness, and sickness is only forced into a new channel. Like Hercules against the Hydra: cut off one head, another grows. Lasting progress requires affirming being so people will not need to be sick.
Wants. Few honestly know what they want rather than what they should want (success) or want to want (loving the neighbour). Children's directness ("I like ice cream, I want a cone") is fresh air; parents may say Yes or No, but should not teach the child to falsify that he does not want it. Awareness does not mean indiscriminate expression; judgment comes later. Without knowing wants, no basis for judgment. An adolescent aware of erotic impulses need not act; if he never lets them reach awareness because unacceptable, how will he know years later in marriage whether he wants his wife or only performs the expected act?
Alarm that freed desires will run riot describes neurotic, repressed emotions. Suppressed feelings explode; the Victorian gyroscope man locked emotions in jail and made them lawbreakers. The more integrated the person, the less compulsive the emotions. In maturity, feelings occur in a configuration: at a dinner-drama one is not consumed with hunger; at a concert one is not consumed with sexual desire for the singer. Spontaneity means responding to the total figure-ground as the active "I," unique to that situation. Only neurotic behaviour is rigidly repetitive.
The unconscious. Modern man surrendered the unconscious as he surrendered the body. Before Joseph interpreted Pharaoh's dreams, people took dreams as wisdom; most now treat them as odd as a Tibetan ceremonial. Cutting off that portion is driving Plato's chariot with reins on only one horse while four or five pull elsewhere. Esoteric dream symbols put the problem back into a foreign language: authorities know, we do not. Fromm's The Forgotten Language: dreams, myths and fairy tales are the one universal language of mankind, recommended for the nontechnical reader. Dreams carry conflicts and repressed wishes and also forgotten knowledge; even the unskilled, refusing to dismiss dreams as silly, may get occasional guidance.
Upshot: more consciousness, more self
Kierkegaard: "The more consciousness, the more self." Becoming a person means the heightened experience that it is "I, the acting one" who lives.
Two errors May's view avoids, with their correctives.
- Passivism. Letting deterministic forces replace awareness. Older psychoanalysis could be used this way: Grodeck wrote "We are lived by our unconscious"; Freud once praised the "passivity of the ego." Freud's overall purpose, stated again and again: make the unconscious conscious; enlarge awareness; help the person consciously direct his own ship against mutinous sailors below deck.
- Activism. Equating busyness with life. Many cover anxiety by hurry; a pseudo sense of aliveness and importance. Chaucer on the merchant: "Methinks he seemed busier than he was." Aliveness often means the capacity not to act, to be "creatively idle." Stevenson: "To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity." Contemplation and meditation, almost lost in the West, return. Work becomes creative expression, not escape or proof of worth.
- Daily feeling check. Several times a day ask "Just how do I feel right now?" and name it more precisely than fine or lousy.
- Body sovereignty. When ill or tired, practise the active voice ("I sicken," "I rest") and decide with the body's signals when to work, rather than surrendering all judgment to the clinician.
- Dream as fatherland language. On waking, write one dream without dismissing it as silly; look for forgotten knowledge, not only conflict.
Chapter 3 contrasts on the way to aliveness.
Daily path May recommends back to the acting I.
The Struggle to Be
Chapter arc: from umbilical cord to creative consciousness of self.
Achieving consciousness of self for adults blocked by earlier experience means fighting what prevents feeling and wanting. The chains, in essence, are ties to the parents, especially in our society to the mother.
Development is a continuum of differentiation from the "mass" toward freedom as an individual. Foetus: fed through the cord without choice. Birth cuts the physical cord; feeding thereafter involves howls and Yes or No. Then: emergence of self-consciousness, school, sexual maturation, college, vocation, marriage. All through life: differentiation from the whole, then new integration. All evolution can be described that way. Man must become a psychological and ethical as well as physical individual, by conscious choice. Strictly speaking, being born from the womb, cutting free, replacing dependency with choice, is involved in every decision, even on the deathbed: dying courageously is the ultimate step in learning to be on one's own.
Every life could be portrayed by a graph of differentiation: how far has he freed himself from automatic dependencies, become able to relate through self-chosen love, responsibility and creative work?
Cutting the psychological umbilical cord
Without the psychological cut, a person remains "like a toddler tied to a stake in his parents' front yard," able to go no farther than his rope. Surrendered freedom turns inward and festers in resentment and anger. Within the rope's range they may seem to get along; crisis (marriage, work, death) sends them figuratively or literally "back to mother." One young husband: "I cannot love my wife enough because I love my mother too much." His error: using "love" for the maternal tie. Real love is expansive and never excludes loving others; being tied to the mother is exclusive and blocks loving a wife. When society itself no longer mothers with minimal consistent support, people cling more closely to the physical mother of childhood.
The prince consortA gifted man of thirty: homosexual feelings, no positive feeling toward women but great fear of them, avoidance of intimacy, blocked doctoral dissertation. Only child; contempt for weak, mother-dominated father. Mother belittled father openly; boy overheard: "You are worth more to us dead than alive, but you have always been a coward and you are afraid to take your own life." Dressed carefully for school, unable to fight; mother came to school to protect him. She confided at length how she suffered with the father, required him to help with some toilet functions (he hated this). In college vacations he was paralysed with anxiety hearing her come upstairs at night, fearing she would enter while he was undressed. She carried on an extramarital affair rather openly; he was upset and more jealous of her attentions. She tried to block his dating, then made dates with girls whose families could enhance her social position.
Piano and Sunday-school recitations were exploited for her prestige. He once could not recite "Honor thy father and mother"; at ladies' meetings he forgot pieces he knew perfectly. School and armed-forces successes became her community prestige. Blockage on the dissertation shared the logic of forgotten piano solos: one way to defend against exploited success is to accomplish nothing the other can take away. Her letters during therapy: long complaints, minor heart attacks, requests that he come home, hints of another attack if he showed less interest. Favoured as "prince consort" in the father's place so long as he pleased her: "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown." No security from the throne: puppet, not strength.
May's mid-century American pattern versus Freud's German-father Oedipus.
Three typical features: (1) lack of feeling, confused sexual role, lack of potency sexually and in work; (2) mother-dominated family unlike Freud's patriarchal oedipus frame; (3) boy made prince consort. Classical oedipus present with differences: deathly afraid of castration (losing power), but the mother castrates, not the father. No figure of masculine strength to identify with. Narcissism compensates for almost complete inner powerlessness. Occasional verbal spats and non-accomplishment: passive protest of a slave. No surprise he feared women and could not move in work, love or intimacy.
Way out? Temporarily withdraw, make oneself small. A young man between weak alcoholic father and martyr-type mother wrote of boyhood: "Still clutching your teddy bear... Make it so small they'll fail / To find it... Then you're left / Alone / To defend what they didn't want." Or later: "take arms against a sea of troubles" and struggle for freedom as a person.
The struggle against mother: Orestes
Oresteia plot as May uses it (Aeschylus + Jeffers).
- Agamemnon. King of Mycenae, murdered on return from Troy.
