Quotes from Rollo May Ph.D.

Now there are times when a whole generation is caught...between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standards, no security, no simple acquiescence." —Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf.

the present phase of our century may well be called, as Auden and Camus call it, the "age of overt anxiety.

It is getting late. Shall we ever be asked for? Are we simply Not wanted at all? {6}" What has been lost is the capacity to experience and have faith in one's self as a worthy and unique being, and at the same time the capacity for faith in, and meaningful communication with, other selves, namely one's fellow-men.

The purpose of the present study is to bring, so far as we are able, some "order and lucidity" into the presently uncoordinated field of anxiety theory.

Hesse holds that Haller's—and his contemporaries'—isolation and anxiety arise from the fact that the bourgeois culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries emphasized mechanical, rationalistic "balance" at the price of the suppression of the dynamic, irrational elements in experience.

Hesse sees Haller's record "as a document of the times, for Haller's sickness of the soul, as I now know, is not the eccentricity of a single individual, but the sickness of the times themselves, the neurosis of that generation to which Haller belongs...a sickness which attacks...precisely those who are strongest in spirit and richest in gifts.

Without compassion, freedom can be self-righteous, inhuman, self-centered, and cruel.