Man′s Search for Himself

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When people feel threatened and anxious they become more rigid, and when in doubt they tend to become dogmatic; and then they lose their own vitality. Every human being gets much of his sense of his own reality out of what others say to him and think about him. Man, furthermore, must make his choices as an individual, for individuality is one side of one’s consciousness of one’s self.

It is as though the person were saying to himself, “I must be important that I am so worth condemning,” or “Look how noble I am: I have such high ideals and I am so ashamed of myself that I fall short. This is what our society needs — not new ideas and inventions; important as these are, and not geniuses and supermen, but persons who can "be", that is, persons who have a center of strength within themselves. If you’re like me and find yourself in similar conversations, frequently asking what’s the purpose of anything or feeling stuck in a rut with life’s mundane routines and relationships, then this book is for you. For just as there never was exactly that situation before and never will be again, so the feeling one has at that time is new and never to be exactly repeated.When Spinoza in the seventeenth century used the word reason, he meant an attitude toward life in which the mind united the emotions with the ethical goals and other aspects of the “whole man. What may is ultimately describing is a type of existential awakening, characterized by the experience of equanimity and vitality that emerges when one arrives in the present moment, “chooses self” and abides in freedom and responsibility. e. loneliness, boredom, emptiness, etc) and will feel disconnected to the stream of things, particularly during anxiety-ridden times. The fact that was written in 1952, is a sign that Rolo May was a visionary in the field of self enquiring, ant the fact that the book is still valid today, you realise that beside progress, we didn't evolved much.

Decision – The person is in a transition stage in their life such that they need to be more independent from their parents and settle into the "ordinary stage". They do what everyone expects from them to do—from their teachers, employers, parents, religions, and communities — or at least, what they imagine these groups expect. Destiny, for example, could be "thrownness" combined with "fallenness" — the part of our lives that is determined for us, for the purpose of creating our lives. May, taking a positive step in Freudian theory, no longer theorizes only about the stages of development in literal childhood; he now also speaks about the maturity man the individual and man the species must achieve. We can see this point clearly when we realize that consciousness of one’s self is always a unique act—I can never know exactly how you see yourself and you never can know exactly how I relate to myself.As the fever in our example is a symptom of the battle between the bodily powers and the infecting germs, so anxiety is evidence of a battle between our strength as a self on one side and a danger which threatens to wipe out our existence as a self on the other. As a diagnostic tool for the culture, his replacement of the Orestes complex for Oedipus still seems incredibly off the mark. Like the boys in Lord of the Flies, man finds himself stationed on the the pale blue dot, the third rock from the sun, without any gods except the ones he himself creates. People are able to be self-aware, keep time, to learn from the past, plan for the future, use symbolic systems to make distinctions and communicate. Although there were some interesting bits of writing here, the book suffers from a problem that is somewhat common among its philosophical contemporaries.

One cannot laugh when in an anxiety panic, for then one is swallowed up, one has lost the distinction between himself as subject and the objective world around him. Thus every person’s life could be portrayed by a graph of differentiation — how far has he freed himself from automatic dependencies, become an individual, able then to relate to his fellows on the new level of self-chosen love, responsibility and creative work? The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. And if a person is alone very much of the time, people tend to think of him as a failure, for it is inconceivable to them that he would choose to be alone. But no ‘ego’ moves on into responsible selfhood if it remains chiefly the reflection of the social context around it.The neurotics of Freud's era, who were unsuccessfully coping with the Victorian morals and bourgeoisie family headed by the paterfamilias, had by 1950s America given way.