- Clytemnestra. Takes Aegisthus as lover; exiles infant Orestes; keeps Electra servile. Faced with the sword: pity ("Hard was my lot"), mother's curse, then in Jeffers passionate seduction.
- Orestes. Goes limp ("I will be passive, I am blunted"), sees the "love" is strategy when she summons soldiers, regains strength, strikes. Pursued by Furies with snake-twined locks: self-reproach that will not let one sleep.
- Apollo and Athena. Respite at Delphi; trial at Athens. Athena warns against both "anarchy" and "slavish masterdom." Jury ties; Athena's deciding vote forgives him so mankind can advance free of chains to hating parents.
Killing the mother is the outer story; the inner meaning is the struggle "to be or not to be" a psychological and spiritual being. Debate between "old" ways (Clytemnestra, Erinyes) and "new" (Apollo, Athena, Orestes' act). Fromm reads it sociologically as new patriarchy versus old matriarchy; May stays with psychological implications. Aeschylus: Orestes "could not choose but scale the height" and would have been "sick" forever otherwise; chorus: "The Light has come."
Clytemnestra is extreme, a symbol more than a person for authoritarian parental tendencies that would exile and strangle the child's potentialities. Greek literature minces no words; modern readers find the medicine strong.
What does killing the parent mean? Fighting authoritarian powers that strangle growth. Those powers may head up in father or mother. Freud thought father versus son universal, built on the "German father." Mid-century American evidence (May's practice and colleagues'): mother often dominant for people now twenty to fifty; the Orestes myth expresses their experience more than Oedipus. The oedipus complex is not universal but depends on culture and history. Son learns rewards only by pleasing mother; potency accessible only at her command is not power at all.
May's guess: rage at 'Mom' often masks one's own dependence.
On "Momism" and Philip Wylie's Generation of Vipers: May guesses much vituperation is a way of getting anger out when the real thing underneath is one's own dependence. Still, Strecker: the system "is beginning to resemble a matriarchy." Erikson: "Mom is more the victim than the victor"; American mother forced into power because father (city five days, weekends only) abdicated. "Mother became 'Mom' only when Father became 'Pop'."
Why the demanding quality? Not the present confused generation of mothers but the previous one. May does not claim to know psychosociological causes. Notes: mothers of these patients behave as though they had suffered great disappointment. Clytemnestra acted "from an age old hate." Exploitative power usually follows being greatly hurt. Frontier psychology plus late Victorian pedestal: women given expectation of being forever served, sexually frustrated, expected to civilize the frontier while worshipped. Disappointed in husbands, take it out in possessiveness of the son?
The Greeks shake the foundations further: Athena, who forgives Orestes, "never knew the mother's womb," sprang full-attired from Zeus's forehead, and sides with "the new." Does this imply the pilgrimage from dependence to maturity is so hobbled by umbilical ties that the goddess of wisdom must be pictured as one who never had to fight them? That mother relationship tends to be conserving rather than revolutionary? Temptation to be sheltered, regress, be "passive" and "blunted" symbolised by return to the womb? May leaves the questions to the reader.
Incest past adolescence is the sexual symptom of morbid parental dependency: gratification not too different from oral feeding, plus the need that another should praise him. Even Mycenae's religion is incestuous: gods as projections, "men striding and feasting" in the sky, expressions of infantile dependency, opposite of Jesus: "I have come not to bring peace but a sword... to set a man at variance against his father... And a crowd's foes shall be they of his own household" (Matthew 10:34-36). Not preaching hatred; stating radically that spiritual development moves away from incest toward loving neighbour and stranger. Household members are foes in truth if one is still bound to them.
Incest taboo's psychosocial merit: enlarges possibilities of change (not that incest harms the baby physically; it doubles the same heredity and robs outside possibilities). Differentiation requires developing away from incest toward capacity to "love outwardly."
The struggle against one's own dependency
Moral is not get a gun and kill your mother. What must die: infantile ties that block loving outwardly and creating independently. Not one great blow-up: long uphill re-education, new insights, self-conscious decisions, bitter struggles. Therapy often takes months to discover how much one was tied without knowing. Anxiety and occasional terror are expected; temporary madness comparable to Orestes'. Neurotic form when growth failed at previous stages; Mycenae's prior hatreds and morbidity made the break traumatic.
Both right: earliest shackles external; for adults the decisive fight is internal.
Aeschylus places source as objective (evil for generations at Mycenae). Shakespeare places Hamlet's struggle as internal (conscience, guilt, ambivalent courage, indecisiveness). Both right. Earliest authoritarian shackling is external: exploitative parents, or a Jew born into anti-Semitic prejudice. Gradually the problem internalizes: the growing person plants the rules in himself and acts as if still fighting original enslavers. Happy moral: since he keeps the forces going in himself, he also has power to get over them. For adults rediscovering themselves, the battle is centrally internal: against dependent needs, anxiety and guilt that arise moving toward freedom. Basic conflict: the part that seeks growth versus the part that longs to remain immature, tied to the cord, receiving pseudo-protection in exchange for independence.
Stages in consciousness of self
Four stages. Most healthy adults live at stage three; four is rare but orients the rest.
| Stage | What it is | Mark |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Innocence | Infant before consciousness of self | No "I" yet |
| 2. Rebellion | Trying to establish inner strength; ages 2-3, adolescence; may involve defiance (Orestes extreme) | Necessary transition; not freedom |
| 3. Ordinary consciousness | Sees errors, allows for prejudice, learns from guilt and anxiety, decides with some responsibility | What most mean by healthy personality |
| 4. Creative consciousness | Sudden insight from subconscious; dreams, reverie; science, religion, art | Ecstasy: stand outside usual viewpoint |
May weighs names for stage four (Oriental "objective," Nietzsche "self-surpassing," religious "self-transcending") and settles on creative consciousness of self / ecstasy.
Fourth stage: answer pops from nowhere after days of struggle, often in lull, but only on problems wrestled with diligently. Cuts below the split between subjectivity and objectivity; temporary transcendence of usual limits. Glimpses of objective truth or new ethical possibility (unselfish love). Orestes in the forest: "no color but clearness; / No honey but ecstasy... no passion but peace." Simone de Beauvoir: "Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying."
Most achieve this only at rare intervals; only saints and great creators live much there. But it gives meaning to lesser levels: mountain-peak perspective that sketches the map for weeks of plodding without "inspiration." Self-forgetting is a poor name; this is the most fulfilled state. One cannot demand it; evidence says insights come on problems one has persevered with. Train vigilance to dreams. Nietzsche on Goethe: "He disciplined himself into wholeness, he created himself... Such a spirit who has become free stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism... he does not negate any more."
- Name the rope. Where do you still go "back to mother" (or father, or institution) under crisis? That length is your psychological tether.
- Rebellion check. Is a current "No" establishing strength, or still defined by what it opposes? Rebellion is stage two, not freedom.
- Love outward test. Does a relationship expand your capacity to love others, or exclude them? Exclusive ties are dependency wearing love's name.
Dependency loop and the Orestes exit.
Hardest step: leave the parental eye.
Freedom and Inner Strength
Chapter arc from denied freedom to daily conquering of existence.
The man who was put in a cage
One evening a king of a far land stands at his window after a diplomatic reception, vaguely listening to music, tired from smiling and talking all evening. Sudden curiosity: what would happen if a man's freedom were entirely taken away, if he were kept in a cage like the animals at the zoo? Next day he calls a psychologist, invites him to observe; they take an average man and place him in a cage from the zoo in the courtyard.
Seven-stage descent: from protest to loss of the word I.
- Bewilderment. "I have to catch the tram... I'll be late for work!"
- Protest. Tells the king he cannot do this. King: "you get plenty of food, you have a good bed, and you don't have to work."
- Doubt. Hatred pauses a second after each reminder, as if wondering whether it is true.
- Rationalisation. Lectures visiting professors that security is a good thing and wisdom is accepting fate.
- Fawning. Thanks the king through the bars; sullen when unobserved.
- Emptiness. Face goes blank; smile "like the grimace a baby makes" with wind. He never says "I" any more. He has accepted the cage. But he is now insane.
That night the psychologist cannot write his concluding report. He feels a great emptiness; repeating "nothing is ever lost" brings no comfort.
Hatred and resentment as the price of denied freedom
The violence of the caged man's hatred shows how essential freedom is: hating is often a person's only way to avoid psychological or spiritual suicide, saying silently to the conqueror, "You have conquered me, but I still preserve my right to hate you." In therapy, patients drastically curtailed who cannot feel their resentment have a worse prognosis. When people surrender freedom they must hate: totalitarian states must supply targets. Hitler's Jews and "enemy nations"; Stalin's "warmongering" West; Orwell's 1984. In Kafka's The Trial, K. never learns his crime and drifts mildly from court to lawyer, having lost the capacity to stand against his accusers.
Hatred and resentment are not good in themselves; maturity means transforming them. But no one reaches real love or freedom without working through resentment first.
Hatred temporarily preserves inner freedom; must later be transformed.
Cumulative freedom in therapy-sized steps.
Freedom's lookalikes versus the real thing.
Freedom's clinical texture
In the consulting room, freedom appears first as tiny pauses. A patient who has always answered "What do you think?" with a poll of spouse, boss and friends begins, for a few seconds, to feel his own preference before he reports it. That pause is not yet a life-plan; it is the germ of taking a hand in one's own development. Cumulative: each pause enlarges the circle in which choice is possible. May's clinical claim is that people are freer than they feel, and less free than they boast. The hollow man says "I can do anything" and then waits for the group to tell him what anything is. The growing person says "I can choose within these limits" and then chooses.
Cumulative freedom in therapy-sized steps.
Limits chosen and limits suffered
Accepting a limit by choice (the sonnet form, the tuberculosis sanatorium schedule, Epictetus's distinction between what is up to us and what is not) is itself an act of freedom. The cage parable's horror is not that limits exist; it is that the man did not choose them, and then hated, and then lost the "I" that could choose. Sartre's Resistance-born seriousness about dying for integrity remains; May's dissent is that freedom as unstructured whim collapses into the lonely drift of The Age of Reason's hero, a freedom that cannot love or build.
Choosing one's self
Kierkegaard's imperative: choose yourself. Facing that one could not-exist clarifies living. The decorated editor who works on his marriage and the instructor who starts the book (Chapter 8's companions) are already practising Chapter 5: they take a hand in their development under a threatening clock. Freedom is not a once-for-all conversion; it is the structure of pause-and-choose repeated until character holds.
Freedom's lookalikes versus the real thing.
- Repression. Conventional circles ban admitting hatred as four decades earlier they banned sex, and two decades earlier anger. Repressed feeling surfaces as its opposite: excessive politeness toward someone you dislike.
- Resentment. The civilised form of hatred; most people will find it if they look honestly.
- Self-pity. The "preserved" form of hatred and resentment, nursed to keep one's balance, and the one affect "which never does anyone any good."
Nietzsche felt resentment acutely: son of a Lutheran pastor who died when he was a boy, raised by relatives, he saw how much conventional morality rests on it, but never got fully beyond rebellion. Even those who find his view one-sided agree: no one can arrive at freedom and love without facing and working through resentment. One patient's poem: hate "in order to win the new." Hatred temporarily preserves inner freedom; sooner or later one must use the energy constructively or be destroyed by it.
Freedom's path from the cage to Faust's daily conquering.
What freedom is not
Three counterfeits versus May's definition.
- Rebellion. Normal interim step (toddler's "No," adolescent revolt) but a "false port in the storm": it depends on the structure it attacks. The 1920s ran on it: Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, D. H. Lawrence, Sinclair Lewis; "free love" defined by what it opposed. May, in college in the late 1920s, recalls crusades against war, taboos and Prohibition. When the enemy collapses, the rebel is empty.
- Planlessness. Some argue freedom is indivisible, so ending laissez-faire ends all freedom. May: freedom is indeed a living whole, which is why it cannot be tied to one economic doctrine of the past. Ideal: a society giving each person maximum opportunity to realise himself.
- Free will as a button. Freedom is not an isolated "electric button"; "freedom versus determinism" is a false debate.
What freedom is
Freedom is man's capacity to take a hand in his own development, the other side of consciousness of self. Without it we would be pushed along "like bees or mastodons." Self-awareness lets us stand outside the chain of stimulus and response, pause, and throw weight on one side. The less self-aware, the less free: forgotten conditionings drive us. In therapy freedom appears in small steps: recalling dreams, choosing to change the subject, saying "I felt angry at you." Freedom is cumulative: "Each exercise of freedom enlarges the circumference of the circle of one's self."
Freedom as cumulative pause-and-choose within determination.
Freedom and structure
Freedom is not anarchy; the self is born within relationships, not like Robinson Crusoe. Sartre's The Age of Reason shows a hero drifting through whim and indecision while presented as free. May honours existentialism's core, caring enough about freedom and integrity to die for them, born in the French Resistance, and agrees that final choices are made alone, sometimes in agony. But choices need a structure: the Greeks' logos, the Stoics' natural law, the religious traditions. Working it out belongs to philosophy, religion, ethics and science together. Structure without freedom is tyranny; freedom without structure dissolves into whim and then into the cage's rationalised "security."
- Greek logos. Reasoned order of the cosmos as guide for choice.
- Stoic natural law. Live according to nature; choose relation to what you cannot change.
- Religious traditions. Covenant, vocation, neighbour-love as forms that free rather than merely bind.
- May's caution on Sartre. Alone-ness of final choice: yes. Equating freedom with unstructured whim: no.
Choosing one's self
Freedom is achieved daily. Goethe's Faust: "He only earns his freedom and existence / Who daily conquers them anew." Kierkegaard's "choosing one's self" means affirming responsibility for one's existence, the opposite of routine momentum. Suicide is rare outside psychosis, but contemplating it clarifies: people who have kept going to nurse someone or finish a work sometimes die soon after the task ends. No one really begins to live until he has faced the fact that he could end his existence and chooses not to.
- The jilted woman. Believing she cannot live without a man who marries someone else, she imagines doing it, then thinks: "the sun still shines, water is still cool to the body, one can still make things," and there may be others to love. She chooses to live. Edna St. Vincent Millay: "Ah, up from the ground sprang I..."
- The assistant professor. Craving fame, he sees there are always people above him and he may end as merely a good teacher, "a grain of sand." He imagines suicide, asks "what then?", and finds much left worth living for, without the demand for fame.
Many people move the other way, constricting their lives when a demand fails. But those who consciously choose to live find two changes: responsibility becomes something chosen rather than a burden, and outer discipline becomes self-discipline, "for who can command someone who has been free to take his own life?"
- Name the stimulus. Freedom begins in the gap between stimulus and response; noticing the trigger widens the gap.
- Look for small signs. Freedom first shows as remembering dreams, changing the subject, or saying "I felt angry." Small choices count.
- Choose the limit. Faced with a constraint you cannot change, decide how you will relate to it, as the sanatorium patients did; that decision is itself free.
- Daily conquer. Ask once a day what you are affirming by continuing, Goethe's "daily" test, not a once-for-all conversion.
The Creative Conscience
Chapter 6 arc from ethics through myth and religion to valuing.
Man the ethical animal
Ethical judgment, like freedom and reason, rests on consciousness of self. A few years ago Hobart Mowrer ran a notable experiment at Harvard on the "ethical" sense of rats. Pellets dropped before hungry animals; etiquette required a three-second wait. Immediate shock after hasty grabbing taught them to wait politely. When punishment was postponed nine or twelve seconds, most rats could not learn: they became "delinquent" (grabbing regardless) or "neurotic" (withdrawing and going hungry). They could not balance a future bad consequence against present desire.
Man can "look before and after." He transcends the immediate moment, remembers the past, plans the future, chooses a greater good that arrives later over a lesser immediate one. By the same token he can feel himself into someone else's needs, imagine himself in the other's place, and choose with a view to the other's good. That capacity for delayed and other-regarding choice is what makes him the ethical animal. Ethics is not a luxury add-on to psychology; once self-awareness arrives, right and wrong, anxiety and guilt, finitude and work enter together.
Adam and Prometheus
Adam as developmental and ethical map, including Hegel's fall upward.
The Adam myth describes what happens in every human development between about one and three: emergence of self-awareness. Eden stands for womb and early infancy, warm and taken care of, reserved for infants, animals and angels, where ethical conflict does not exist. Romantic pictures of paradise without productive activity are typically a harking back to that state, or further to existence in the womb.
With loss of "innocence" come the burdens of self-consciousness: anxiety, guilt and awareness of dust, of death and finiteness. On the positive side, eating the tree of knowledge is the birth of the psychological and spiritual person. Hegel spoke of the "fall" as a "fall upward." Early Hebrew writers might have made it celestial rejoicing: this day, rather than the clay of creation, is when man the human being was born.
Amazingly the myth pictures all this against God's will. Yahweh is angry that man has become "like one of us" and might take the tree of life too. Contradiction: the God who created man in his image (freedom, creativity, ethical choice) wishing to keep him blind? May's explanations: primitive storytellers could not distinguish constructive self-consciousness from rebellion; the God of the myth is Yahweh, earliest jealous tribal deity, against whose cruel ways the later Hebrew prophets protested.
Parallel Greek myth: Prometheus steals fire for humankind's warmth and productivity. Enraged Zeus chains him to a Caucasus peak; a vulture eats his liver by day; it regenerates by night; torment perpetual. Zeus also packs diseases, sorrows and vices into a box of mothlike creatures; Mercury carries it to the earthly paradise of Pandora and Epimetheus; curiosity opens it; afflictions never end. So far as punishment goes, Zeus had an edge over Yahweh in cruelty. These demonic dealings do not present a pretty picture of archaic gods.
May pairs Adam (awareness, ethics) with Prometheus (creativity, culture): both myths say that becoming human costs anxiety and conflict with powers that prefer the old order. The regenerating liver is the endless price of creativity: each day the work begins again. Fire is technique, culture, the arts, the capacity to make. Eve's punishments (desire for husband, pain in childbirth) and Adam's (sweat, return to dust) name the cost of leaving innocence: sexuality with conflict, labour, mortality.
Together: the human cost of leaving innocence for culture and conscience.
Grand Inquisitor: ethics versus the ant heap
One of the most remarkable pictures of the conflict between ethical sensitivity and existing institutions, and of the anxiety ethical freedom brings, is Dostoevski's Grand Inquisitor. Christ returns quietly, healing; the old Cardinal has him imprisoned. In the night the Inquisitor explains why Christ should never have returned: for fifteen centuries the church has struggled to correct Christ's original mistake in giving man freedom. Christ's error was placing on man, "with free heart," the burden of deciding good and evil for himself. That fearful burden is too much. People want to be treated as children, led by authority and miracle. Christ should have given bread as the devil suggested; instead he refused to buy obedience with bread. In the end they will lay their freedom at the church's feet: "Make us your slaves, but feed us." Man prefers peace and even death to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil.
A few heroic persons could follow Christ's way; most seek to be united "all in one unanimous and harmonious ant heap." Man's greatest torment is to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over the gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born. The church accepts the gift: it will allow or forbid wives, mistresses, children according to obedience, and they will submit gladly, saved from the agony of free decision. Tomorrow Christ will be burned.
Dostoevski does not mean the Inquisitor speaks for all religion; he means the Inquisitor names the bargain every authoritarian system, sacred or secular, offers the hollow: miracle, mystery, authority in exchange for the anxiety of choice. Conformity that baptises "cultural" or moral rules or absolute doctrines still leaves out the essence of human ethics: sensitive awareness of the unique relationship with the other person, and working out, in some degree of freedom and personal responsibility, the creative relationship.
Authoritarian religion and hollow culture both prefer the ant heap.
Religion: source of strength or weakness?
May's functional test, not creed checklist.
The question is never whether religion as such makes for health or neurosis, but what kind and how used. Freud erred in holding religion per se a compulsion neurosis; some is, some is not. Philosophy can be flight into a harmonious system or courageous understanding; science can be dogmatic faith or open search. Indeed, because faith in science has been more acceptable in intelligent circles, it may more often play the role of compulsive escape than religion does. Freud was correct technically in asking the right question: does religion increase dependency and keep the individual infantile?
Those who say glibly that religion makes for mental health are equally wrong. Blanket statements relieve us of the harder task: assessing religious attitudes as functioning aspects of the person's organic relation to life. May's questions: Does a given religion break the will, keep the person infantile, enable avoidance of the anxiety of freedom and responsibility? Or does it serve as a basis of meaning that affirms dignity and worth, grounds courageous acceptance of limitations and normal anxiety, and aids the development of powers, responsibility and capacity to love?
Younger persons struggling for autonomy have often been inculcated with a sense of doom if they disobey. Dreams of being guilty yet not guilty (cited as guilty by Senator McCarthy though knowing oneself innocent) appear at this stage. About half of May's psychotherapeutic work over ten years was with persons from specifically religious backgrounds and professions. Tentative impressions: religious backgrounds often bring more than average "zest" to do something with one's life, and also a particular attitude he calls "the divine right to be taken care of." The two are contradictory. Zest energises therapy; the divine-right attitude is one of the greatest blocks to development.
Dependency economics in the religious professions: the minister is not supposed to require a salary; railroad and store discounts, lower seminary tuition, being "taken care of" by the church train subordination. Labor learned that God does not send the paycheck by raven's mouth as food was sent to Elijah; religious professions often cannot strike. The social assumption "be good and security follows" erodes self-respect and others' respect. Goethe's lines: he who cannot rule his own internal self is all too fain to sway his neighbour's will. Vicarious prestige through identifying with minister, priest, rabbi or bishop parallels therapeutic transference; in therapy it is worked through so worth comes from one's own activities. Christian love can deteriorate into "If you take responsibility for me, I will for you," until no one knows where he himself is.
- Infantile. God as magical parent ("cosmic papa," Auden's phrase); prayer as lever; doubt forbidden; financial and emotional passivity sanctified; terror and loneliness anaesthetised. Millay: "Terror and loneliness / That drive a man to address the Void as 'Thou.'"
- Mature. God (or ultimate concern, in Tillich's direction) as ground of dignity; prayer as honesty; doubt as part of faith; active responsibility for livelihood and neighbour; terror and loneliness faced as the price of being a self. Tillich: despair and anxiety cannot be worked through until confronted in stark reality. Freud's solitary ten years after Breuer; Jesus in the wilderness wrestling not bread or power but the temptation to throw himself down to prove God would protect him.
Both sides required; conformity ages starve the prophetic.
Authoritarian religion and the Grand Inquisitor pattern: give people miracle, mystery and authority, and they will hand back freedom. Mid-century return-to-religion often took that bargain. Popular guides sold security through conventional piety; May distinguishes that anxious flight from the slower work of acquiring a tradition until it is one's own. Prophetic religion attacks dead forms; priestly religion conserves living ones. A conformity age tends to baptise radar adjustment as "goodness," so the prophetic edge is what hollow people most need and most fear.
The creative use of the past
From coward-making conscience to creative conscience.
In the final paragraph of his last book, Freud quotes Goethe: "What thou has inherited from thy fathers, / Acquire it to make it thine." It makes no sense to talk about tradition until dependency is clarified. To the extent an adult has achieved some freedom and identity as a self, he has a base from which to acquire the wisdom in past traditions and make it his. Missing that freedom, traditions block rather than enrich: an internalised set of traffic rules with little fructifying influence on inward development.
Part of the malady of the day (Chapter 2) is loss of creative relationship to the wisdom of the past. Henry Ford's 1920s "History is bunk" received wide publicity; that such an issue could be accepted for discussion indicates the rebelliousness toward tradition then. But history is our social, communal body: in it we live, move and have our being; to cut one's self off from it is about as sensible as to say "My physical body is bunk." Pride in having no interest in religious traditions falls in the same category. Educated people ashamed to admit knowing nothing about economics or literature have been proud of illiteracy in religion, or of knowing only Sunday-school fiction and catechism. Dependency attitudes and sophisticated rejection both shut the person off from a creative relationship to an important segment of the "wisdom of thy fathers," robbing him of part of his historical body and contributing to diffuse perplexity.
Shakespeare's "conscience doth make cowards of us all" describes authoritarian conscience: internalised threat. Creative conscience is Fromm's "recall to himself," Nietzsche's move beyond good and evil as herd categories, Tillich's transmoral conscience. Tradition and immediate experience interrelate where the individual participates in inheritance rather than being jailed by it. Brazil's single word consciencia for conscience and consciousness is May's etymological ally: knowing-with is the point. The Lynds' Middletown observation: people cannot tolerate uncertainty in all sectors at once. When economic and political life are unstable, they cling to rigid religion or morals; when those soften, they may open elsewhere. Creative use of the past means choosing which inheritance to acquire, not swallowing the whole plate of fathers.
The person's power to do the valuing
Some readers, hearing of the lost centre of values, think what is needed is simply to work out a new set of values. Others think the old values (love, equality, brotherhood) only need bringing back. Both miss the central problem: modern man has to a great extent lost the power to affirm and believe in any value. Content on paper is not enough; what the individual needs is a prior capacity, the power to do the valuing. The triumph of barbarism in Hitlerian fascism did not occur because people "forgot" ethical traditions as one might misplace a code. Humanistic values of liberty and the greatest good, Hebrew-Christian values of community and love for the stranger, were still in textbooks and Sunday school. No archaeological expedition was needed. People had lost, for the reasons of Chapter 2, the inner capacity to affirm, to experience values and goals as real and powerful for themselves.
There is something artificial about setting out to "find" a centre of value as though shopping for a new coat. Endeavours to discover values outside one's self slide into what the group expects: what is the "style" these days, in values as in coats? That has been part-and-parcel of the trends toward emptiness. There is even something wrong in the phrase "discussion of values." One never receives convictions about values through intellectual debates. The things a person actually does value (children and mutual love, pleasure in drama or music or golf, pride in work) he accepts as realities. Theoretical discussion of the value of loving his children he would regard as irrelevant if not impertinent. Pressed, he says he values the love because he actually experiences it.
May does not hand ethics to whim: the valuer is the person who has cut enough cord to stand, who has felt and wanted, who has met freedom's anxiety with courage. Values are tested in dialogue between Goethe's inherited fathers and present experience. The hollow man cannot value; he can only poll. The creative conscience is how the ethical animal becomes actual rather than merely potential.
- Hobart Mowrer. Rat delay experiment as foil for human ethical time.
- Adam / Prometheus / Pandora. Twin (and triple) myths of awareness, creativity and affliction.
- Hegel. "Fall upward": the birth of the human in the eating of knowledge.
- Dostoevski. Grand Inquisitor: miracle, mystery, authority versus free heart.
- Freud / Goethe. Closing verse on acquiring inheritance; Freud's solitary decade after Breuer.
- Fromm / Nietzsche / Tillich. Conscience as recall, beyond herd good-evil, transmoral courage; confront despair starkly.
- Auden / Millay. "Cosmic papa"; terror and loneliness addressing the Void as Thou.
- Lynds / Ford. Middletown on uncertainty; "History is bunk" as symptom.
Courage, the Virtue of Maturity
Chapter arc: from inward courage to love and truth-seeing.
Past decades shelved courage for knighthood, sport or war because life was oversimplified: death suppressed, happiness assumed automatic, loneliness and fear always called neurotic. Neurotic anxiety should be overcome (courage there often means getting professional help). Normal anxiety remains for any developing person; courage is essential in confronting rather than fleeing it. Ellen Glasgow: courage is "the only lasting virtue." Not chiefly courage against war and the H-bomb, but inward quality: a way of relating to one's self and possibilities. Achieve that, and external threats meet greater equanimity.
Courage to be one's self
Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom. Willingness to differentiate, move from parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration. Opposite of courage is not cowardice (that is lack of courage) but the refusal to grow: clinging, conforming, numbing.
Courage to be one's self is scarcely admired now. What is dreaded is getting out of the group. We lack understanding of friendly, warm, personal, original, constructive nonconformity. From Prometheus onward, to create requires courage. Balzac: the quality that above all deserves the greatest glory in art (including all creative activity) is courage. Psychoanalytic studies show one reason creative activity is hard: it means differentiating from the protecting mass.
May disagrees with Balzac on one point: "common minds" also need this courage; it is not only for geniuses. We are not talking about heroes. Obvious heroism and rashness are often products of vanity or despair. Greater courage is required to preserve inner freedom and move on the inward journey than to face many external dangers. All courage is basically moral courage; so-called physical courage usually rests on a moral decision about what one will risk for.
Greatest clinical block to courage: having to live as the apple of the parental eye, gaining worth only through admiration and praise. Parents with unconscious doubts about their own strength demand the child be especially courageous, buy boxing gloves, push competitive groups: showing lack of confidence. Overprotection and pushing alike fail. Courage grows from confidence in one's own powers, based on parents' love and belief in potentialities. Need: help to use his own power, and to feel seen as a person in his own right.
Courage grows from being loved as a person, not from gloves or cotton wool.
Requirements more often: social amenities, good grades, societies, "normal" so never talked about, suitable mate, father's business. Conforming while not believing it is rationalised as needing support; deeper motive: continue as apple of the eye. Vanity and narcissism (compulsive need to be praised) undermine courage: one acts for the gallery. The act itself reminds of emptiness. Hallmark of courage in an age of conformity: capacity to stand on one's own convictions, not stubbornly or in rebellion, but because they are one's own.
When courage begins to emerge, a halfway station appears: grant yourself freedom in fantasy or small acts while still living for praise in the main. Hopeless dilemma: granting the need for praise keeps the cord. Hardest step: deny those under whose expectations one has lived, risk their disappointment, and stand as a self.
A preface to love
Love is relatively rare in our society; most relationships mix motives. Learning to love, Auden suggests, includes learning one does not know how. Matthew Arnold in "Dover Beach": "Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!" against a world with neither joy nor certitude. Love needs courage because it risks the self.
Harry Stack Sullivan and others: capacity for love matures late; before adolescence you can get a child to sound like it, but stressing it yields queer results and neuroses. Infant and child normally dependent; frankly enjoy fondness. Relieving for parents to note how much more spontaneous warmth the child shows a teddy bear or dog than human beings: bear makes no demands; dog is intermediate. Steps: dependence → dependability → interdependence.
Chief block: "marketplace orientation" (Fromm). Love used for buying and selling. Parents expect love as repayment for care, camp, college. Love demanded as payment is no love; house built on sand, often collapses in young adulthood. Why should support imply love? Could as logically expect gratitude without love, or love without ledger.
Fromm/May contrast: love as market versus love as courage.
Learning to love requires the courage to be oneself first: hollow people "lean together" and grow lonelier; they have no base from which to love. Preface, not treatise: the topic has been widely treated; May's point is the link to courage and selfhood.
Courage to see the truth
Oedipus, already king, presses for the truth of the plague's cause against Tiresias and Jocasta's pleas to stop. "Break out what will, I shall not hesitate." When the shepherd's news lands, he blinds himself, but the drama's courage is the insistence on seeing. May reads this as the mature virtue: willingness to know what one does not wish to know about oneself and one's world. Rashomon, scientific integrity, facing a marriage's real trouble: same pattern. Without courage to see, freedom and love remain half-lit.
- Halfway station. Where do you grant yourself freedom only in fantasy? Name the real risk you are postponing.
- Truth step. What fact about a relationship or vocation are you asking others (or yourself) not to say? Write it privately first.
Vanity, narcissism and the parental eye (expanded)
Vanity and narcissism, defined as the compulsive need to be praised and liked, are the enemies of courage. When one acts to gain praise, the act is a living reminder that worth is on loan. Specific cultural pressure: for sons especially, living up to the group amenities, grades, societies, "normal" so never talked about, suitable marriage, father's business. Financial support is the surface reason; remaining the apple of the eye is the deeper one. Parents who push boxing gloves and early competition out of their own doubt produce obstinacy or bullying, not courage. Parents who overprotect produce the same deficit by another road. What works: love that sees the child as a person with particular capacities, and help to use his own power.
How vanity undermines courage, and the exit.
Love's developmental ladder
Sullivan-era staging May uses: until adolescence the capacity to affirm other persons has not matured enough for love in the full sense. You can train the sound of it; stressing it early yields neurosis. Steps he names: dependence (infant), dependability (child learning to be someone others can count on), interdependence (mature love). Teddy bear and doll allow projection without demand; the live dog is intermediate; human partners require empathy that must ripen. Marketplace love (Fromm) collapses when the ledger is called in during young adulthood: camp, college and support never purchased love.
Arnold's "Dover Beach" is May's epigraph for love under a world without certitude: the couple's truthfulness to one another is courage, not sentiment. Auden's line that one is taught at length to know one does not know how to love fits the preface: humility before the difficulty is part of the virtue.
Without truth-seeing, freedom and love remain incomplete.
Courage as the through-line of maturity.
Courage defined against vanity
Courage, for May, is not the absence of fear but the capacity to meet the anxiety that freedom and selfhood bring. Its enemy is vanity: the compulsive need to be praised and liked. When one acts for the gallery, every act reminds that worth is on loan. Specific cultural pressure on sons: group amenities, grades, societies, "normal" so never talked about, suitable marriage, father's business. Financial support is the surface; remaining the apple of the parental eye is the deeper hook. Parents who push boxing gloves and early competition out of their own doubt produce obstinacy or bullying, not courage. Overprotection produces the same deficit by another road. What works: love that sees the child as a person with particular capacities, and help to use his own power.
How vanity undermines courage, and the exit.
Love's developmental ladder
Until adolescence the capacity to affirm other persons has not matured enough for love in the full sense (Sullivan-era staging May uses). You can train the sound of it; stressing it early yields neurosis. Steps: dependence (infant), dependability (child learning to be someone others can count on), interdependence (mature love). Teddy bear and doll allow projection without demand; the live dog is intermediate; human partners require empathy that must ripen. Marketplace love (Fromm) collapses when the ledger is called in during young adulthood: camp, college and support never purchased love.
Arnold's "Dover Beach" is May's epigraph for love under a world without certitude: the couple's truthfulness to one another is courage, not sentiment. Auden's line that one is taught at length to know one does not know how to love fits the preface: humility before the difficulty is part of the virtue.
Seeing the truth (Oedipus)
Courage includes the courage to see. Oedipus presses on despite Jocasta's plea to stop the inquiry. Half-lit freedom and love remain incomplete without truth-seeing. In a conformity age the hardest seeing is of one's own emptiness and borrowed values. May's clinical note: people often prefer the anxiety of not-knowing to the anxiety of knowing what they already half-suspect.
Without truth-seeing, freedom and love remain incomplete.
Invictus and the mid-century ear
Henley's "I am the master of my fate, / I am the captain of my soul" sounds, to a hollow generation, either like whistling in the dark or like a demand they cannot meet. May's use is neither pep nor mockery: courage is exactly the capacity to stand as captain when the radar of the group screams that standing alone is failure. The hallmark of courage in a conformity age is the willingness to hold one's own convictions when they cost liking.
Courage as the through-line of maturity.
Independence as the condition of love
Two hollow people clinging to each other do not yet love; they anaesthetise loneliness. Love is possible only in proportion to independence. The developmental ladder (dependence → dependability → interdependence) is not a slogan against need; it is a warning against premature "love" training that produces neurosis. Marketplace love collapses when the ledger is called: camp, college and parental support never purchased love. Arnold's "Dover Beach" pair, truthful to one another under a world without certitude, enact courage as the preface to love.
Parental eye and the refusal of the gallery
Vanity and narcissism, the compulsive need to be praised and liked, are courage's enemies. Living up to amenities, grades, societies, suitable marriage, father's business: financial support is the surface; remaining the apple of the eye is the deeper hook. Halfway courage still acts for praise. Full courage denies the expectations and stands as a self. Parents who push competition from their own doubt, or who overprotect, both block the path. What works: love that sees particular capacities and helps the child use his own power.
Man, the Transcender of Time
Chapter arc: from 'time running out' to eternity as a quality of the present.
The clock running out
Concrete cases. A young husband, decorated lieutenant, now newspaper editor, finds serious marital problems that may take months or years of growth and psychotherapy. Draft and war loom: is struggle worth it, or let the marriage crack and take temporary relationships? A brilliant young instructor plans a five-year book of scientific contribution; therapy for blockages; wonders how to write with integrity if an atom bomb may fall on New York. Private neurosis loves to masquerade behind the age's insecurity, but the age's insecurity is also real. Stoical "we were born in this age" does not help. The question of time, how late is it?, focuses pressing modern anxiety.
Man does not live by the clock alone
Unique mark of man: stand outside present, recall past, imagine future. A speaker preparing an address calls to mind other speeches, audiences, failures. Plants and animals live by circadian and seasonal clocks; psychologically and spiritually man does not live by the clock alone. His time depends on meaning. A thirty-year-old's memories of age five: thousands of hours forgotten; a few meaningful hours remain vivid. Memory is not just imprint of past time; it is keeper of what is meaningful for one's existence. Quantitative time cannot be ignored; we simply do not live by it alone. The more a person directs life consciously, the more he uses time constructively. E. E. Cummings: "A man who lives intensely really lives, but a man who lives to be 120 does not really live longer."
Same capacity: historical mammal or hollow waiter on tomorrow.
Anxiety that "time is running out" comes partly from deeper than the bomb: fear of empty time, like fear of being alone, raises the specter of not existing. Anticipation of empty time can be horror because one fears dispersal of the self. Macbeth: "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, / Creeps in this petty pace... / To the last syllable of recorded time; / And all our yesterdays have lighted fools / The way to dusty death." Wish then to blot out time or make oneself anaesthetic. Fred Allen's gag sharpened into philosophy: life as "an unprofitable episode that disturbs an otherwise blessed state of non-existence."
Neurotic uses of past and future
Postpone living. Deteriorated heaven: present wrongs righted later; Marx rightly attacked Czarist uses of religion as opiate. Everyday form: "things will be better when I am married / graduate / get a new job." Automatic turn from unhappiness to "What pleasant thing do I have to look forward to?" Hope then deadens the present. Creative hope is different: bringing part of future joy into the present so anticipation makes one more alive and able to act now.
Past as escape: "At least things were better then." Recurrent myths of golden age and utopia show how strong the comfort-pull is. Living in hopes for the future: usual escape of the unsophisticated; living in the past: of the sophisticated. Both avoid the pregnant present.
Two escapes and the constructive alternative.
Faust and the pregnant moment
Goethe's Faust wagers he will never say to the moment, "Stay, thou art so fair." Mephistopheles' kingdom is monotony and void: "What good for us, this endlessly creating... / I'd rather choose, instead, the Void forever." Near the end Faust, reclaiming land for free people, fore-feels lofty bliss and does speak to the moment; he dies in that affirmation, and the traces of his earthly being "cannot in aeons perish." Eternity is not a succession of tomorrows; it is a way of relating to life. Jesus: "the Kingdom of Heaven is within you." Goethe: "Fore-feeling of such lofty bliss": eternity enters the present as a quality of existence.
Berdyaev: "The problem of time may well be the fundamental problem of philosophy." An instant possesses value to the extent it is united to eternity, "an atom of eternity." Deteriorated uses of "eternal" made intelligent people avoid the word; omitting it constricts psychology and philosophy.
No matter what the age
Integrity and self-realization are not postponed until a safe century. Athens under threat, Mycenae in blood, Renaissance plague years, and our bomb-haunted decades alike allow, and demand, the pregnant moment. Orestes walking "toward humanity," Faust's last affirmation, the instructor who starts the book anyway: each treats time as opening rather than corridor. The clock runs; meaning is not on the clock.
- Bomb excuse check. Where are you using the age's insecurity to avoid a marriage, book, or conversation that would take years?
- Hope audit. Is "when I graduate / marry / change jobs" energising today's action, or deadening it?
- Pregnant five minutes. Sit without filler; trail one thought; note how many directions open. That density is May's infinite side of the moment.
Quantitative and qualitative time
A speaker preparing an address who calls up past audiences is already living qualitative time. The thirty-year-old who retains a few hours from the year he was five has kept meaning, not minutes. Korzybski and others in May's milieu stressed time-binding as the human specialty; May's psychological point is sharper: empty time terrifies because it returns the hollow self to the fear of dispersal named in Chapter 1. Busy activism and blotting-out (drink, noise, compulsive hope) are twin defences against that terror.
May's time contrasts for the bomb-haunted reader.
Faust's wager and Mephistopheles' void
Faust's wager: he will never ask the moment to stay. Mephistopheles offers endless novelty that is still void: creating that goes in circles "as if it had" existence, yet Faust would rather choose the Void than that monotony. The dramatic reversal, Faust's free people on reclaimed land, "fore-feeling" bliss, speaking to the moment, dying in affirmation, is May's emblem of integrity under mortality. Traces that "cannot in aeons perish" are not literal immortality of fame alone; they are the eternal quality entering a finite act.
No matter what the age (expanded)
May lists the temptation to wait for a calmer century. Athens, the Hebrew prophets, Renaissance plague years, and bomb-haunted New York alike had reason to postpone. The book's answer is structural, not pep talk: if eternity is a quality of relating to the present, then catastrophe does not cancel the pregnant moment; it only raises the cost of missing it. The decorated editor who works on his marriage and the instructor who starts the book are not denying the draft or the bomb; they are refusing to let the clock be the only god.
From age-anxiety to action that does not wait for utopia.
Same word, opposite uses of the future.
From Macbeth's tomorrow to Faust's moment.
Quantitative and qualitative time
A speaker preparing an address who calls up past audiences is already living qualitative time. The thirty-year-old who retains a few hours from the year he was five has kept meaning, not minutes. Korzybski and others in May's milieu stressed time-binding as the human specialty; May's psychological point is sharper: empty time terrifies because it returns the hollow self to the fear of dispersal named in Chapter 1. Busy activism and blotting-out (drink, noise, compulsive hope) are twin defences against that terror.
May's time contrasts for the bomb-haunted reader.
Faust's wager and Mephistopheles' void
Faust's wager: he will never ask the moment to stay. Mephistopheles offers endless novelty that is still void: creating that goes in circles "as if it had" existence, yet Faust would rather choose the Void than that monotony. The dramatic reversal, Faust's free people on reclaimed land, "fore-feeling" bliss, speaking to the moment, dying in affirmation, is May's emblem of integrity under mortality. Traces that "cannot in aeons perish" are not literal immortality of fame alone; they are the eternal quality entering a finite act.
No matter what the age
May lists the temptation to wait for a calmer century. Athens, the Hebrew prophets, Renaissance plague years, and bomb-haunted New York alike had reason to postpone. The book's answer is structural, not pep talk: if eternity is a quality of relating to the present, then catastrophe does not cancel the pregnant moment; it only raises the cost of missing it. The decorated editor who works on his marriage and the instructor who starts the book are not denying the draft or the bomb; they are refusing to let the clock be the only god.
From age-anxiety to action that does not wait for utopia.
Macbeth's tomorrow and the bomb
"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" is the clock as curse: time as empty corridor. Mid-century bomb anxiety intensifies the curse; people postpone marriage, books, children "until things settle." May's answer is structural: if eternity is a quality of relating to the present, catastrophe raises the cost of missing the pregnant moment rather than cancelling it.
Same word, opposite uses of the future.
Faust's reversal as emblem
Faust's wager never to ask the moment to stay; Mephistopheles' endless novelty that is still void; Faust's preferral of the Void to that monotony; then the reversal: free people on reclaimed land, fore-feeling bliss, speaking to the moment, dying in affirmation. Traces that cannot in aeons perish are the eternal quality entering a finite act, not fame alone. Integrity under mortality is the chapter's last word.
The pregnant moment (expanded)
The pregnant moment is May's name for a present that opens rather than a present that merely passes. Clock time is a corridor; meaningful time is an opening in which past and future gather into an act. Faust's "I now enjoy the highest Moment, this!" is not stopping the clock; it is filling a moment so that eternity-quality enters a finite act. Traces that cannot in aeons perish are that quality, not a billboard of fame.
From Macbeth's tomorrow to Faust's moment.
Main Points
- Emptiness is powerlessness, not a flat battery. When people cannot act as entities directing their lives, desire and feeling dry up; apathy defends against anxiety and invites tyranny.
- Loneliness is fear of losing the self. Alone, hollow people fear dispersal; being liked buys warmth at the price of identity.
- Anxiety threatens the core; awareness can destroy it. Fear is of a known danger to one side of the self; anxiety catches the whole. Strengthen consciousness of self.
- Five losses underlie the malady. Centre of values, sense of self, living language, relation to nature, and the sense of tragedy.
- Becoming a person means fulfilling potentialities by choice. Feel, want, recover the body and the dream life; joy, not happiness, marks fulfilment.
- Cut the psychological umbilical cord. Orestes over Oedipus for mid-century mother-dominated patterns; love outward, do not waste inward.
- Rebellion is not freedom. It depends on what it attacks; planlessness and the free-will "button" are also counterfeits.
- Freedom is taking a hand in one's development. Cumulative pause-and-choose within limits; accept limits by choice (sonnet, sanatorium, Epictetus).
- Choose oneself daily. Goethe: he only earns freedom who conquers it anew; facing that one could not-exist clarifies living.
- Adam and Prometheus price the human. Self-consciousness and creativity cost anxiety; Hegel's "fall upward"; authoritarian gods war against the new.
- Religion is judged by use. Does it keep you infantile or affirm dignity, responsibility and love? Freud asked the right question, gave a blanket answer.
- Acquire the inheritance. Goethe via Freud: what you inherit, make thine; conscience as recall to oneself, taproot of courage.
- Courage meets freedom's anxiety. Vanity (need for praise) is the block; hallmark in a conformity age is standing on one's own convictions.
- Love requires a self. Marketplace love collapses; dependence → dependability → interdependence; hollow people cannot lean into love.
- Time is pregnant, not a corridor. Hope as opiate deadens; eternity is a quality of the present moment; integrity possible no matter what the age.
| Framework | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Emptiness-loneliness-anxiety | Hollow → alone → core threat | Naming mid-life or cultural malaise |
| Gyroscope vs radar (Riesman/May) | Inner rules vs peer scanning | Seeing conformity's mechanism |
| Feel → want → dream | Three steps back to the self | Starting therapy-like self-work |
| Four stages of consciousness | Innocence, rebellion, ordinary, creative | Locating where you are stuck |
| Cage parable | Denied freedom → hate → loss of "I" | Warning against security-as-goal |
| Creative conscience | Person values; tradition as inheritance | Ethics without authoritarianism |
| Pregnant moment | Present opens to eternity-quality | Bomb/excuse anxiety about long work |
Frameworks and mental models to carry out of the book.
Master arc: from predicament through integration goals.
| Who | Role in the book |
|---|---|
| Riesman | Inner- vs outer-directed; gyroscope and radar |
| Fromm | Anonymous authority; selfishness vs self-love; marketplace |
| Kierkegaard | Choose yourself; more consciousness, more self; love yourself rightly |
| Freud | Anxiety roots; make unconscious conscious; inheritance verse |
| Aeschylus / Jeffers | Orestes as struggle to be |
| Kafka | Hollow moderns; Trial, Castle, Metamorphosis |
| Goethe | Daily freedom; Faust's moment; acquire inheritance |
Who's who for the narrative and argument.
About this book
Man's Search for Himself by Rollo May, 1953. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions
- Emptiness is powerlessness, not a flat battery. When people cannot act as entities directing their lives, desire and feeling dry up; apathy defends against anxiety and invites tyranny.
- Loneliness is fear of losing the self. Alone, hollow people fear dispersal; being liked buys warmth at the price of identity.
- Anxiety threatens the core; awareness can destroy it. Fear is of a known danger to one side of the self; anxiety catches the whole. Strengthen consciousness of self.
- Five losses underlie the malady. Centre of values, sense of self, living language, relation to nature, and the sense of tragedy.
- Becoming a person means fulfilling potentialities by choice. Feel, want, recover the body and the dream life; joy, not happiness, marks fulfilment.
- Cut the psychological umbilical cord. Orestes over Oedipus for mid-century mother-dominated patterns; love outward, do not waste inward.